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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is naive, but the younger you are, the larger the ratio of each unit of time to your total time lived. So each unit of time seems longer.

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That's what I always thought.Plus when you're older, for most I'd guess, your life becomes full of routines.

I used to think sitting through a 3 hour lecture was an eternity. Now after sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day 3 hours is just seen as a morning.

I thought this article explains it pretty well: http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/volume_9/v9i39_yaffe.html

I think its a mix of both, but mostly yours.

When you are 4, turning 5 is another 20-25% of your life. When you're 39, turning 40 is more like .025% of your life.

Perception of time changes because we have more of it to compare it to, making it feel like its accelerating. But that is all relative.

You mean 2.5%... or maybe your perception really has accelerated. :)

Thats what you get when you divide 1/40 in the calculator and forget to move the decimal over.

You seem to forget: The older you get, the more you forget. With ten, you know pretty well what you did last summer. With 80 you'd say: What summer? It's snowing outside.

I agree with both the "ratio" and "routine" arguments.

Speaking of getting older, what's with the incredibly tiny fonts on web sites these days? I can read it OK, but Ctrl + makes it less annoying. If they're trying to "fit more ads" it's backfiring in my case because I'm less likely to read it. Now get off my lawn.

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