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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

Interesting mix of pointers in this article.

What I was looking for, but could not find in the article, is some more information about time perception [1].

It amazes me to no end that time seems to be passing faster and faster now that I grow older. In my youth, 10 minutes used to take ages, but now a month passes in a blink.

If any of you startup guys can find a way to slow this down, I'll buy a subscription.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception

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I've noticed that it slows back down to childhood levels when I am on a really fun vacation, especially one that involves heavy physical activity and fascinating new outdoor environments. I think the novelty, play, and lack of stress combined are able to 'fix' this.

I am convinced the slowing down is essentially cultural, and is a result of how our lives are different as adults- and can be fixed by understanding this.

I think this can be accomplished full time as an adult by not taking things so seriously, and taking a lot more (not physically dangerous) risks. Go on adventures, don't obsess over fear of financial ruin, don't care about status or 'careers' and time will slow down.

As a single dad, I can't really figure out how to do that full time given my responsibilities, but can manage it for stretches of time on weekends and evenings.

A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences; when each day resembles the one before it, whole months can disappear in lived monotony.

I like to think of memory as using a sort of compression algorithm. Repeated data gets compressed away; novel data takes up space.

So you can slow down your time perception by making your life less compressible. Do things differently; make bigger changes in your life more often; make more milestones; take more trips; change things up; be random.

> as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences

Yes. I cant believe how much of my life has been stolen by being kept captive in the UK.

>A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences

Experiential reference grows, reducing what "a long time" really means. At ten years old, a year is one tenth your life experience. At fifty years old, it is one fiftieth. Pretty simple.

Agreement on the novel experiences. They do seem to reset the clock.

Pretty simple, but that would mean that an experienced minute would go 50 times as fast, and that is not the case.

Also (as I tried to get at in a sibling comment), I don't see how this would work internally. Why would time perception be relative to all experience? What is the use of that, and how would it be accomplished? Why don't we have this with other sensory input, such as vision or hearing?

The way I think about it is by making an analogy with sleep: We perceive time to be fastest during sleep, i.e. when there is no sensory input. So the perception of time is actually linked to changes in sensory inputs. My hypothesis is that as we grow older, we become less and less sensitive to stimuli due to familiarity, so we perceive time to be faster.

One theory I like is that when young, we see the world in "high FPS" (a rough metaphor for some neurological phenomenon). As we age, the "FPS" slow down, which makes everything seem much faster.

At least in my subjective experience, I can tell that motion seems coarser now that I'm 40. I can still detect the "soap opera" effect when motion smoothing is turned on in a TV, but it's a bit harder to tell than when the feature was introduced.

Interesting. I (also in my 40s) sometimes experience the vividness of reality in a higher quality than usual, and I vaguely recall that my visual experience was always this vivid when I was younger. Most of the time now it seems to be a bit dulled down. I always thought that this is because I probably need glasses. It might also be stress related.

What would cause such a change, and would there be an evolutionary explanation for it? Could it be related to vision only, or does it apply to other sensory input as well?

I mean, have you at least tried ruling out the glasses theory?

You might find this interesting:

Time Perception: Why Time Can Feel So Slow — https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/time-perception.php

I do indeed, thank you.

Unfortunately, the question what causes time perception to speed up with age, remains a mystery to me. I don't buy the argument that when we grow older things are less new, and therefore time somehow appears to go faster. For one, I learn more now than I did in my teens, when there was no internet. I also get to meet more people, experience life events, learn about death, etc. All pretty new, yet time seems to only accelerate.

The article also taught me a new term: "Boredom-prone individual". I think it might be an interesting experiment to try to be as bored as possible over the course of a year, and try to become a BPI. Perhaps the lasting effects will make up for the investment!

Isn't it just the fact that every moment is somehow compared to our experience of the sum total of all our moments. As you get older, a day becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of time out of your total lived days.

This is a theory that makes some sense, but I don't understand how it would work in my mind.

If I watch a minute pass by, I am certain that it goes faster than in my youth, but the scaling does not seem to be a linear relationship.

Say at the age of 10, I experience a minute to take 60 es (experienced seconds for a 10 year old kid). At the age of 40, it probably takes ~30 es, but certainly not 15. If we rule out sleep and boring parts of the day, then the numbers may come close.

But how would this work internally? How come all my experiences somehow add up and are projected onto my time perception gauge? Why is this not happening with, say, vision, hearing, temperature, hunger, etc?

My years doing the digital nomad thing were pretty slow. 3 months in a foreign country is subjectively way longer than 3 months at home (approx. 2x longer). A change of career/vocation should work the same.

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