I’ve worried about this a lot in the last few years. My 20s are flying by at an obscene rate. I’ll be 27 soon and I feel like I should still be a teenager living with my parents, going to school, and working a part time job. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago, was it?! A decade . . .
So last fall I was visiting my great-aunt, who is 82, and I sheepishly asked her if 60 felt like a long time ago. “Nope, it doesn’t seem long ago at all. Feels like just yesterday.” :eek: My heart sped up and visions of waking up tomorrow with wrinkles, gray hair, and a bad back flooded my mind. Does 40 feel like a long time ago? She took a moment to reflect, I held my breath. “Yeah, I guess it does.” I felt much better.
I think it also is a matter of repetition. When you’re younger, you do many things for the first time or even the first few hundred times so you’re still paying a lot of attention to them. As you get older, you wind up doing a lot of things thousands of times and I think your mind just kinda goes on autopilot which makes the days seem faster as there isn’t as much to distinguish them.
I bet if you were in a new situation (foreign country maybe) where you had to work hard at new things all the time, the days would seem much slower.
I’m 62 (Didn’t I just turn 50?), and this is pretty much the way I see it. We tend to perceive time as a percentage of our lifetime. I remember talking about this with my mother, who was about 90 at the time. She mentioned that for her, summer seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye, but when she was a child it was practically endless. Sure, for her a 3-month summer was about .28% of her lifetime. Even at my age, I sometimes have to look outside to remember what season it is. And since I work at home, alone, I ***never ***know what day of the week it is (Tivo has to take part of the blame for this).
I agree with Polerius as well. I have encountered this theory before, but it really occurred to me a few weeks ago (or was it months?) that our perception of time is based on how long our life has been so far.
Even a 5-year-old perceives the last five years as “forever.” And I still tend to think of events before my birth as “forever ago.” I recently realized that, while I had long known the date of Kennedy’s assassination, it was only a mere 11 years before I was born. To 10-year-old, or even 20-year-old me, that was waaaaaay before the beginning of existence. Now I realize that my-life-so-far has taken up a large percentage of the 20th century.
I believe that time perception can be altered if you can teach yourself to focus on new events as a percentage of an era. I may be 33 today, but the last three years have been 100% of my 30’s era. That, combined with taking the time to soak in the daily experiences as I did as an inexperienced youngster, has given me the occasional sense that a day is passing by slowly. I’m trying to use this technique on weekends.
I also believe that increased responsibilities make it seem like there aren’t enough hours in a day. I often find myself wishing for the long days that I had when I was in college, because I could accomplish so much with that abundance of time. Really, I didn’t have that much free time, it’s just that the days seemed to pass slower. However, a lot of things were done for me. I had a meal plan, so I went to the cafeteria when I needed food. I didn’t have many responsibilities beyond walking to class and sitting there, and being sure to study and do homework.
Nixon has never been anything but a historical figure to me, but this made me realize that Clinton has now been out of office longer than Nixon had been when I was born, and it doesn’t seem like Clinton has been gone very long. To a kid born today, 9/11 will never be anything more than a lesson in history class.
When I was finishing 3rd grade, the beginning of 4th grade at the far end of the summer was so far away I couldn’t really picture it.
Now that I’m 50, I catch myself picturing the end of life frequently - not so much with alarm as for practical purposes - as in, why did I start this stupid project? I’m not going to get around to finishing all these things before I die. I wonder, if I get the roof redone, should I try to aim for redoing it again? or should I pay extra for a roof that will outlive me so I don’t have to hassle with it again?
>My heart sped up and visions of waking up tomorrow with wrinkles, gray hair, and a bad back flooded my mind. Does 40 feel like a long time ago? She took a moment to reflect, I held my breath. “Yeah, I guess it does.” I felt much better.
There, now, see? At the age of 82, she can still read you well enough to figure out that you need to be lied to. Genetics is smiling on you.
I endorse Polerius’s first theory, as well. And also to add some to the “Things that happened before my birth are unreachable historical events” theme, there is an oldies radio station in my hometown. When we go up to visit my mother, I listen to it in the car. They’ve started playing 80s music!! I think I startled supervenusfreak when I began ranting about how 80s music is NOT oldies, dammit!
And then I realized that the music of the 80s is at least as long ago from now as the music of the 50s was when I was a child. God, I feel old…
I just realized that the moon landing was ten years before I was born. (Almost exactly, oddly enough.) Hey, dude, the moon landing was ancient history.
To me it’s strange. In some ways, (let’s pick a year) 1999 seems like a whole other life. And in some ways it seems like yesterday. I can’t really explain it…
There’s a literary phrase, though I’m not sure where it’s from exactly: “The past is another country.” Seems true to me…when I look at my life in childhood in the 70s, and contrast it to life in general today…wow! It’s like day and night.
I always like to relate to things in periods of 4 years (IOW, the amount of time one usually spends in high school or college).
The 4 years of high school and the next 4 of college seemed like a very long time. In contrast, I can’t believe I was almost at my last job for 4 years. A big part of that is probably do the the fact that a lot of changes happen over those 4 years. Compare the difference between a 14 year old, an 18 year old and a 22 year old.
Also, you have that school / winter break / school / summer break cycle that really breaks up those 4 years into 16 discrete segments, each with different activities and a different tempo - school was very busy and intense, breaks tended to be more laid back almost to the point of monotony. I think that contributed to the sensation of a lot more happening over those 4 years.
What I’ve found is that once I graduated college, life takes on an endless cycle of work. There’s no more summer breaks. Basically, other than holidays and the passing of the seasons, there’s nothing to indicate the passage of time. So when I look back at events that signify major structural changes - ie moving or changing jobs, it becomes a bit shocking to realize that several years had actually passed.
…that you experienced as a kid. I do it all the time. have you noticed how time slows down when you are waiting at the dentist’s office? Or in an airport lounge? It is because your sensory input has slowed dramtically.
That’s why i look for boring places to go (for vacation)-a week in kansas can stretch into infinity!
To revisit this…I started thinking about music. When I was growing up (born in the late 70s, child of the 80s), my parents listened to their high school music: stuff from the 60s. I remember thinking how different it sounded and how long ago (20 whole years!) that music was made. I was amazed my parents could remember what season of what year a certain song came out. Now, the mid 80s (when I first really started remembering specific songs and albums coming out) are over 20 years away, and my high school days, in the early 90s are coming up on 20 years, and it seems so vivid and clear, and so recent, even given the huge amount of experiences I’ve had already.
Exactly. When you’re a kid, you think of a year ago and see different classes, different teachers, different classmates. You see clothes you don’t fit into anymore, you see lessons that seem so simple now.
Now I look back a year and I’m sitting at the same desk I’m sitting at now doing more or less the same thing wearing the same clothes and working with the same people. Nothing’s changing. Eventually the days turn to weeks turn to months and so on.
I have a consipracy theory about this. Pardon me while I put on my tinfoil hat so the guys in the black helicopters can’t mess with my mind as I post this.
My theory is that the earth is actually spinning faster and faster all the time. When we’re first born, of course, we don’t realize this because we have nothing to compare it with. We only notice it as we get older and time becomes more important, then more precous to us. In trying to hide what’s happening, the government tampers with the “official” clocks (this is determined by a combine of the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati and the One World Government in Brussels) to make it look like time is constant. Meanwhile, the scientists have conspired to try to tell us that the earth’s rotation is actually slowing down, and the flat-earthers, biblical literalists and intelligent design folks are all really just agents for the One World Government trying (successfully, it appears) to confuse the issues so nobody gets wise.
Why do they do this? To make us think that, as we get older, our lives get away from us. If we knew the earth’s rotation was actually speeding up, we’d account for it, plan better, and be able to conduct our lives with more personal and individual control. Instead, as we get older we come to believe that life is getting more chaotic, and we’re more susceptible to suggestions that maybe someone else should take care of us; so, we agree to be put in assisted living, retirement communities and nursing homes, thus feeding huge profits into the military industrial complex – money we actually should be spending on enjoying our lives.
This is the same cabal that selectively emits radioactive waves into our telephones and TV sets to make us feel ill, so they can reap huge profits from selling us drugs.
Copy and paste this text into an e-mail and send it to everyone you know, and urge them to do the same. We must pull back the blanket of secrecy over the great time conspiracy! Do it today!
The passage of time is really starting to freak me out. I’m not doing much these days, so there’s nothing significant to set one day apart from the next. My boss often gives me weekends off; I think she’s doing it to be nice, but weekends have no meaning for me. That’s actually part of what got me wanting to go back to school–the need for significant structure in my life, for the time of day it is, or day of the week, or month, to actually mean something. Although I suppose I’ll have to deal with indistinguishable days when I get a real job anyway. Oh, well. I guess I can always go into teaching ;).