Why children perceive time slower than adults
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is tongue in cheek, it's just it's been on my mind a lot as all my close friends have families now. We have all the resources we wanted growing up but no time and no friends to play. =/
I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.
Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.
I get your point and upvote though.
kids go to school. that's hardly better than working. on the contrary, it's worse. i had a lot less freedom to do things the way i liked in school. i "lived" during holidays when i went traveling. once i started working, i was able to incorporate work into my life. i picked jobs that i actually wanted to do, where i would learn something interesting. where i had the freedom to structure my work as i wanted. where i had colleagues that i enjoyed working with. especially as a freelancer i have a lot of freedom. i also picked jobs in other countries, so every day i was learning about new cultures and ways of doing things not only in my free time but also at work. so while i had a full time job, i was also a full time traveler.
so for me the full day is part of life. balancing the priorities, and making the best out of every situation. even chores go into that. i enjoy cooking. i enjoy seeing a clean kitchen. chores are a part of making my home livable. and for most chores i can pick an audiobook or something else to listen to, making the time even more worthwhile.
if you think work and chores are not part of life then they will probably cause you more stress and you'll be in a situation that you can't get out of because you can't stop working and doing chores. on the other hand by incorporating those into living, i can detect things that really cause me stress and avoid them. i can fire bad customers and quit bad jobs. if work is not part of living then changing jobs won't help. if a chore is causing me stress, i find a different way of doing it, or for things like cleaning, maybe try to avoid that needing to be cleaned in the first place.
on the topic of the article: how fast i perceive time depends on how much of that time is spent experiencing something new.
i write a diary that is a reflection of that. days where nothing happens go by fast, and my diary is one paragraph. days that are filled with novel activities cause me to write more, sometimes a lot more.
children spend more time experiencing something new
I’m not convinced anybody is any closer at really quantifying this experience, but they tried to control for it
Do novel new intense things in your life, at literally any age, and you will remember them very well, and the feeling of how much time passes will change dramatically, I call it personally 'adding decades of life felt'.
When I did my 2 stints of 3 months backpacking all over India (and a bit of Nepal) around age 30, I wasn't prepared. Every day completely different than previous one, no strict plan just massive Lonely planet book and return flight ticket in 3 months, no phone, no credit card (2008 and 2010).
After few weeks, I felt like I was on the road for 6 months. After 2 months... hard to describe by mere words - the entire life back home, didn't matter which part or when, felt like literal memory of a dream you had last week, very hazy, somehow it felt real since I went cca 1x a week into internet cafes to check emails and yes those were my parents writing back, but were they? It felt brutally distant, and Indian/Nepalese reality felt like the only truth, that always was and always will be. Literal different life with reborn moment somewhere on a plane there.
I managed to recreate exactly same experience on a second visit, 100% since I behaved in same fashion. Much shorter stint in Tanzania afterwards lasting 3 weeks achieved milder effect of it - say it felt like 3-6 months on the road, its not linear how it scales. Did Kilimanjaro for 1 week, Serengeti/Ngorongoro another one, and last week on Zanzibar (way before it became cheap european holiday destination). Again, the key was novelty.
I still remember so many events, people, places etc. from those trips like it happened yesterday. I came back different, and made changes in my life for better, much better. Looking back, it was literal life (re)defining moment. I don't think I can recreate it easily these days, it would have to be done without phone again. But going there into some luxury resort, none of that would happen, its not about distance but how far out of your comfort zone you push yourself out for a long period.
Primarily, if I had to guess, it’s simply what we’re experiencing that makes time feel slower or faster.
Having fun? Time goes by faster.
Boring class? Time goes by slower.
Up all night with a newborn? Those first couple of years feel like a long time.
When that newborn is older and now you’re playing video games, riding bikes, and having fun? The saying goes, “They grow up too fast.”
Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.
my life was bad, and i missed out on many childhood experiences growing up, like i didn't have friends until i joined university. but i didn't know that it was bad. on the contrary i felt that eg not having friends protected from bad influences and the misbehavior i saw in my classmates. life was what it was and i had no idea it could be better.
and frankly, it was for the better. i felt that i had a happy childhood. hoping for a better future would have made my actual childhood experience worse.
it took me decades as an adult to even understand what i was missing and how it affected me. and the most important part, now that i understand that i can fix it and my life now is so much better than i could have even hoped for just a decade ago.
i don't see how children can have a hope for a better life unless they compare their life with that of other people or worse with what they see on tv. (we didn't have a tv, and we preferred it that way), which creates a false hope because you are not those other people and your life will never be like theirs.
only as an adult you can realistically understand which of the bad things in your life are in your power to fix. and in my opinion that is the time where you develop a hope for the future and start working on it.
it took me decades to understand the bad things, and i have more hope for my future now than i have ever had before
Like how Christmas comes around slowly when you are a kid, but each year it speeds up a little because life has lost its new-ness. So then, your brain takes short cuts - like how when the first journey somewhere takes AGES, but after a few times, it feels a lot quicker (whilst being the same physical time)
The winter 1956 was indeed difficult in Finland. Because of general strike and Hungarian Uprising elementary things like Milk and Kellog's Corn Flakes were in short supply.
The brain may have up to 50% less neurons in adulthood than in infancy.
A child is simply experiencing more stuff at each moment of time than adults.
Because, their brain is actually firing more neurons, many of which might be redundant executions. Hence.. the need for pruning.
that is when you become aware of the repetition and rhythm of life
further the less compressible life is the longer it seems
same job for 10 years feels fast since nothing happens, but different jobs every year (good or bad) makes time seem long since there’s so much to remember
also the less you sleep the less you feel alive
N=1. Many, many years ago I gently started cutting my sleep down. I feel alive 19-20 hours a day, now.
It has to be due to how many HN readers are themselves children...