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Comment by encephalos | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been wondering a lot lately if it’s possible that time is felt differently (I guess moves) for us on an individual level.

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I think about this a lot too but I think it just has to do with the way memories are stored in the brain - not anything to do with time itself.

It's sorta handwavey but I've seen it explained that at age 40 a year represented 2.5% of your life while at age 10 2.5% of your life (especially your post baby life) may only be a few months.

And to put it in terms of some advice I do think time moves differently depending on how much new memories you are taking in. Vacations to me can seem to be very long while weeks where I settled into my normal routine flew by.

As I approach 40, a year feels about as long as a month did when I was elementary-school aged. I worry that if the current rate-of-increase continues, my last decade will feel weeks long.

I think the answer to this is to do more interesting things on a regular basis. If every weekend you do something different, then the month feels longer than when you stay home every weekend.

I've long been skeptical of this explanation. Later school ages (junior high and high school) were probably the most monotonous and regimented part of my life, period—I've certainly never experienced that much concentrated, intense boredom without any way to do anything about it—yet subjective time had only barely sped up from elementary school. It should then have slowed way down in college, but it didn't. It should have slowed down again a ton when I had kids, but it didn't. The change has been consistently in one direction, as has the acceleration of the effect.

I’m less interested in how long it feels in my memories, and more in how long it feels while I’m living it. If it makes any sense, the question is how to cram as much—consciousness, I guess?—as possible, into however many decades I get.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? So many people are focused on every other moment besides “now”. Memories build from our past, and they’re constantly appearing in our minds based on various stimuli. Moreover, society is structured in such a way that people are constantly focused on the future. It’s very difficult to actively live “in the now” and focus on the actual experience of simply existing.

That’s really the biggest tragedy of modern human existence, many people never get to see the true beauty of living in the now, they only get to see it from the “bad” perspective, when their negative emotions become overwhelming and time seems to slow down to a standstill.

Normalize living in the now. Normalize the idea that our “purpose” on this Earth is simply to exist, and that “purpose” can be the most important of all possible purposes.

To quote the ever-wise Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I've had a pretty opposite experience. The busier I am, the more I have to process, and time feels to pass more slowly. I feel like the first 6 months of my kids life took at least twice that.

Great advise! I wanted to add a bit more to it. As you age the number of novel experiences and "space" for those experiences in your brain decreases. So the first 20 years of your life you accumulated a lot of new experiences while your brain was growing an expanding. For this reason it feels like you lived in regular time. Your final 20 years will mostly be nothing new and what is new will largely include a base that is shared based on past experiences. This is why as you get older time moves faster.

Saw someone wearing this T-shirt at a 10k race:

"Life is short. Running makes it seem longer."

I feel the same way about my time in elementary school. My theory is that it was boredom that made school time feel so slow. Summer vacation always seemed to fly by.

Time is felt differently at different points in our life, even within an individual’s experience. When you pay more attention to the passage of time itself, it appears to elapse more slowly. When you don’t pay attention, it appears to elapse more quickly.

Yes, I would absolutely accept that we all perceive time at different rates, but where we externally synchronize with measured “seconds”, we don’t have any way to communicate that my “second” may subjectively feel longer than your “second”. Similar to how we can’t really describe what “red” looks like to someone else, without using the word “red”.

I think someone has proposed a formula according to which we experience the passage of time as a function of age. So basically time passes faster the older we get, I guess the reason would be that there's less and less fundamentally new things to experience and hence less lasting memories. I saw it in a numberphile video, but don't remember which one unfortunately.

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