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Comment by sibeliuss | Hacker News Reader

I think time just starts getting weird when you hit your thirties. Seems to catch everybody off guard.

I was around 24 when nonlinear perception of time started becoming really noticeable to me, and it's bothered me ever since.

What happened?

Edit: what was different about how you perceived time?

It seems to pass faster as you get older.

its more then that i feel. sometimes, suddenly n month/years have passed before you realize it. its like... it feels something just happened... but its already been 5+ yrs.

for me personally its mostly about routine i think. time just looses its meaning while doing the daily grind.

but honestly, the article spoke about it better then i ever could :)

It's mostly that very few things change quickly enough anymore.

When you're a kid, you change schools, pass exams which serve as time markers, have various important lifetime events. As a young adult, there are a bunch of those too.

You know you're getting old when you start measuring your life by events related to your children or grandchildren.

Older people have fewer of those, especially ones in a stable situation.

I think so too. I'm in my thirties and have lived in three different countries in the last four years. Time feels really linear and it doesn't feel like n months/years have flown by.

I try to always do new things so I don't wake up one day with ten years flown past me.

This is it. It's the same as when one goes on vacation to somewhere new and time stretches way out. As one gets older and time awareness becomes a thing a choice presents itself: how do you want to work with your days? Novelty stretches time, routine contracts it. Time is very possible to "work with", but how well that relates to responsibility is another matter.

Yes, this. Before my mid-20s, I thought it was just something people said about aging and not an actual phenomenon, but then I started to notice it actually happening. I realized, when you are say, five years old, a year represents a fifth of your life, but at 25, it's a 25th of your life, so maybe it makes sense that years seem shorter the older you get, because they are ever-smaller fractions of your lifespan. Or maybe that's just a bullshit rationalization? I don't know. All I know is that it seems to be a real thing and it just keeps getting worse the older I get.

> It seems to pass faster as you get older.

I equate this to each year being a smaller period of your overall time. When you turned 5 a year was 20% of your life, at 50 it is 2%. Perceptually that is huge.

The event test at the end seemed to target people older than someone in their early thirties at least. So I don’t know that this article would have anything with being in their thirties to do?

Also, I’m about to hit 30 this year so there’s that.

And also also, when I got to the question about Jurassic Park, my immediate thought was 1993. But then I became unsure whether that was for the first or the second movie so I guessed that the first one actually came out in 1984 or something. Shouldn’t have second guessed myself on that one, d’oh!

But that kind of underlines the point about age, and what they were saying also. If I were older I probably would’ve seen it in the cinema when it first came out and I’d be like “oh yeah, I remember when I went and saw that movie that was the same year that I did such and such so it must have been then”.

I hit 30 earlier this year and I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t hold onto memories as vividly anymore. Even life-changing events that happened last year feel distant whereas when I was younger I could relive memories in my mind, not necessarily with more detail, but they wouldn’t feel as distant.

that just correlates with age and isnt caused by it.

you just havent had an emotionally charged event if you haven't experienced that in some time.

its likely just harder to get a rise outta you nowadays then before... but with the right mindset/training, you can even force it to happen.

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