Why time “speeds up” as we get older (2019)
sitn.hms.harvard.edu
sitn.hms.harvard.edu
You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations certainly felt considerably shorter.
Why are those birds cheeping? Oh, it's the dawn chorus. Again.
I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of time.
Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play the previous ones.
My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined, but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many hours.
And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives. My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually matter.
Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't flunk.
Please don't let someone censor you for acting rationally.
No, it's not normal. Not at all. I hope for all that's good it's not your life when you're old, or if you're old it's not your life.
I still think that OP is incorrect that this is evidence that previous comment is not ageist. Just because most people hold the same prejudice doesn't stop it being prejudice.
Back in the 1920's it would have been quite normal for white people to assume that black people (like myself) were inferior. Just because it was normal doesn't mean it wasn't racist.
Not the same. You can't measure inferiority. You can measure activities, time and age.
I am right.
>I hope for all that's good it's not your life when you're old, or if you're old it's not your life.
I have no idea what you mean here.
It's a partnership, and it works better when one tries to understand that roles evolve over time - for one's self and for others. Also understand that stereotypes of age (and many other things) are not a great way to go through life.
But even that's not fine. Better to recognize we're all different, whether it be age, race, creed, orientation, cilantro/no-cilantro, whatever. VI vs EMACS tho - 'nother story.
Recognising that we're different is fine. That comes with recognising that some of us are the same.
Yeah...the first week of a new job feels like a month of the previous job. Four months into it now, and the weeks fly by.
While on vacation, the days feel long. Though once I get back, the week felt short. :-\
I worry about what retirement will be like. On one hand, all my time is free time. On the other, 10 years will probably fly by and I'll have no idea where it went.
Vacations to unique places last forever. Never been? Spend 2 weeks in Japan and you'll remember it just as vividly as the best summer from your childhood. Every moment of every day will be long and filled with memories.
Debugging code every day? Yeah of course that's not memorable. Your brain is just tossing away repetitive data.
Feeling like life is going by way too quick? Have a kid. Every day with a baby is unique.
People with large families will have lived 200 subjective years by the time they are 70!
Other advice: Stop doing stuff you are good at. Every few years try to take a new job that you are specifically not good at. Companies that hire people who have succeeded at a lot of different things but not necessarily the thing they are hiring for are likely to be very good places to work. (FWIW my current workplace doesn't hire based on language or tools or background, we hire good people and assume they can pick up what we are doing).
The first time I drive down a road it seems longer than subsequent times. Once parts of the road become familiar the time it takes to get down the road seems shorter.
I have read that explanation several times on different websites, but I don't agree. Had a lot of new and unique things happening to me in the past decade (kids, moving, new job, new country,...). Times still flew. I have talked to friends about this and they have noticed the same thing.
Some time around IIRC 25, the effect really started to take off, and it's never gotten better, no matter how much my life is shaken up.
[EDIT] and on shorter time scales, back then, tell me I've got an hour? Fuck yeah! Enough time to do several things! Now it's like... ugh, barely enough to even start something. Guess I'll putter and tidy the house until it's up, which'll feel like about ten minutes from now.
The relative portions of your life get longer the longer you live.
I don't know how to get out of this. I can't think of any truly new things to do. Maybe I could go to jail or win Wimbledon? These would be truly new :-)
Any of the following can consume your whole time, and have huge communities of full-time devotees:
* Rock Climbing
* Mountaineering
* Kayaking
* Paragliding
* Kite/Windsurfing
* Surfing
* Snowboarding (if you ski, skiing if you snowboard)
* Backcountry skiing (aka ski-tour)Even better, an activity where the community surrounding it is also vastly different than your typical friends circle. Know a bunch of engineers? Dive into painting or sculpting.
Find a way to twist your brain in a painful new direction.
It will not work in the same way if the time won't be limited - I will be more relaxed.
People can spend years solving one problem in their mind and there are not many experiences in your mind until it generates smth you haven't thought about, and this doesn't happen often.
I think in retrospect we perceive time through our memories, less so by our momentary experience. If your memories have little variance, you'll feel like time has passed quickly. So if you work some factory job for 40 years, you may feel like life passed by in a blink of a moment.
Staying in old routines is comfortable, but to use myself as an example if I just stayed in la complaining about how horrible the city is, I'm robbing myself of a fuller life.
My plan right now is to move abroad for at least a few months or so. I really need to change up things
What "speeds up"? Looking at a clock ticking doing nothing? Eating breakfast? Waiting in line? Watching a movie? An international flight? Memories of a typical work/school day? Memories of a two week vacation? And relative to what? You can't say something "speeds up" without a reference.
For example you can ask : "What feels the longest, a day at Disneyland, or the 8h drive to get there?". And you will probably get different answers based on the context.
Our body doesn't have a single clock, and BTW, neither do computers, so the transmission delay between neurons and the amount of new experiences can each explain a different kind of "speed up".
Another issue is that kids are exposed to more varied experience at school. Jobs often expose us to similar experiences over and over again.
The only problem is how to get paid to have a varied life.
Time seeming to speed up isn't a visual phenomena! I don't see people walking faster. People are not talking faster.
It is in recall of recent times, not in the moment, that we feel like time is going by faster.
And your point explains that.
We tend to have fewer memories of recent time, because we had fewer unique experiences relative to when we were young and almost every day was full of new experiences and new things to learn.
The first trip on a new road or a road not travelled for a very long time always feels like it takes the longest. The more you travel that same road often the faster the journey feels. At least to a certain point.
You see 2-5 elections per year.
The day lasts from 0500-2130h (at least here in NY)
New faces throughout the day.
Constant stimulation, followed by periods of inactivity.
Practically impossible to guess when someone will walk in the door.
Strict rules for how you’re supposed to conduct the election, combined with the anxiety of how your co-workers and yourself actually perform.
And then waiting for the results.
The theory in the article did strike me as quite plausible.
"Cognitive decline" is probably the wrong way to think about it. Your cognition changes as you age.
When you're young, you're inundated with lots of information. You can process that information quickly, but you don't know which signals are important.
As you age, you learn what information is important, and what can be filtered out. So even if you're slower, your brain can work more efficiently. It also knows how to take shortcuts.
...at least, that's what I remember reading in my college Psychology textbook five years ago, and it jives with the current article.
E.g. when I read a novel, the last few pages don't fly by any faster than the first ones do.
For that 50 year old it was just 0.03%.
At any rate, I’m old and I can confirm that the speeding up isn’t just a myth.
You gain weight because you eat more calories that you burn. This is, again, mathematically correct, but it offers no explanation of the why
Why do you eat more than you burn ? you move too little ? you eat too much ? your brain malfunctions and it is unable to detect food intake ?
(Maybe I misunderstand your angle).
I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in batch of 100 hours.
The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates and I'm not back to my kid self, it feels that I have tremendously more time now than a few years ago.
I suspect that it's tied to how much present you manage to be.
When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.
I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff, like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time seems to pass slowly.
In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many things and then looking at the clock, it hasn't moved much. This sensation increases when I meditate a lot.
I think the more you meditate, the more you unlearn precious patterns, memories, etc. that were clogging up your brain. Then you have more time to experience the present moment, and your brain has more capacity to process what's going on now rather than what happened to you previously.
I'm going to take what you recommend and run with it.
This was my first foray into meditation.
I can only tell you what I have done, the cost and benefit I personally experienced. I cannot make recommendations as it would be utter B.S.
I'm pretty good with my brain, but my attention was lacking to say the least. In search for a solution, I tried meditation on my own. I read books, and tried to sit down by myself.
I failed. Repeatedly.
Frustrated by what was the first time not being good with my head, I ask my doctor, who I knew was a Buddhist doing meditations retreats in caves, to help me find a teacher.
I insisted I wanted meditation only. No mantra or singing. No mythology or holly texts. No prayer or God. No offering, ritual or altar.
She told me the closest thing to what I was looking for was a course of "Vipassana Meditation, in the tradition of S.N Goenka".
It's a meditation technique that you learn during a 10 days courses. Shorter periods are NOT available as a beginner, and the 10 days are really necessary. I advice strongly against quitting in the middle of a course, for your own mental health, even if you believe you can. Once your are in it, you should finish.
You _will_ want to quit. Almost everybody does. Sometimes, I still do on the first day, when I start a new course.
The 10 days are not devoid of mysticism, religious undertone, etc. but they do teach you a technique that can be practiced as an atheist, or a practitioner of another religion, with minimal fuss. Keep in mind, though, that if you are scientifically inclined, the 10 days will grind your gears in many ways. After so long, it still triggers me sometimes, but I've being involved with those people quite deeply now, and I find solace in the fact they are benevolent and dedicated to helping.
I actually lived a year in one of the (numerous, almost 200 in the world) meditation centers, I dated one their accountant (!), and being part of a lot of their activities. They are just regular human beings, with the good, and the bad, but they really want to help, and they do. The accounting books are clean too ^^
The course is free, and you don't need to pay for the teaching, nor the accommodation, or the food. Ever. They will regularly remind you they need donation, and even tell you it's good for you :) I do donate, but it is completely optional, and some people never give anything. It's considered perfectly ok.
As for the 10 days course, it is _hard_. The discipline is strict:
- waking up at 4 am
- no food after 12
- you put any distracting object in a safe you can't access before the end, including your phone, books, wallets or notebooks
- you can't talk, do much exercise
- you meditate 10 hours a day
The hardest part is not the silence, the food or the sleep though. It's the meditation. Provided you practice correctly, it will be extremely challenging. Boredom, physical discomfort or pain, distress, depression, break down, sadness, etc. are only a fraction of the things you may, or may not have to face. And that's only what you can put words on, which is, to my surprise, only a very tiny part of the experience.
The cost, hence, is high.
It's even higher if you decide it's worth it for you to carry on with it daily. It takes time, and effort.
Also, it's a slow process. A steady one, mind you. My life has changed in ways I believe would have not been possible otherwise. Some progresses fade without practice. Some gains are for life even if you stop.
But I've been at it for some time now, and I will continue for the rest of my life. The trade off proved worth it for me.
The most obvious benefits that I personally experienced:
- my social, love and professional life have completely shifted. I had what looked like autistic traits, but they have melted. I'm considered an extrovert now.
- I am happier. It was not a straight transformation. I had depressive periods. But the trend on 15 years is that, all in all, I'm much, much happier than when I started. This by itself makes the technique worth it, as it leads you, little by little, to decouple happiness from circumstances.
- I know myself better. This means I accept myself more as I am, I have less illusion about myself, and also I live my life according to that knowledge, instead of hitting an invisible wall. If I'd share what I learned with you, you would think it's trivial, obvious things. But making them yours make all the difference.
- I'm more productive. It's a small detail compared to the rest, but a nice boost.
- I am more at peace with the suffering of our human condition. Less afraid of death, less angry with people destroying things, less depressed by the state of society. I forgive a lot now. Including myself. I'm ok hurting people too, which is strange to say, and not what you think would be the result of meditation.
In fact, I became less minimalist and more materialist with time. I don't look the stereotype of a wise, zen person. Also, some areas in my life I desperately wanted to work on didn't move at all. I eat too much, I still get angry for some things that are so superficial in retrospect. So be careful with expectations.
You can find more information about this particular technique and the related courses here:
https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index
Yes, I'm well aware that the website looks like a cult.
It's even worse when you are in a course, with the Pali wows and the recordings repeating again and again the same instructions.
You will have to assess that by yourself.
Whatever you chose to do, I hope you'll find something that works for you.
To your point, meditation helps me quite a bit (along with long cardio and limiting media consumption)
As much as I'd like to agree with you, I'm not sure I can, i.e. I can't say that time seems to pass less quickly since I've started meditating regularly.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I have a 3-year-old son (i.e. I always feel like I should have more time, even when I consciously plan to not do anything)? Maybe I don't meditate "the right way"? Or maybe I'm just not a good judge of how I perceive time. I don't know.
I would add I started experiencing time slowing down once I did a one year stay at a Vipassana center. I also meditate 2 hours a day now. My first 10 years of meditation, I didn't felt it.
So maybe, it's dose dependent.
Or maybe it's all in my head :)
But I can definitely believe that the more you meditate, the more you will experience things differently. My 10-day vipassana course was already an intense experience compared to meditating 10-20 minutes every day!
Not to mention you should cook, buy fresh food, stay informed, be politically active, learn new things, keep your house clean, recycle, do health checks up, get a hair cut, but don't use your car for everything and spend some time in nature. Don't forget to read, meet new people, get to zero inbox and fix your shower curtain.
The perception is pretty plausibly an information processing phenomenon, and there are mechanisms for that, so pro thinkers addressing it seemed interesting enough to share. If it brings down the level of discussion, I would of course apologize.
10 years ago feels 10 years ago, and this effect of time speeding up just doesn't register with me.
Having kids seemed to increase the effect markedly, but it was already there.
The reason why we imagine time pass faster when we get older is related to how we experience and remember events during life.
As events excite us, the perception of that particular Time-Event is short but since we were fully engaged at that time, we remember it more in detail and thus taking longer. Vis versa, time spend in boredom is perceived as passing slowly but since nothing out of the ordinary is happening, we remember it as a quick period with nit much detail.
Couple that with the exciting youth and dreadful routine as an adult, your life in your older ages becomes repetitive plus, depending on how much knowledge you like to consume,feels easier to predict and thus by default less exciting. Experience kills the novelty and partially the excitement, resulting in the opinion that when you wake up one morning feeling like the past 5 years have passt with a blink of an eye, that time flies by.
I think that hobbies besides your daily routine can help you battle that feeling of lost years.
On the other hand I found something else helpful: you gotta figure out your calibration of your routine:novelty ratio. If you are a person that likes 60% novelty and 40% routine but you are stuck in a job that is very repetitive or doesn't leave you with enough energy after work, you'll end up earlier in that "life is passing too quickly category".
But if you somewhat can adjust your life to that calibration then you experience the right amount of novelty that makes you feel that life takes exactly as long as needed.
As we get older, life becomes more routine. Fewer unique experiences = less space taken up in memory = later years appear to have moved faster in retrospect.
With that said, I'm sure there's a million explanations. And all of them are probably, at least somewhat, true.
Basically the more novel experiences you have the slower time seems to pass for you, the less novel (interesting) stuff you do the faster time passes because there's no markers.
This stuff has been known for literally decades now.
Doesn't seem like that long to me.
Anecdotally, I've been sitting in the same house for 20 months of the pandemic and have a diminished sense of time, and while in that time I've taken up music and new instruments, written volumes, transformed physically (weight loss), kept up regular highly intense physical hobbies, added and removed clients/jobs, worked in vastly different fields.
However, I've always pursued novelty, and I'd wonder if this accepted explanation would indicate that the brain is now just bored of novelty, or if something about these things were not sufficiently novel experiences, and where does that sufficiency land?
I suspect that the internal clock slows down as we age. That wouldn’t affect our perception of the speed of physical events, because those are relative to each other, but it would reduce the ratio of physical events per “clock cycles”, giving us the sensation of a shrinking of the time dimension. The past becomes more “blurry”, so to speak.
When you watch a movie for the first time, it seems to last longer than when you watch it a second time. It seems to me that as our brain is processing new information our perception of time is dilated.
As we grow older, we have to learn less about the world and consequently time is perceived as quicker. I suspect this is why during a drug induced euphoria the experience seems like it can last an eternity and time ceases to exist. Our brain is processing and adapting to the stimuli much as we were doing in our youth.
There are of course two different perceptions of time. Current and retrospective. Some days can seem to last forever, but by the end of the week you end up feeling like the week went by very fast. The opposite is true, as well as a mix of both.
edit: just realized emreb has a similar comment after reading further down the thread!
All it takes it looking at how fast folks take to [solve problems / write an essay / read through a book / grok a new concept / learn a new skill] after a certain age.
This is certainly measurable and IMO rather easy to, if only when applying it to yourself when you're past your prime (I know I am).
And jumping from that rather easy to establish fact to a perception of time going faster is not exactly a stretch.
In short ... unless they've invented new ways to measure the deterioration of the brain with age and accurately correlate it with information processing capabilities, I'm not seeing much of an insight from this article.
I always assumed time passing rapidly had to do with novelty, when you are a child, everything is novel, as you get older, situations become less novel and aren't "remembered".
(I highly recommend the channel, its videos capture and evoke feelings quite superbly.)
When you're a child, a week seems like a long time, because you haven't lived very many weeks. A year seems like an eternity, because relatively few have passed.
As more of these increasingly large time units get behind you, years, then decades... you have a firsthand understanding of what living their respective durations feels like.
It's like by living you're calibrating your ability to measure time properly, and then you die.
Let's see. I am a dad to two kids, a husband, with a day job as a software engineer, but working on my side project when the wife and kids have gone to bed. (yes I'm on HN now but I'm going to fire up gedit soon -- trust me.) I don't even know what free time means any more.
Back when I was a seven years old I had not a care in the world, was often bored. Time passed slooowly. I was sure my eighth birthday would never arrive. I turned 50 in June.
When you are 10 years old a year is a large fraction of the total time you have been alive so it feels much longer than when you are 60 and that same year is only 1/60 of your life.
edit: reading further down I see I'm not the only one who had this same idea :)
At least anecdotally, I know a lot of people who get worse sleep as they get older. Sleep quality is, if I'm not mistaken, at least indirectly correlated with memory. So it seems reasonable to believe, in addition to everything else people are saying here, that one possible reason time flies by is that we don't get the sleep to make those memories stick.
But it seems according article my perception was wrong ...
TL;DW: We percieve things logarithmically. Thought it was an interesting idea.
I'm sure there's a poem there somewhere. Like tears in rain. Or something something. It's my birthday in a couple weeks. Hooray.
I thought the number of neural connections decreased throughout most of life? They surge in babies and teenagers, but are otherwise declining most of the time.
I like to think there are some weird swirly images or static noise I can watch/listen to while going about my life that will "novelize" everything. hah.
[EDIT] the effect of making an hour hour or an afternoon feel as long as they did when you were, like, 6 years old, I mean.