Take your age and divide by 2. Think about your life until this age. For example, I’m 34 so I think about everything that happened in my life up until my 17th birthday. After doing this for a while, think about everything that’s happened since then. Doesn’t the perceived time span for the 1st half of your life seem a lot longer than the 2nd half? Basically, the 0 -17 portion seems like it lasted a lot longer than the 17 - 34 portion.
At first I thought that this was related to all of the new things that I was discovering in the 1st half of my life. So my brain is probably filled with more memories of these years. But then I try the same test with other things. For example, I’ve been working for my current company for 7 years. The first half of my time here seems much longer than the 2nd.
i’ve heard it explained as being part of your experiential frame of reference, as it were. when you’re 3 years old, a single year is 1/3 of your entire life. it therefore seems like a year is forever. but as you get older, it becomes a much smaller percentage of your total lifespan. when you’re 50, a single year is only, what, 20 percent of your total life? a month seems like a piffle, a day is gone in a blink. but to a child, whose total life experience can probably still be counted realistically by the number of days, that single 24-hour span is a very significant chunk of life experience.
I noticed this when I was about nine years old. I used to ride my bicycle from my house to my grandma’s house all the time (between four and five miles). It took forever to get to my grandma’s house but almost no time at all to get home again, which doesn’t make any sense at all because, if anything, I was riding slower on the way back.
On the other hand, your age thing doesn’t really apply to me. Eleven seems like a lifetime ago but if I think about the time between 0-11, it’s a blink. So many things have changed for me since then, and I’ve gone through so much, so maybe you have to be older for it to work? The “half age” would probably have to be sometime around the age of majority, and definitely after puberty. I’ll try again in 10 years.
It’s the opposite for me. I can barely recall my childhood, and most of my high school years gloss over. I’m 23 now, but the last three years of my life seem to take up more room than all the other ones put together. Maybe I just have a bad memory.
Kinda sucks thinking about the future then, huh. Pretty much we’re maintaining an increased speed towards our own perceived death… or would that be hind-sight related life?
Perhaps as if your life is like the beginning of one of those HUGE roller coasters, where the 1st half of your life is the slow, memorable, climb to the top, before you accelerate at an increasing speed towards your demise when it “bottoms out” (death)…
I think the age thing applies to me. I’m also 34 and it seems as though the first half of my life sped by. When I think of a year of gradeschool, it seemed to creep by. But now, from September to June goes by SO quickly. Every year is faster than the last.
This past weekend we were watching a Green Day thing on VH1 and I realized that Dookie came out in 1994…11 years ago. That blew my mind! I’m having a lot of these realizations lately and it’s depressing me. I’m 20 years older than my nephew that just turned 15. That sickens me. I still feel like I’m 15 sometimes.
So, as Mr. Nowhere above me described, we’re f**ked.
I totally agree with the premise in the OP. I think it is partly because there is more structure to the first 20 or so years (each grade or year in school, each birthday was a big deal, etc.). Now that life is more ongoing the years rush by. I can barely keep track of when things happened in the past few years.
FTR, my 20th high school reunion is this year. :eek:
I was born about 15 years after the end of WWII. Growing up, WWII seemed like a distant event, something that had happened a long time ago. Yet 15 years ago (from now), I had been out of high school for 10 years. 15 years * now* doesn’t seem all that long.
This works out to be something amazing for me, albeit on a small, very personal scale.
I’m 29, that divided by 2 is 14.5. Well, at 14 1/2, something traumatic and scarring did happen to me, which very neatly bisected the first half of my life from the second half of my life. I led a completely different life up until 14 1/2, and everything that happened since then can be traced, even in just a small way, back to this event.
So, I figure, I’m at the age where I can finally put it behind me and start the next 14 years of my life over.
I like the lachesis’s explanation. It just doesn’t work for my example of the 7 years that I’ve spent with my company. And based on the responses so far, it seems that the phenomenon doesn’t quite kick in until you’re into your late 20’s.
Hm. Doesn’t quite seem to work with me. Could be that the halfway mark is 9 years old for me. And I’m far to practiced at going back and reliving every agonizing day of middle school and high school.
I’m 38 and it works for me. The first 19 years of my life seemed to go by much slower than the last 19 years. Of course, those first 19 years were when summer vacations seemed to last forever and each school year was a distinct time. Not like now when the years seem to all blend into each other.
I think it’s pretty common. We struggle in our market research with something the researchers call “telescoping.” If you ask someone if they did something in the past 6 months, they frequently will say yes even if it was really a year ago (sometimes longer).
Nitpick:
20 percent of a 50 year old’s life would be 10 years. A single year would only be 2 percent.
It falls true for me as well that the older I get the faster life seems to go by. The time since I graduated high school in 2003 seems so far away and it seems like time since then has sped up. Part of this disparity is probably the way my lifestyle has drastically changed since that time. But I think the single year being a piece of a much bigger pie the older you get analogy makes sense.
First 17 years of my life, I lived in the same house, had the same friends and went to the same school.
The last 16 years, I’ve gone to college, 2 grad schools, lived in 4 different states, got married, been to Europe, driven X country twice. Moved about 10 times, had multiple girlfriends, and friends.
My perception of the amount of time each took is correlated to the amount of activity in each half.
Of course it does. Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re going to live to be 100. Each of your last years is a mere 1% of a lifetime to you, and feels like it (unless you’re strapped to a bed and subjected to endless repeats of Celine Dion’s Greatest Hits or something).
When you were ten, your most recent year constituted a full 10% of a lifetime, though, and so of course it seemed much longer.
Remember when you were four, and a year meant a full quarter of a lifetime? Damn, years were akin to eternity.
You probably do not remember a time when you were conscious of being one year old, nor of having, at that age, an opinion or attitude about how long a year is. Or how long six months are. And you probably cannot recall lying around at the age of 3 months and contemplating the fact that a week is a twelfth of a lifetime. But does it seem to you as if you’ve been here forever? As if your own personal history stretches back, dimly lit but eternal, back to before you were a verbal person, long long eons of sensory-memories and awkwardly formulated & variably successful attempts to communicate, reaching for dust motes in sunbeams and laying on blankets and whatnot?
Something similar struck me in 1987 - the 20 year anniversary of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Ban. “It was 20 years ago today …” In 1967, when those words were first sung, 20 years before had been 1947, a much longer twenty year period, in my view.
It’s the opposite for me. The first half (9 1/2 years) of my life seems a lot shorter than the second half. I’m guessing that’s because it was longer ago and also because I didn’t have much of a memory during my first few years. From when I was born to when I was 9 1/2, I sat around at home and ran around at elementary school. Between then and now, I finished elementary school, middle school, high school, and (in a month) my freshman year of college.
I guess it’ll be different when I’m older and the rest of my school years are in the first half of my life instead of the second.
Well, real or not, there’s no doubt that at least subjectively time passes quicker as you age. It becomes much more apparent when you get into your forties. For one thing, as you get older, each year of life is a larger percentage of your remaining life, and that makes the years seem shorter (since no one is anxious to reach the end!). Secondly, as you age, you tend to settle into a routine so the days don’t have as much differentiation as the year passes. One day is similar to the last, a week similar to the last, etc. and before you know it, another year has passed. And one last thing. When you get older, you tend to be more forward looking, and less focused on the immediate past or today. I think this longer-term look helps to speed up time since your remaining time is shrinking.
