Back when I was a young child, time moved by slowly. And every year was a major milestone.
I remember there was this kid in my neighborhood that was 8 years younger than me. And that seemed like such a big difference. He was just barely a baby, I thought. And I was already almost a teenager.
Now that I am almost middle aged, though, years seem less long. In fact, what happened 20 years ago seems to be recent. 1998, no? Yet I can remember everything I was doing around that time. And it doesn’t seem to be that distant in the past.
When I was in high school, my street law teacher warned us about just such a thing. Years passing faster when you get older. I am also reminded of that song from Fiddler On the Roof, “Sunrise, Sunset”. In it, the man laments about his children, “I don’t remember growing older. When did they?”
Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon. Please tell me if you have. I don’t want to think I am alone in the world, in this way.
And for you young dopers, take as a warning of what is to come.
I think of projects at work like they were recent.
We converted to a new system and purchased new pc’s and printers. I still use that inkjet printer in my office.
It seems like a few years ago, but it was in 98. We’ve had several major upgrade releases of that system. Most of those inkjets broke awhile ago. I have one of the survivors.
Twenty years feels like 5 years ago.
Thirty feels like 10.
Yep… I think of how hugely long my 12 years of school seemed, and how recent something 12 years ago seems today. My mother died 16 years ago now-- that’s public school plus college–but sometimes it seems like barely any time at all.
I take consolation in the fact that before we know it, the sun will age into a red giant, consuming the Earth so none of it matters in the long term.
A friend of mine has a hypothesis that our perception of how quickly time passes is a function of how much time we’ve experienced in our lifetimes to date.
So, for an 8-year-old, a month is a not-insignificant portion of their life-to-date, and it feels like it takes a long time to pass. For a 50-year-old, a month is less than 2/10ths of 1% of their total life-to-date, and thus, feels like it flies by (under normal circumstances, at least).
When my kids were born, my dad said: “The time from diapers to car keys will seem like a couple of weeks – enjoy them while you can.” He was right. I have no idea where the time went.
I’ve been saying this for years, and every time I do, the person I’m saying it to looks at me like I’m speaking in barks instead of words. . .at least now I know I’m not alone!
I’m 72. Last week one of my doctors asked how long ago I had heart surgery. I had to stop a second before the words came out: 5.5 years. It seems like maybe a year ago. And didn’t we just do a spring clean-up in the yard? It couldn’t have been an entire year ago.
We tend to measure time in fractions of our life. To a 5-year-old a year is 20% of his live. To me it’s 1.39%.
there’s another aspect to this: the way we “get used to” feeling something.
Compare it with smell: when a new smell hits you, you are intensely aware of it. (like when you open the door and walk into a kitchen with the aroma of , say, onions.) But after a few minutes, you are used to the smell, and no longer notice it…Your nose has adapted to it, and for you to suddenly notice more onions, you would have to be exposed to a much larger dose of the smell.
The same goes for time. After 50 years of living, you need are “used to” the passage of time at a certain rate. You don’t notice another hour or another day, because they are so much like all the others. It takes a larger dose of time before you notice it enough to be remarkable.
Pretty sure it’s largely this; dunno about anyone else, but time days when I’m on holiday also last far longer than they do at home. If I’m in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by unfamiliar people, or at least people I don’t see all the time, so much less stuff is ‘on automatic’. I reckon if things are new, the brain makes more elaborate memories of them, and it feels like time’s passing slower. When you’re a kid it’s almost all new.
I don’t think it’s wholly a function of age though; I have far far more memories of age 23-24 than I do from age 18-21, because I spent age 18-21 unemployed living with a guy where both the area and us had pretty severe depression. 90% of it could be summed up with “ditto”. Age 23-24 I spent travelling the world.
Last year, in my 30s, I’ve gone back to studying. Moved house, complete lifestyle change, new friends, new area. The last year has felt long and incredibly full, even though in reality I’ve not been doing more, just different.
It’s interesting because I used to have a touch of photographic memory as to where I was, what I did, with whom I spoke, what I wore, etc., in a week or two of recent past.
If you asked me right now what I was doing two weeks ago where nothing significant happened, I’d shrug. I’d remember the significant incident, though, since it’d be the only non-trivial event.
This has been studied, and the conclusion they have come to is not very satisfying for me, so I have an alternative theory which other have brushed upon here in this thread already.
The official theory is that, when you’re young, a year is a higher percentage of your total lifespan so far, so when you’re two, the last year is half your life, and then at ten, a tenth of your life, and at 20 a 1/20th etc, so as the fraction drops, the significance of a year’s length has less meaning.
But I think it’s because when you’re young, everything is new, and you are constantly assessing, cogitating, adjusting, and concluding new information at a rapid rate. Every new movement of your body, every discovery under the couch, every taste and smell, is new and needs analysis. Then things around you start to become more familiar, but theoretical ideas begin to occupy your mind, like mathematics or philosophical thoughts, politics and relationships, etc. Then in your twenties even those become less interesting, you have started to make more fixed decisions on those ideas and now the new things are largely variations on the familiar. Until by the time you’re in your 40s, most of everything is well trodden and dull, so your brain has less new information entering it than it used to, and even that comes at a slower rate and can be easily cynically dismissed.
The perception of time passing is directly proportional to the measure of information being loaded into your brain.
That’s almost word for word what a guest speaker told the audience at a commencement ceremony at my alma mater. “When you are 5 years old, one year represents twenty percent of your life. When you are 50, one year is but two percent of your life.”
What really gets me, though is looking at family photos and realizing that my dad was younger then than I am now. That really doesn’t make sense. I used to experience that with pictures from my childhood but now, it also happens with pictures from my teenage years :eek: .
Actually, I feel like I’m psychologically stuck in the past. In my mind, my dad’s in his 40s (he’s 71), my eldest daughter is firmly in primary school (she’s starting secondary school in 6 months) and my youngest daughter is finishing kindergarten (she’s in her third year of primary school).
As you get older, a year is a smaller % of your total lifetime. When you are ten, 1 year is 10% of your life. When you are 50, a year is 2% of your life.
As we get older everything becomes a rerun. You need emotional intensity and novelty to feel the sense of time slowing down. As you get older you live life on autopilot. Driving 5 miles on a comfortable road seems to occur far faster than driving 5 miles in a blizzard because the latter is full of novelty and emotions. Basically the older you get the more of your life is on autopilot, which means you barely pay attention. If someone close to you gets cancer, time will slow down again.
As I enter middle age, I find myself measuring time in fractions of a lifespan. If a lifetime is 80 years and something happened 16 years ago I’ll think ‘that was 1/5 of a lifespan ago’. I also find myself comparing how old I was when my dad was my age. Like when I was 36, I’d think about how when my dad was 36 and I was 9 years old. I remember being 9.
Oh yeah, I’m always flabbergasted at this. I remember my grandma telling me that the older you get the faster time goes. She was right. Just the other day I was watching a movie and wondered when it was made. I looked and saw the year 2000. I thought to myself, “oh, it’s not very old”. Then it hit me…2000, that’s almost 20 years ago!! Remember as a kid how long it took for your birthday to come around each year and for Christmas to come? Now it seems like I just take the tree down and it’s time to put it back up! I can’t believe March will already be over next week! It’s really kind of frightening.
