For some random reason the topic of Captain Kangaroo came up tonight. I used to watch it as a kid. I was thinking about Mr. Greenjeans, you know that really old sidekick of his.
Well, I just did the math… I’m 25 years older (now) than he was when he played that character! Da-yum, how did that happen?
I guess when you are young, everyone looks old. It’s just hard to believe I’m way older than Mr. Greenjeans.
I do this when I watch old shows. The elders often look way older than they actually are.
I thought Miss.Jane Hathaway on Beverly Hillbillies was ancient, when I was a kid.
She was in her 30s during the show.
Died at age 69.
God, I gotta look up Granny.
I thought this thread was gonna be about the perception of time as one gets older, as in the passing of the seasons. Because that’s definitely a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It seems like it was just yesterday that I saw a forecast for the first winter snow of the season and called Snowplow Guy and said, OK, you’re on again for another contract for the season. And now it’s spring with bright sunshine and shrieking birds. What the hell happened? Did the earth suddenly speed up its orbit by a factor of 10?
OTOH, summer – which is hot and filled with shrieking children and exploding fireworks – seems to last forever. I would dearly love to escape to the far Arctic, or, better still, to the peaceful darkness of winter in the Antarctic, until late autumn.
I get that feeling a lot when remembering my parents. As a kid, they seemed ancient—now I realize they were barely half my age when the memories took place. Funny how memory warps time, making the past feel both distant and close.
What bothers me now is the acceleration of time perception as we age. A year once felt endless; now, months disappear in a blink. At his rate, I’ll be dead before the decade’s over.
Each year shrinks in proportion to our life (e.g. when you’re 2, a year is half your life; at 60, it’s 1/60th of your life), and our brains, wired for novelty, start glossing over routine days.
Yup. And now I’m in my 40s, university students look like kids. I expect this will get worse as I continue to age.
I still feel like I’m 25 most of the time, though, and forget that I need to be careful not to injure myself. Does that ever change?
Me too. It’s funny, because winter seemed endless, but also gone in no time. Unlike you, I prefer summer since it doesn’t get particularly hot in England. It’s nice being able to go outside without bothering with coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and you can do more outdoor activities.
It’s a conspiracy. All the arguing and conflict over global warming is just a planned distraction to keep us from wondering why time is speeding up.
My father died last October. If I die at the same age, that’ll be in 27 years. Still plenty of time, right? Well, 27 years ago was 1998. I was already an adult with a career then, and I remember those days very well.
I made a photo album for my 50th birthday. Out of the 130+ pictures I selected, only 2 have my dad at an older age than I am now. Granted, he’s not in all of them, far from it, but it’s still weird.
me, too - I distinctly recall that the 2 months summer holidays at school were eeeeeeternal!
… and most of the time I was bored as heck - living on the countryside in the 1970ies would do that!
It really seems that time perception does change as one ages - I suppose it has to do with brain-maturity (novelty vs. routine) or so???
the other day I recalled the Y2K thingy that was popular in consulting in the late 1990ies - a quarter of a century / 30 years has passed since I worked on those projects!
Also what really gets me are those relative time-interval things …
Songs like Elton Johns Rocketman (early 70ies I think) are now similarly far away from today (55ish years) than the end of WW1 from my birthyear (1969) … well, give or take a few years, THAT is crazy to me - and I am sure a lot of you can relate to that!
I loved watching The Golden Girls. And the humor has held up really well (if not the fashions… 
). The characters’ ages: Dorothy and Rose were both 55, Blanche was in her early 50s, and Sophia (Dorothy’s mom) was 80. Imagine! Women that old having fun, traveling, and even having sex!
Estelle Getty, who played Sophia (“Picture it-- Sicily, 1922…”) was age 62 in 1985 when she played an 80-year old and was the youngest of the four actresses.
I’m 76 now-- 20 FUCKING YEARS older than the characters! I was 20 years younger than the Girls when I watched it as a new show. And the jokes about Dorothy putting Sophia in The Home (“Shady Pines”)-- I’m IN The Home now. 
And speaking of 20 years, I’m 24 years away from age 100. WTF?!? Hell, the jeans I’m wearing are 24 years old! Twenty years is nothing. Not much time ahead, my friends. There used to be so much-- a lifetime, in fact. Cannot wrap my brain around these things.
I’ve gone back to singing in the community college choir, which I first joined in 2001, the year after my husband died. The freshman and sophomores in that class (if they are the appropriate age- there are some older students, though none as old as I am. I’m 10 years older than the teacher!) were born several years after 9/11. The Twin Towers in their personal historical time line is like Hiroshima or Pearl Harbor to us Baby Boomers-- pre-history, “before we were born.” <head explodes>
Must go lie down.
Didn’t realize we had so much in common; I’m also a 40-something Brit.
My body is trying to tell me I am getting older, but I’m not listening and basically still doing the same active stuff as I ever did.
I am noticing the recovery can be slower. I have a dry throat as a lingering symptom of a cold I had about a month ago, and my left arm has been too painful to do resistance training for at least a couple weeks, and I don’t even know how/when it might have got hurt.
And FYI I agree with you about summer. It’s rarely too hot in the UK, and as out weather is humid/rainy, it’s only really the summer months where you can sit on grass. Plus the short days in winter are awful.
I always believed time acceleration with age was simply due to a given time period (e.g. 1 year) in proportion to your total life lived (proportional theory), plus life becoming more boring as we age (routine vs. novelty). But, searching a few peer-reviewed papers on the subject reveals a broader answer:
Proportional Theory: The “Wait, Wasn’t It Just January?” Effect
Summer breaks as a kid felt like an eternity. That’s because, at 10 years old, a year is a massive 10% of your life. Fast-forward to age 60, and a year shrinks to less than 2% of your entire existence. Basically, the older you get, the more life feels like someone keeps hitting the fast-forward button.
Routine vs. Novelty: The Groundhog Day Phenomenon
As kids, life is packed with novel firsts—first bike ride, first day of school, first sexual encounter, first sexual embarrassment, etc… As adults, we fall into routines: wake up, work, eat, mate, repeat. When every day starts feeling like a rerun, our brains stop marking time as distinctly, making the weeks, months, and years blend together like one big boring TV series (such as some ultra-serious British costume drama, like Downton Abbey[*]). Novelty stimulates your memory encoding process, anchoring events more distinctly in your mind.
Cognitive Speed & Attention: The “Did I Just Blink and Lose a Decade?” Theory
Some researchers believe our brains slow down how they process time as we age. Meaning we don’t pick up on all the small details of passing moments like we used to. So while a kid can stretch out a car ride by asking “Are we there yet?” every 30 seconds, adults look up from their cellphone and realize an entire week has disappeared.
Memory Encoding & Compression: The Mental Junk Drawer theory
Our brains store memories like a cluttered closet—early ones get neatly folded and tucked away, but over time, everything just gets stuffed in wherever it fits. The more experiences we accumulate, the more our memory compresses things, making childhood seem far away and your last birthday feel like yesterday. Our brains are bad at organizing, and time feels like it’s vanishing as a result. Neural efficiency often means older memories get “compressed.”
Most researchers agree it’s a combination of these factors, along with individual differences in lifestyle, health, and personality.
So, want time to slow down? Variety is the spice of subjective time. Try new things and break routines. Find a hooker new hobby. This can help “expand” your perception of time. Or, just get in your time machine and go back a few decades.
[*] (just kidding; I like Downton Abbey)
I’m 16 years older than Wilford Brimley was when he played the grandfather in Cocoon. Sheesh.
I hear you. My dad, 22-23 years older than me, died a year and a half ago, right before his 82nd birthday. He kept every letter and holiday card that was ever sent to him. When my sisters and I were going through his stuff, there were cards my wife and I had sent him 20+ years ago with pictures of his grandkids as babies. I remember those times clear as if it happened last year- taking the pics, choosing which pic to send him. And I thought, he was about the same age then as I am now. The next 20+ odd years (if I even get that many) are going to speed by for me like nothing.
Is it morbid to watch old movies and TV reruns and think, all of those people are dead now?
There’s a meme about how it’s weird to be the same age as old people. Even weirder is watching a white-haired Angus Young of AC/DC performing on stage at nearly 70 years old, cavorting around like a deranged cave hermit. Still has plenty of energy.
Morbid? Hell, it’s reality.
Some of those old farts really should hang it up. I’m lookin’ at you, Mick Jagger.
For some reason, Willie Nelson seems to be able to carry it off. Maybe because he’s not pretending to be young.
I’m 66. Not yet. Reality intrudes when I overextend my current older self, but that’s not too often.
The shame is how much the other 25yos don’t recognize that I’m still them. 
As I often say: “I’m actually only 30 years old; just very high mileage!”
do they count as separate “firsts”, if they happened on the same day?
… asking for a friend
Yes on the first one. As for the second? No clue—no siree, not a single idea whatsoever.
… but, if your [cough] “friend” needs a little help, there are medical, mechanical, and inflatable solutions.
I’m 70 this month - the answer is NO. I’m more unsteady, my hair is thinning and I can’t see as well as I used to. But I still feel I’m young in my mind. And, on the other hand, I recently re-roofed my garage. I tore off 3 layers of old shingles, carried up and installed new ones. I was careful and it took a bit to recover but I did save about $2000.
There’s a writing prompt if I ever saw one.
So I did some calculations on the songs we play for my daughters.
I play an old BBC recording of Teddy Bear’s Picnic that my parents played for me from 1932.
I also play Laughing Gnome by David Bowie (or used to, I play it less now they are old enough to understand stuff more, as it clearly says “fag”, as in cigarette 
), from his early folky period.
I realize when my parents played me Teddy bear’s picnic in 1984 its recording was as distant in the past, as David Bowie recording Laughing Gnome in 1973 is now.