A year seems shorter the older you get... why?

Factual Questions
21

I think its just how busy you are. Wait until you don’t have any thing to do & see how slow time is.

22

I’m with Clairobscur, who brought up something I had noticed myself. When I go away for the weekend and have something new and interesting planned for every minute, it seems like a week. I’ve also noticed that trips out seem to take much longer than trips back.

But Hail Ants came up with an excellent point…the view of time as a Resource (never enough) vs. the view of time as a Restriction (WHEN will it EVER END?!?). This is especially true for me at work…surely I am not the only one who finds that the day flies by when it’s busy and I’m racing the clock to get things done, but time drags when I have nothing to do but wait until it’s quittin’ time.

Hail Hail Ants!

[sub]I’ve always wanted to say that![/sub]

23

I’m more persuaded now that time is marked proportionally. This would fit the observation that the time contraction affect is a function of age, and is cumulative.

I think there’s something to the measuring time by events, although I believe that our observations about the passage of time would be different if this were the primary mechanism. And the fact is that I remember being four years old for a very long time. But I remember very few experiences from being 4 years old.

Either way, though, it seems there’s got to be some mechanism for setting the “standard” length of an interval - an amount of time that is perceived, and expected to be, a year. This standard could be a fraction of a lifetime (what I’d go with), or a certain number of experiences.

And then somebody on a linked thread said something about drugs… that may tell us something about the way time perception works. My own experience with time-stretching drugs, from years and years ago:

  1. If I break up a minute into seconds, I do not find that the apparent lenth of a second is any different from usual. The second hand on the watch does not appear to be frozen, or slowed down at all. But it does seem like there are a lot more seconds in a minute.
  2. While I notice thoughts a lot more, and generally seem to have more experiences as time goes by, but I don’t remember all that much about it.
  3. Even if I remembered next to nothing about an experience the following day, there was at least one case where I felt like I’d had a three day weekend, even if it was only Saturday and Sunday.
24

In the last 10 years I’ve had a heart attack, gone to Spain, Italy, England, France to name a few. We are now adding onto our house. All these are new and novel things (well maybe not the heart attack, but it was memorable). So new and/or novel things do not seem to enter into it. The truth is 2b, IMHO.