Why Does Time Go Faster As We Get Older?
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Our perception of the passage of time is, in my opinion, merely a summation of our memorable experiences. Our brain filters out some large percentage of it's input, to keep from being overloaded. It filters out what it's already familiar with.
As a kid, you're not familiar with much. A yield sign is interesting, for example, and you notice it. Later, you see a yield sign, and can't even remember you saw it.
If you travel to Australia, and the yield sign says "Give Way",you notice it again. That's why travel is so memorable. Your brain filters less when you're in unfamiliar territory filled with new perceptions.
As we get older, unfamiliar things and new perceptions are fewer and fewer, so we're getting less input per unit time. Thus it seems that time is passing faster.
My own philosophy, which I often forget to follow, is to optimize my perceived lifespan by doing as many unfamiliar things as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes I just want to get a hamburger instead.
I think there may be a minor biological element to this, too. Because of this reduced need to remember new things rapidly, our brain optimizes in other areas and it can be more difficult to retain those things when you need to do so.
In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds.
This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable:
For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group.
For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.
Quite a claim. Is it falsifiable?
A truth that isn't falsifiable isn't useful.
I'm playing with the definition of 'useful' here, using a much less rigorous meaning than you probably intended. But even scientific frameworks start with axioms that are unprovable but accepted as true. Those are useful truths which the rest of the framework is built upon.
For example, I cannot prove that everyone in china is right handed, but that is certainly a falsifiable idea. One could go to china and ask each person: impossible, but meaningful.
An example of an idea that is not falsifiable is that my garage is inhabited by undetectable dragons. What use is this idea? What use is it to speak of things which cannot in any way be detected?
Is that statement true? Is it falsifiable? Is it useful?
Also rumble strips. I remember the first time I encountered them (trying to cross a median in Madison, Wisconsin). Now not very memorable.
Realizing that time isn't actually passing faster, that it's just your perception, helps with dealing with it.
Driving to someplace new always seems longer than the ride back home.
The really odd thing I've noticed about travel is that each day I'm away feels full, and time goes by more slowly, but the minute I'm back home, wham, it feels like I had just left.
How can you keep that feeling of having had richer experiences and fuller days once back from a trip?
As we age, our life becomes increasingly routine. We all make beds, shower, cook, eat, do laundry, commute, work and sleep, they take up the majority of our days and will be repeated thousands of times. A child however likely only has shower, school, eat and sleep, their free time per day is probably near 8 hours, where as an adult likely has 1-2 hours of free time per average weekday.
If the majority of your day is taken up by a routine, it will quickly become compressed memories so the day may be long, but the year collapses into 2 hour increments of unique activity (supposing you don't spend them watching reruns on TV).
I remember first coming to Canada (I was born in the UK) and when driving on the highway I noticed a "Wrong Way" sign on the back of the signs on the opposite side of the road. Not only was it a unique sight to me, as in the UK no one would think to do that, but I found it highly ironic as Canada's neighbours (the US) drive on the same side of the road, but the UK whose neighbours all drive on the opposite side of the road doesn't have it. Now I've been in Canada for several years, I never notice the signs, and even though I'm going on a roadtrip later this week, I doubt I'll notice one of those 'wrong way' signs the entire trip.
However, personally I have witnessed my years getting relatively shorter, but since getting a job as a writer at 17 I've managed to fill a lot of my time with uniqueness. The act of writing largely disappears, but the memories surrounding it appear to be strongly attached to what I've written and I still haven't lost the memories of even my earliest writings.
I suppose I haven't found a way to extend my perceived lifespan, but I believe I stumbled my way into producing a strong 'lifeline' (if you will) that I've attached many lesser memories onto.
A given duration of time pales away in comparison to one’s age as he/she grows older.
For example, a 20-year-old sees a decade as half a lifetime. For the 100 year-old it counts as just 10%.
But I do have a memory of my parents leaving me with my grandma once and telling me they would be back in 3 hours. I was 3 or 4 at that time and I remember thinking how mind-bogglingly long these 3 hours felt when they said it.
And, by the way, for me senior year high school seems the longer.
I buy the "you compare each experience to your previous experiences" argument. If new experiences happen at a constant rate, that works out to simple ratios of time, eg. senior year of high school was 1/17 of your life, freshman year of college was 1/18. But new experiences don't always happen at constant rates: some people open up much more in college than in high school. Hence it feels longer.
I suspect that certain experiences occurring at certain periods also have a bearing. I find that some experiences tend to signal the beginning or end of different stages of my life and in some way I'm not fully able to describe, this seems to have some effect on my perception of time as I look back.
But for me, there's definitely something in this comparing any time period to how long you have lived so far.
I propose that what happens is that as people age they get better at avoiding boredom. Also, youth is boring compared with adulthood.
Consider grades K-6 where most students have little choice of what subjects to learn about, are often in the care of a single teacher for most of the day, and whose assignments involve lots of repetition (math drills, handwriting drills, spelling drills). This is just plain boring, and so the mind works hard to avoid boredom by daydreaming, planning, etc... but still struggles to stave off boredom.
As we age we get more choice about what we want to do, and life gets a bit more dramatic and less boring. I recall being bored during recess in grade school b/c I really didn't like tag or four square. Put a mixed gender group of adults together and who knows what might happen.
So the increasing speed of the passage of time is a result both of life becoming less boring and also of the learned ability to minimize boredom. I read articles on my phone when waiting in line or when riding the muni. In general most of my work and leisure time is highly focused to avoid boredom and thus just flies by.
Occasionally I have a reminder of how slowly time can pass -- such as when sitting in a waiting room with no reading material or poor quality reading material, etc.
I notice a huge difference in how much "stuff" happens in my life when I'm traveling vs. when I have a job.
Home life is measured in weeks and months, and when you ask somebody what's new, they'll say "not much" and maybe tell you what they did last weekend. Or the weekend before that.
Road life is measured in hours. I'll find myself telling somebody a story of this amazing thing that happened earlier on my trip, possibly in another country, and suddenly realize that it was only 3 days ago. A month of travelling compresses so much life into such a short span that it's really strange checking in with friends back in the world that can account for that same month with a single sentence.
There are times when life in the 'states can approximate that (the first weeks of a new startup for instance), but it's so easy to drop back into steady state where life is measured in calendar time.
I saw something that I can't find right now, about compounding exponential age or relative perception of age in that when you are 1-10, 10-30, and 30-60 these are all thirds of your life, seemingly. So 1-10, 10-30 and 30-60 all feel about the same length of time. Maybe there is some sort of memory filtering system that contributes to that.
Also, if tasks take longer to accomplish wouldn't time appear to pass faster, not slower?
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=932040&displayty...
Originally published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. :-)
I.e. the dimension of time accellerates.
No, I meant if time as such speeds up causing all events to happen faster and faster.
Young and old would experience the same "speed" of time and feel that "speed" accelerating with age.
Well looking back at all the weekends and my first drive and my first sip of alcohol, it all seems to have gone so fast :(!
In hindsight, length of time is perceived as change in world view. The more your mental state has changed in a given period of time, the longer it seems. The reason the decade from 5 to 15 seem so much longer than 55 to 65 is because of the drastic changes in your world view that occur during childhood. It's the same reason not a lot of 5 year olds are friends with 15 year olds, yet I imagine most 55 year olds can be good friends with most 65 year olds.
This hypothesis would predict several micro and macro phenomena which are testable:
For the micro scale, two groups of subjects are placed into an environment with no way of tracking time (no windows, no clocks) for a month. The control group is provided with books/TV shows/news programmes of their choice, asked to pick ones that they've read/seen and enjoy. The test group is asked to pick books/programmes they think they'll enjoy, but have never read or seen. After about a week, notable events are planned - maybe the light bulb burns out, or the sheets are changed to ones which are bright red, or maybe the food in the cafeteria changes. At the end of the month, the person is asked to estimate the amount of time that passed between certain events. If the hypothesis is correct, the control group should perceive less time having passed between the events compared to the test group.
For the macro scale, my theory would predict people with monotonous, repetitive, jobs to experience the effects of "time passes faster with aging" more than those which expose them to new phenomena. So a Java-only career engineer will experience the effect more than someone who spends time learning new languages.
If we were immortal, I wonder if we would continue to perceive that times go by faster?