Why time seems to pass faster as we age
invertedpassion.com
invertedpassion.com
For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there's so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years.
Novelty and so on may help to "slow" time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine.
(and I'm horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps)
We're at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It's helped me keep the habit up.
https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html
Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak:
# list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days
# get years and day range from args
echo "### $years years ago"
for i in `seq -w -$days $days`
do
olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d`
longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y`
echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)"
cat $olddate.md
doneFor me, I never get around to revisiting old entries regularly. How do you motivate yourself to do so?
Right now, I'm really curious to see why I took a trip 10 years ago to my hometown - all I see in my journal is my packing list, so someday the journal entry for that trip will pop up.
That helps too.
These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked <some meal> and played <some game> with <one of my kids>, in the evening <watched some movie / read some book>"...
What are you journaling on a daily basis?
- “I could have handled X better by doing Y.”
- “Seeing A made me curious about B; maybe look into that.”
- “I really tried at K, but oof didn’t work out; let’s try L tomorrow!”
- “I did really good at P, Q, and R today — I’ll get a treat tomorrow and start on S.”
Mostly just internal monologue kinds of things, but there’s three benefits I’ve noticed:
- I don’t think about frustrations as much if I write them down.
- I am better at self-compassion when I externalize the monologue.
- I slowly adjust my monologue to reflect how I word it in writing, eg how I choose to frame things or what kinds of things I notice.
“Had a headache. Went to bed early” seeing how often my grandpa was sick was very eye opening to me.
“Got the X repaired/replaced. Cost me $Y and it took Z days to finish”
“I sat and just visited with $Child. What a good kid. He’s just a teen. He told me about his friends and school”
Etc. I don’t know. I guess reading a normal life makes me feel better. Growing up I thought they were perfect. Seeing they were people just like me with very similar struggles is actually fun.
I haven’t taken the time to go though these diaries after he passed, but I did take a peek since I never really knew what he wrote.
The little I saw was so surprisingly mundane, like you describe.
I can’t quote it now, being thousands of miles away, but I remember something about my mom making a tasty soup.
I found it endearing but also forgiving, since I’ve struggled with journaling myself. Your post reminded me now that it’s okay to note the mundane.
I usually suffer from the same. Some periods I do bother bulleting, as reminders for thoughts to expand on later in the day. But I never do, and then only the bullets remain - as a kind of headstone for unwritten thoughts. Still, they are better than nothing.
It took time to realize that was worth writing down.
Honestly I look back 10 years and see things like you describe. "I went to the gym for an hour, worked on this or that, blah blah", and I really love seeing that too. That's life man. Those memories fill your brain up with experiences and a sense of time if you let it. Just remembering how fit I used to be makes me happy and makes me want to do that again.
This makes sense to me because a) content-wise I consider learning / making sense of what I experience in my life to be both intellectually and emotionally interesting and b) text-length-wise 6 bullets force you to really boil things down to the core
It’s different from my JIRA work log or Todoist list of completed tasks in that these are not everything I did, but just the important items. The things where I ran the risk of getting stuck
Come appraisal process, I’ll have forgotten most things I worked on in the year. My imposter syndrome creeps in, but this Notion page keeps me sane!
With this proof in hand, I’ve started journaling. I use the Apple Journal app. And it’s doing a good job of prompting me!
I don't disagree. But I think the flavor of the richness depends on the quality of the days. It is my experience that decades can also be built from days that ought not be preserved.
Or at least not without strong curation and editorial treatments.
I suppose I had too much time to dwell, not enough external pressure to keep my shit together. I have kids now too, but the end result is that I rarely journal anymore - there's always something else I need or want to do, and then suddenly I'm dead tired; rinse, repeat.
The changes still took years but having effort pay off was a new thing.
This doesn't sound right at all. For me, and I suspect for most people, it has the opposite effect. It makes life feel short, fleeting and mundane. Looking back to 2014, I can't believe how quickly the past 10 years has gone. Heck just looking back 4 years, the pandemic years seems to have flown by. It's like a distant memory now.
> but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short
So it isn't journaling at all. You are just rationalizing.
Life is precious because it is short and fleeting. And it's why people keep a journal. To keep track of precious time. It's also why parents keep a scrapbook of their kids. Because in a blink of an eye, the kids grow up and leave the nest.
If you truly thought life wasn't short, you wouldn't keep a journal. You'd just live and not keep track of time.
Life is short whether you waste it on nonsense or not. It's the nature of human life.
> Even eternity wouldn't be long enough for the compulsive procrasturbator.
Sure. But eternity isn't enough for the most accomplished either. There is a reason why the emperor of china
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-year-old-text...
and steve jobs
https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/2...
both wanted to prolong their lives. I don't think anyone would characterize the emperor of china nor steve jobs as 'procrasturbators'.
You make it sound like active people ( who don't waste their time ) feel that life is long when it's precisely the opposite. It's those who don't waste their time who want to live longer because they have so much more to do.
Then again, 'wasting time' is a concern for many precisely because life is short.
If I died today, I'd do so happy that I checked off the most important things on my list. I gain nothing by adding another 100 things to the list just so I can say that life is too short. It's long enough for what I want to do; anything more is a bonus.
Is it possible you are projecting your own insecurities, given that you are commenting on HN during work hours on a weekday, of all things?
I'm confused, does it feel recent or very long ago? This seems to contradict your previous sentence. If 10 years has gone past quickly, how could the pandemic feel like a distant memory? In that case it should feel like yesterday
I read somewhere else that time speeds up when we repeat a few boring/not-so-stressful things each day.
> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich
I want to agree with it. The more I take on and do, however imperfectly and which involves a bit more stress, it starts to slow down time. At least in the sense that you look back at the previous year and think "wow that was a lot and it seems like so long ago" when it actually wasn't that long ago.
> It makes life feel short, fleeting and mundane
In fact, the key might be to journal more of the mundane things. Like how many times I had to get on a call with the background verification company to speed up my move to the new company.
and from OP article,
> Surprising information comes in droves every single day, so the brain simply paid a lot of attention
how come all the new/surprising info from shorts/reels/tiktok not have a effect of slowing down time haha?
So does it feel distant or just like yesterday (i.e. time flew by)? The two seem contradictory.
Here's another viewpoint. Life is not precious at all because it is short and fleeting. Muslim here. We believe only the parts of this life which pertain to afterlife are precious, as afterlife is eternal instead of temporary. This life is merely an end to a means. It doesn't need to be a goal in and of itself because there's another life after it.
My point is that if I believed in a religion [and a specific interpretation of God's written word] that said I could get to heaven with 72 Houri by committing murder then [actual] life would not be precious at all.
Please note, I'm not suggesting YOUR beliefs or interpretation of the text, but it cannot be debated that a sizable amount [in nominal terms] believe this.
As for the topic itself. The obvious reason time passes faster when we're older to me is that each day is less of my life. At 1 week old a day is 1/7th of my entire existence. At 60 one day would be 1/22000th of my life.
I also feel it in terms of time left. When you have $1000 in your wallet, splurging on a $50 meal might seem fine. When you've got $75 in your wallet you're unlikely to blow $50 of it on a meal (unless you've got a supply elsewhere). In the same way, when I've have got 20yrs left in my life, some of them probably not in the best of health, then committing 10 of them to move to a foreign country to immerse myself in a new language feels very different than when I've got 60 years left (20yrs old). Seeing your life left clock go down 1/60th (1yr at 20yrs old) feels slower than seeing it go down 1/20th (1yr at 60yrs old). that's 3x faster.
If it helps: https://www.7cups.com/
If I may provide a suggestion... search for a serious website that is about dating (not tinder or something the like) in your area and connect to people and try to date (meet in person for at least an hour or so) at least one person once a week. Don't spend too much effort in people who just want to stick to online conversations or fooling around, just move on. If at the meetup there's no click, you have a good evening or at least you built up experience in dating.
You will need to get probably seriously out of your comfort zone but it becomes easier each time! Practice makes perfect!
But that said, there’s alot of philosophy and other things to help. Aeschylus said “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” Another relevant quote is that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best is today.
You won’t get what you wanted, but live in the present and enjoy what you can have. I’d give anything to get my wife back, but that’s not reality. The next best thing to live today and find joy.
I'm not quite as old you but close, and I already feel what you're feeling about the time left. That there isn't a lot of it, or that it will be gone quickly. Everyone has things they will not get a chance to try or experience. No lifetime offers everything, and every path taken means many, many others will be never explored.
Like money, you can't take memories with you. So try not to dwell on things you didn't do or that didn't work out the way you imagined. Half or more of people who get married end up divorced. Probably many more are less than happy. Kids can be a joy but they can also be a heartache. Every criminal is somebody's kid. Nothing comes with any guarantees.
Make life interesting today, as today is the only thing you really experience.
Could you elaborate on that? As someone who is younger I have noticed that many (but by no means all) people over 60 often do not want to commit to these kind of 'life-changing' escapades, despite now having the time (kids out of the house and/or retired). I assumed it was more around lack of (youthful) energy/health and the fact that you're so used to how you've lived for decades that change is far more difficult or feels more daunting.
You're saying that having a relatively shorter amount of 'time left' makes such a move different, wouldn't that fact make it easier? (YOLO and so on...)
Moving to a foreign country with an unfamiliar culture and language, and establishing a new life there, is a chore. Probably even more so if you don't have a spouse or something who's familiar there:
Learn the language, the culture, establish or reestablish your daily habits, find new friends and ways to socialise, perhaps new hobbies if the old ones aren't available. Find out where and what to shop and how to cook, when the stuff you know is gone. Turn your house into a comfortable home, etc.
If you're older you might not feel that you'll get to see much of the payoff.
I also imagine it gets harder to find people who are open to new friendships, as you get older.
I'm truly sorry about all the bad memories. I do know what that is like, many what-ifs. If you're receptive to any thoughts: Mourn them, but try not to waste the present being angry about the past, or you'll regret missing out on this time too. Give yourself another shot, try again. There will be a time where you don't get any more chances, but it's not yet. I know post-70 year olds that have cycled up mountains in France. One that just stopped being a climber after two replaced hips. I'm sorry about the kids. Maybe travel and meeting someone is still an option. Take care.
I started journaling back in 2012 (or 1999 depending on whether you count a Pokemon notebook that I barely wrote in!). I used to handwrite my journal entries. I refused to type them because they didn't feel personal enough.
How foolish of me that was.
I discovered Daylio while looking for a mood journal back in 2021. It's easily one of the best apps I've ever purchased. I've journaled daily since getting it, and it (with therapy) helped me understand and better control my introversion and mood swings.
I eventually moved all of those entries over to Day One two months ago. Day One is even better. You can add recordings! From your Apple Watch! And everything syncs nicely via iCloud! No more talking into the ether!
What are example initial values of $days and $years in "args".
Memento mori
I'm sorry you've received negative comments in reply, it is weird that people feel the need to be so negative to someone trying to help. I just sometimes have a hard time understanding their mindset.
I'm at the point where everything is a dumb terminal again.
"Oh wow 3 years already passed" -> "Oh wow I got pretty good at this thing I picked up just yesterday"
I picked up biking during the pandemic, and 3 years later I have legs of steel, 10k miles under my belt, and people know me as "the bike guy", when I think of myself as "ok this biking thing is kind of fun".
With string instruments you sound like a crying baboon for 2 years, and with brass instruments you sound like an underwater crow for 2 years.
The cello:
1. You're literally sitting when you play, whereas many violinists, violists, and bass players have to stand. 2. Big enough strings to not cause a player to develop callouses, no pain/bleeding. 3. Almost always only play one string at a time - no knowledge needed of chords. 4. Until you get ultra good, you will only need to learn 1 clef, and only a handful of key signatures
I think guitar and piano are among the harder of instruments to learn. Bowed string instruments are among the easiest.
I also had an enforced multi-year hiatus when I broke my arm at age 35.
I might need to do some extra drills and practice to get back to where I had been, but the fundamentals never left. Like riding a bike - might be out of shape, but I still know how everything works.
You don't forget how to ride a bike because the bike is doing most of the work. Because of physics, a bike stays better balanced when it is moving.
Compare that to say, pro racers, mountain bikers, trick riders, etc. there are significantly more skill involved in those than casually riding around.
I feel there is a kind of threshold that you cross at some point and then, the skill becomes part of you, forever engraved. You know you're there when you can play the piano without a piano, just in your head and in the tingle of your muscles. When you do not need a rational stage like a score or even a piece to play. You just play what you feel.
I don't play that often now, maybe 30 mins to an hour once every two or three days. My technique is not as good as it used to be. But my understanding of music, harmony and emotion is deeper. My music is better now than when I was at my peak as a technician, because as a human being, I matured.
If you're riding a Peloton I guess, but not a real bike in any of the many disciplines.
For example, it takes me longer to gain the intuition of something, but on the other hand, when I do, it plugs into a vaster web of knowledge. I am certainly more disciplined in both mind and body compared to when I was younger. I'm capable of clearer visualization and simulations now than before. I've got a lot more math under my belt.
I learned piano as a kid, picked it up pretty fast, and forgot a lot of it. I am not practiced in sight reading any more. On the other hand, when I poked around learning again, it's tapping much deeper into music theory, composition. For example, I learned Petzold's Minute in G Major (formerly attributed to Bach) as a kid and as an adult. I still can't quite get both hands working together as an adult ... but I was cracking up as I kept seeing how beautiful the chords are composed together in a way I never noticed as a kid.
This guy has a lot of really great videos on how to practice smarter and has a lot of answers to dumb questions that you don't really wanna ask. I hope it helps.
Most adults who pick up skills just don't do it in a deliberate way. When I moved to Japan for work I thought as an adult it'd take me years to acquire a new language. But the company I worked for got me professional training and I hunkered down about 2 hours per day and in ~14 months I did much better than I thought was possible.
Personal history: I started playing guitar around 18 and at ~25 I was way ahead most of my 18-20 year old peers who had started way younger. And I was a jazz snob since like 20.
I did learn the basics of piano and reading music when I was around 7 but never played actively, but it might've helped that I didn't start from scratch at 18. But I was immersed once I started - music was literally all I did in my spare time aside from doing drugs. :D
I'm now in my 40s and have been learning piano for the past 2 or so years. I think I've been progressing quite fast, but it's easy since I already know what to do, it's just another instrument (the challenge is mainly the hand coordination).
In other words: Keep it up, you'll the reap the fruit of your labor eventually!
No, you won't necessarily reap the fruit of your labor. You will certainly improve, but most of us will face a hard upper limit with diminishing returns as an adult.
I've played trumpet and guitar since age 13. I started learning piano ~10 years ago, age 40. But even after a decade with thousands of hours of practice, I still can't "natively" read bass clef. I still mis-read G as E, e.g., if I'm not actively paying close attention. Where I could sight-read treble clef basically perfectly since I was a kid, I'm still clumsy on bass clef after 10 years of learning as an adult.
Just like learning a new language.
I’ve noticed practicing something over and over does not make you better. It just makes you faster at doing something you already know how to do.
Trying a new approach when you practice is what I find actually makes you better.
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Talent-Improving-Skills/d...
It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.)
In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)
I observed this with people traveling, I used to call travel cognitive impairment, as usually functional human beings (like my close relatives) suddenly get very lost and helpless during travel (specially at airports).
I then realized that this was because this was a unusual experience for them (once every year) and this would overload them with things out of their routing (even if they traveled before). That didnt happen to me (yet) because I was traveling a lot for work, so this was a routine for my brain.
The downside is I am exhausted. I also couldn't imagine doing any of my work while travelling even if I had a computer with me. There is downtime enough to do some, but I don't think I'd have the capacity to engage with it. I think advanced abstract thinking relies on a bit of cognitive room being created by routine. Perhaps that is at the consequence of the routine moments disappearing into a void of compressed time.
I always tell them that this soon will feel more tiring than working and they will choose to stay in the same place for at least 3 months.
I play music so have a pretty good feel for rhythm and i distinctly remember the clock in a family members house ticking each second being way, way slower as a kid. Slept there the other day and it was fast as hell. So incredibly weird. I'm sure my memory of the BPM is much slower than the feeling from today.
Sitting looking at the digital clock right now two seconds seem close to one as a kid.
I wonder what that would mean for life extension, imagine this exponential - then you'll get very little effect from living past 200 years:
Pretty interesting thought experiment.
Sort of joking, but sort of not, they seem to go pretty slowly while doing an exercise like the plank
Then I ditched settled life and started traveling year round with a couple of bases i spend more time in between traveling. I’ve learned that the change in environment keeps putting the mind back into a more neuroplastic state where we are more open to the experiences around us, can change our habits more easily and just generally turn off autopilot for awhile.
I’ve been doing this for about 9 years. It’s been like a century. I feel like a very different person then when I started. I have some friends who still live in the same city at the same job that I left originally and it absolutely blows my mind that they stood still while it feels like I went to Mars and back.
I know people who work for the state government who keep appearing in India, Thailand, Brazil etc. when we're in meetings - usually they're billed as external consultants to avoid tax liability issues.
The true crux is that most people don't actually want the digital nomad lifestyle, humans naturally seek out some form of stability.
So what’s really the blocker for many is a choice of priorities. I won’t have children. I don’t have a strong need to play homemaker or gardener. My lifestyle is pretty similar to a lot of retirees who have second homes and travel between them. I talk to quite a few in one of my home bases and we have a lot of the same travel plans as well as it’s common for them to try to spend a month or two a year traveling to new places.
The GP described quitting their job and going traveling for an entire decade, which is an incredible luxury over an enormous timespan that only the luckiest will ever be able to enjoy. The fact that the GP then chooses to treat this gift as though it makes him better than his colleagues who had to stay and work for that decade is.. frankly just gross. "They stood still" no bud, they had a life experience that 99% of the world population has no choice but to experience. Maybe instead of being pretentious about your experiences, try gratefulness?
I say this as a "privileged" tech worker, with "only" a six figure salary. I could quit my job and go traveling, maybe for a year, and then be broke and set far back on my retirement goals, and my hopes of ever retiring. And I could only do that if I was tremendously selfish, like you: choosing to have no kids, choosing to allow the elders in my family to face poverty instead of proper end of life care, etc.
If you have the ability to not work and travel for a DECADE of your life, I suggest you have an immense gratitude towards everyone else keeping society running while you luxuriate, instead of pretending as though the fact that you've had this opportunity somehow makes you superior to those who had to work
You replied to the person who wrote the GP. I don't see anything in their post that confirms not working - they just work remotely, as the post you are replying to confirms.
> And I could only do that if I was tremendously selfish, like you: choosing to have no kids, choosing to allow the elders in my family to face poverty instead of proper end of life care, etc.
This is deeply unfair. Choosing not to have kids is not selfish at all. By some metrics it's even laudable, but you don't have to go that far to simply not condemn people who make that choice. And you have no idea how much they make or whether their parents are "facing poverty". Perhaps their parents died younger. Perhaps they have excellent retirement savings. Perhaps OP is one of seven children who contribute equally to their parents' care. You don't know.
I'm in full agreement with you that traveling like this is a privilege of the wealthy. But I think the way you condemn it falls pretty flat.
I did make a choice, and it didn’t involve all that much luck beyond what everyone here has, a lucky break in a good career and a high income birth country. Actually there was bad luck, my partner and I were laid off at the same time. Sometimes the good comes from the bad.
I don’t think I am better or worse, but I do push myself always to experience new things. It’s hard to imagine my life any other way, but then lots of people are deeply passionate about things that I’m not going to understand and vice versa.
I think it’s interesting that you call not having children a selfish act. Having biological children always struck me as very egocentric. For me I have no choice. I am gay and our families live in places where one day in the not too distant future LGBTQ couples could have their children taken away. Maybe that would have been a good road to walk down, but it was not my road to take.
It’s also interesting what you project onto me around elder care. What I see is that most people I know live far from their parents and families. They spend their whole professional lives in major cities and visit home maybe 2 weeks a year. That pattern of life doesn’t make sense to me. I love my family and want the flexibility to see them often. If they needed money or needed care, I would give it to them, but they have no need. Besides spending some of the year near them, I know that I inspired them to travel more and take bigger risks in their retirement. I know I have helped enrich their lives. We will go on a few trips together this year and I never have to decline an invite because of not enough PTO.
If there’s something about your life you feel trapped in and unhappy with, try to change it!
How else should people have children? Someone's genes are required, even if you do it in a test tube.
For various reasons I won’t bore people with, I now go out of my way to tell young people that they should feel absolutely no obligation to do have kids. Yes, as animals it’s our collective responsibility to bring up the next generation of our species, but that doesn’t mean every individual should, and it’s awful to feel forced into doing so if you aren’t comfortable with the very real risks. And the risks are worse than I ever thought. And I don’t even have it the worst.
/me with my 15 days of vacation a year
I had some friends living interesting lives when I was settled. Sailing the globe, doing seasonal work in the arctic and backcountry skiing mountains with no name. Doing field work in the African bush. I kept thinking about them and wondering how I could be them, like the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it.
It's also hard to have hobbies that rely on the same group of people meeting in person over a long period of time.
My partner and I enjoy our hobbies with groups of people when we are there. It’s not that different than being a snowbird. The main difference is that in addition to home base time, we also spend 4 months a year traveling, sometimes on our own, sometimes with our people.
I'm not quite sure.
As from what you might be escaping from... Admission that your experiences are irrelevant? That you have no obligation to yourself or anybody to live a specific way? That no way of living is better or worse (given that you have money and ability to decide about yourself). All means of distracting yourself until you die are equally valid.
Meaning of life is a weird thing. It changes as you age and experience. It's different for everybody despite the trends. I'm not gonna argue any point about it.
like, as much as I like where I work, and as much as work throws new and weird challenges at me, but .. it's just computer maintenance. Entire years are kinda the same rote of work-shopping-sleep-work. I don't even have many memories of these years, honestly.
Now that I've left my comfort zone with my instruments, do stuff with the instruments, go to a lot more concerts... life is kinda revolving around concerts and every day has some thing to approach with the instruments I'm not happy with. Suddenly that week is when I picked up TES BOS to make the bass sound better, that week was with a few friends, that week was a frozen crown concert, that week was when I got a really cool intro in a riff challenge, that week my teeth confused the fuck out of my dentist and their tool tray ended up as a diorama of a medieval battlefield, ...
If your take explicit time to recognize and examine the world around you, even in your backyard, time seems to stretch and you notice and retain more.
I’m lucky enough to have lots of different colored birds show up in my backyard, so sometimes I sit out there and wait for them.
It’s not exciting, but every time I see one it’s a new memory and those new memories make time feel more.
There are just some pretty ones around me.
> If you have a stable job, you can pretty much mentally time travel a full year and find your days to be similar.
> But if I ask you to imagine doing a PhD in Sanskrit at a foreign university, you would have no idea what your days are going to look like.
This also feels right, to me. But also, I spent nine months learning new languages to try to build a service to launch with a friend and that didn't turn into a long memory of effort. In fact, I recall it as sandwiched. It was a blip.
I think the real key is new experiences, not the aspect of study. Maybe that's the foreign university aspect: what happens when you aren't at study. The people you meet, the places you go, etc.
I too have hundreds of hours of meditation and I remember the feeling of time was very much affected. One night I remember out of sheer stubborness I sat for 5+ hours and I always remember the next week felt like it was a month.
It doesn't have to do with having "new" experiences, or new memories, or doing anything "interesting". It has to do with how we attend to the world.
And as Gilchrist pointed out this is being worsened as the devices we use day to day like smartphones, which aren't inherently bad, tend to stimulate mostly the left hemisphere unless you just listen to music. All the time you're going after buttons, notifications, looking at the icons, you're just continually sucked back into the world of the left hemisphere : icons, words, symbols, "things" to do or that could be done, things that could happen, emails, posts, likes, whatnot.
Actually I think it was already shown through EEGs that long time meditators, buddhist monks, had some areas of the brain more developed.. which would seem to support my theory likely those areas are related to the right hemisphere (and hence the right hemisphere's qualities such as ability for compasssion, seeing the whole, seeing things in context, ... and therefore seeing one's life in context as well instead of an old tape repeating in your mind everyday).
edit: also if you think logically, then it makes sense that the common intuition that having new experiences, or adding more variety in your life would make time feel like it goes by slower, but it is not because of "new" experiences, but as in my theory above, because those new experiences stimulate the right hemisphere, as you become more focused and attentive to what is happening NOW. In fact by definition any new experience will stimulate the right hemisphere. So if you dont have the $$$ to go out and enjoy the world, or take a vacation the good news is you'll probably enjoy the benefits of right hemisphere activation by doing... NOTHING! (ie. meditation, focused attention on the breath or any one of many techniques all revolving around developing concentration and attention) :)
When you're one years old, 1 year is your whole life.
When you're 100 years old, 1 year is 1/100th of your life.
Time as you perceive it, is related to new memories you make.
When you’re young, everything is a new experience which in turn becomes a new memory.
When your 100, to use your example, you’ve done everything there is to do. So no new memories & days blur together.
It is just a thought experiment...
Another thought experiment: suppose reincarnation exists and, as soon as I'm born, I remember my past lives, would time go faster or slower?
I don't expect an answer, they are just thoughts that I have...
Notice how when you have to wait for an hour, you’re bored, time seems to pass slowly, yet for those last ten minutes time passes more quickly because there’s only 1/6 hours le— yeah exactly, no, that doesn’t happen. The whole hour passes slowly because that whole fraction theory is bunk.
I lived abroad for 2 months a few years back and it felt like 6 months. I moved states not long after and once again, massive slowdown. That first year in a new city felt like three. New relationships can do the same thing. As can new jobs or, even more so, a career change. And let's not forget drugs.
But those are all things a person can completely avoid if they don't make a conscious effort not to. My default for many years was to sit snuggly at a boring job, travel only intermittently and otherwise immerse myself in repetitive media. I refer to those as the lost years (mid-to-late 20's).
So for instance, when you go from 1 to 2yrs old, it’s double the amount of your entire life, but from 80 to 81 it’s just a small fraction.
Not sure if this has been proven or is even possible to prove.
Also, if you think about memory recall, it takes a second to recall a memory.
So you have the ability to traverse time at a rate of (Your Current Age - Age of Your Earliest Memory) / 1 second
So maybe it’s also the feeling that looking back in time feels faster (more time has elapsed relative to the speed of memory recall) as you get older.
Oh yeah, found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E
I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. All I can tell you is "they are sponges" is a common description. It blows me away they can learn how to recognise faces, walk, speak a language in the space of a few years.
As a kid I recall getting bored very easily. I needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed my brain.
As a young adult I recall a friend asking me to look up a telephone book to find the a persons address. I got back to the car and told them the address. "Oh", they said "I must have the spelling wrong, try ...". No problem, I remembered every name and address on the page I've just seen.
But as I grew older, remembering stuff came less easily. Now at over 60, if I put in a situation where I'm forced to remember a while pile of new stuff I feel distinctly uncomfortable, whereas before I was better at it than most.
And during all that time, the passage of time has sped up. Ergo, my theory is I gauge the amount of time that has passed between events X and Y by the number of memories accumulated in the period.
I had this same realization. In other words, our internal clock is not like a mechanical, or a quartz watch, with seconds flowing at a constant rate. It's more like a hourglass or a clepsydra, but instead of sand/water, the flow is of bits of information from the world into the brain. As in a hourglass, near the end the flow is weaker (learning is much slower as an adult than as a child), and the same amount of physical time corresponds to much less sand (subjective time).
Life is cruel that way. Can hardly wait for how quickly it passes when I’m in my 70s or 80s…
I've been enjoying getting familiar with the sun's location and cyclic changes of nature as the seasons and years pass where I live.
A lot of people use their kids for this. “Bobby was in 2nd grade, must have been 2014.”
Do you have any sort of home base you can always go back to?
I look back from having diverged from a world where I never escaped my home-town gravity well and I'm glad I took the leap. It made me a deeper, richer, and more interesting individual.
I made some minor lifestyle changes to make things a bit easier on myself, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of my days are largely the same.
However, life moves much more slowly now. When I get to the end of a week, Monday seems quite a long time ago.
I'm not sure about the predictability thesis. The way I think about it is that I have no expectations from life anymore; I take what I can get, give what I can, and focus on one day at a time. I think this more than anything has contributed to a feeling of my life slowing way down.
Actually we do have very little time, its just that the upswing and downswing have different feels to it. You might have noticed this even when you are driving for a vacation. Drive to the picnic spot feels like an eternity, drive back home feels quick.
There are ~52 weeks a year. Which makes a week 2% of a year. That's already a fast enough tick. Weeks do go by fast. An year is like 10% of a decade. Once you are past the age of 40. You indeed have little time left.
Human life is short if you are doing remotely well in life. It can be a suffering if you are not doing great.
I have maintained a fairly tight circle of friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. One of the patterns that stands out very strongly is the high variability in the perception of time. Those who have settled into a routine such as a relationship that endures and work that remains highly similar even if the company and title change tend to experience this time flying by effect strongly. Others who have had major complications to deal with like relationships coming and going, medical problems, big changes to location, fundamental changes in work situation and so on end to have a critical time slowing effect. Coming to grips with big changes and getting settled again requires a lot of attention and work and does not allow for a relaxed grip on life events. Try getting mugged, dumped, fired, sick, and then moving somewhere unfamiliar and you might find this time passing faster effect disappears, if only until adjustments are made.
This implies the whole effect may be about how humans must focus when pushed but then tend to zoom out and ease up when ongoing attempts to steady themselves are successful. Reminds me of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/).
That’s the sweet spot to be. Where life is challenging, so you aren’t bored, but not so challenging to where you are overwhelmed. It seems the author urges people to flip from the boredom side of the flow state to the anxiety side because both of those are where time feels like an eternity (which anyone who has been in either of those states can attest to). I think a better idea is to question if what the author is proposing, trying to make time feel slower, is a good idea. Personally, I think the exact opposite is the case; all the best moments I’ve had are ones that went by “too quick”, and we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Time going by slowly is likely a canary in the coal mine for something being wrong.
On other hand I am sure there is some difference with perception of time when you get older and you will handle boredom better or can take something nap like just easier...
On the other hand, if you're talking about "that happened two years ago, but it feels like it was yesterday" I agree. I don't think that's what the post is talking about.
Seriously, I'd probably give a year of my life to experience it being two years longer.
2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar.
Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.
Any explanation that doesn’t say anything about the mind is just baloney. Time here is an experiential phenomenon. It’s not fractions. Insert your pet theory in a context where adults have the same mindset as children and retain memories perfectly and have no reason to discard/compress memories them—you see that it’s totally irrelevant whether your life is 2/3 or 1/8 over. It has everything to do with how the mind works, not how numbers work.
Bonus points for the “unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect”… which is very self-aware-useless.
I came up with another explanation: My thought processes have slowed, so the world has sped up, relative to myself.
Is there scientific evidence for either explanation?
It explains and illustrates why time flies so well, love that site.
At six years old I have been told that old people tend do sleep less.
So I went to my father and asked: "Daddy, why do old people sleep so little?"
He looked at me and said: "Because in a way they always sleep".
But guess what? That means that all you have to do to make time pass more slowly is bring more novelty into your life. I can say from personal experience that the year I spent living abroad seemed to go on forever. Every single day was filled with new experiences. There was a huge amount of continuous novelty and learning and growth. It was really nice. I need to move to a new country again.
Comparatively, that difference is huge: a year is far more significant to the child than to the adult.
The argument presupposes that you experience the length of an event relative to the sum length of all experiences you've lived through. That seems pretty much related to the premise of the article we are discussing. So it's not much simpler.
The idea of high correlation between predictability and time flying is interesting.
I'm working on patenting an idea and have filed the provisional. This gives me exactly 1 year to file the full application. There's so many unknowns between now and then which has me very aware of time and actively wanting to slow it down.
I'm not certain it always applies though. I've definitely had periods of high unpredictability where I enjoyed what I was doing and it didn't seem to go by slow at all.
This doesn't really have to do with the brain becoming a better prediction machine so much as how mindful and present you are in the moment. While it is true that doing the same things over and over creates habits (ruts) of the mind, the practice of mindfulness reverses this.
These days (in my early 40s), when I spar with swords, time stretches out by a lot. Especially during tournaments.
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal
And if you are concerned about this feeling of time going by faster: being less of a tunnel-visioned adult who is mostly focused on the extrinsic can maybe counteract this feeling.
I'm striving for not causing harm to others, avoiding things that lead to ill mental states like compulsion or anger, seeking things that lead to healthy mental states like calmness and focus.
This seems to be a boring life from the outside, but doesn't feel like that to me. Maybe because I've got enough challenges. Time perception is not important to me.
It s true that novelty is rewarding. When mice are placed in a novel environment, their neurons become more excitable, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with subjective perception of time
I try to be careful not fall on the fallacy that "I get it" and draw assumptions about things.
If not, after your pass your 50s time turns into blurring mashup of deja-vu's and the feeling that you are Fred Flinstone rolling in my Flintmobile while the background scenery, the houses, the palm trees and buildings repeat every 3 seconds.
"Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years."
Intense pain makes time feel longer, but it is the same for all intense experiences. And I am not even sure about that, endorphines can make time fly.
And when I consider memories, pleasurable events tend to take more time in my mind, pain tend to get erased more than pleasure. For example, I don't remember much about sick days, though obviously uncomfortable, they don't take much subjective time, thankfully.
This explains how trauma and ptsd can create terrible feedback loops.
Having lived through a somewhat damaging childhood I have chosen to not recall the unpleasant memories and have forgotten them.
(Learned this in one huberman podcast)
I’ve heard that time seems to pass faster because it is such a smaller percentage of our life. For a 2 year old, 1 year is 50% of their life. For a 100 year old, 1 year is 1% of their life.
At 48 a year is just over 2% of your life, it's so fast almost supersonic.
Maybe they're right. But I'd prefer more reliable sources, which other commenters here have provided.
Remark 1: dt / s is small when t is small.
Remark 2: Perception of s (call it p) is in reality a function of t. For small t, p(t) is perceived to be near infinity. For t > 40, p(t) rapidly decays to a small number.
- Franz Kafka, The Next Village
I think time seems to pass by quickly because as we get older we get busier with family, work, children, spouse, friends, a few side interests etc.
Supposedly it's quite a bit to do with routine and not having new experiences.
https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl...
> It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time,[2] kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos
> The ancient Greeks recognized the difference between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos).
You think that's fast? Just wait till you're over 75!
year 1 = 100% of your life year 2 = 50% of your life year 3 = 33% of your life ... year 10 = 10% of your life ... year 50 = 2% of your life
etc.