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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

There is already a body of research on the perception of time as a function of age, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_a....

It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.)

In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)

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The ticks per second thing is very interesting because of a something weird i encountered the other day - i suddenly realised seconds are WAY faster than they used to be.

I play music so have a pretty good feel for rhythm and i distinctly remember the clock in a family members house ticking each second being way, way slower as a kid. Slept there the other day and it was fast as hell. So incredibly weird. I'm sure my memory of the BPM is much slower than the feeling from today.

Sitting looking at the digital clock right now two seconds seem close to one as a kid.

I had the same realization a few years ago and it horrified me. Is it gonna keep getting faster?

Extrapolating from my own case time seems to have doubled in speed from 5 to in my 30's, if that doubles when im 70, then when im 100 it's 8 times as fast, wow.

I wonder what that would mean for life extension, imagine this exponential - then you'll get very little effect from living past 200 years:

https://imgur.com/crLQUy6

Pretty interesting thought experiment.

Now that you mention it, I think have noticed this too, but perhaps not to quite the same extent.

Sort of joking, but sort of not, they seem to go pretty slowly while doing an exercise like the plank

Interesting just made a quick test and I'm off by around 30%, seconds seem to be faster by that amount.

Yes, and one thing you can do is doing something/everything different everyday, but the downside of this is that you'll get fatigue out of keeping your brain on alert all the time.

I observed this with people traveling, I used to call travel cognitive impairment, as usually functional human beings (like my close relatives) suddenly get very lost and helpless during travel (specially at airports).

I then realized that this was because this was a unusual experience for them (once every year) and this would overload them with things out of their routing (even if they traveled before). That didnt happen to me (yet) because I was traveling a lot for work, so this was a routine for my brain.

I am travelling right now, freeform exploration of another country is full of novelty. It feels like I have been here for a month but it has only been two weeks.

The downside is I am exhausted. I also couldn't imagine doing any of my work while travelling even if I had a computer with me. There is downtime enough to do some, but I don't think I'd have the capacity to engage with it. I think advanced abstract thinking relies on a bit of cognitive room being created by routine. Perhaps that is at the consequence of the routine moments disappearing into a void of compressed time.

I have friends who say that if they had the money they would travel the whole world all the time.

I always tell them that this soon will feel more tiring than working and they will choose to stay in the same place for at least 3 months.

My anecdata is that my late-twenties felt way slower than my early-twenties, mostly because I switched from a 9-5 office job to a remote job that allowed me to slow travel. I spent a month in Rome and I remember most days and definitely remember all weekends, but I would have to really dig deep for a memory from 2019.

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