I’m 25. I just realized that I’ll be thirty in only five years, forty in only 15. It seems like my high school graduation was yesterday, but I just realized that was seven years ago. College flew by. I realized I’ve played guitar for twelve years. These realizations make me go :eek:
So, tell me, and be honest - is the rest of life going to completely zoom by like this? Is it all on fast-forward from here onward? Am I going to wake up tomorrow and realize I’m 50? I imagine that things like kids and etc. really accentuate this.
As we age, time goes by faster. It’s a matter of relativity. Example:
When you were eight, how long did a year seem? It was forever, right? That’s because at that time, a year was 12.5% of your entire life span up to that point.
Now that you’re 25, that same year is only 4% of your life span up to this point. It seems to go by much quicker.
Yes, it goes faster. Marriage, buying a house, having a kid, all just a blur. I have suddenly been at my job, the job where I was the youngest person working there when I was hired, for 15 years.
The thing that really got me was a few years ago when I was reminiscing about my first year at college (when I was 17) which seems quite recent to me, and I realized that I am more than twice as old as I was then. So that year is further away from me now than my birth had been that year! :eek:
I’m only 19 and days are beggining to feel like hours.
Here’s a rundown of my schedule through a few of my average days:
Wake up
Do homework
Go to school
Jog a mile
Do my excercise routine at home while watching a movie
Sleep
Wake up
Go to work
Arrive home
Excercise routine
Sleep
Wake up
Jog a mile
Work
Excercise routine while watching movie
Sleep
Wake up
Drive to friends house
Drive home
Sleep
All of this is pasted together by eating, spending time online, and running errands. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get anything done if time goes by too much faster. I’m having a hard time finishing books and assigments as is.
It really does speed up, at least in your perception.
On the downside: When I was an early adult, there were times when paying a utility bill required a gargantuan effort that offered huge relief when accomplished. Now it seems like I pay them continually and often. Some things seemed like such huge unknowns, I could barely think about them, and often enough didn’t until they became unignorable disasters. I sure don’t remember having to trim my fingernails so much, but now it seems like a nearly constant requirement.
On the upside: Paying utility (and other) bills seems like a constant requirement, but it’s become much easier to do. Some things remain huge unknowns, while other former huge unknowns have become more familiar - one way or another, by now I can see around them and have much more confidence that they will eventually pass by.
But, yeah, it accelerates. You enjoy it more though - at least, I do.
Sorry to revisit a thread I’ve already posted in so soon (boy, doesn’t time fly?).
I spent a good part of this last weekend with some rowdies I used to run with, but hadn’t seen any of in five years. I’m going to reinvigorate the relationships, but the thing most relevant to the OP is that we were able to pick up where we left off, as if that last joyous blast five years ago was just last week. Downsides (Whew! It does go fast!) and upsides (confidence and a more solid identity, I suppose).
Well, there are less of those important markers in your life. You’ve done many of your firsts so maybe things seem to blur together. When I took care of my grandmother I had nearly no markers in my life. I not only didn’t know what day it was but couldn’t tell you how long ago things happened. A few weeks, a few months or a few years, I just didn’t have anything to associate with in order to measure time.
Then when things changed and things started moving around in my life rapidly things just crept by. Every day was different and I could do some archaeological digs on my memory to set up when things occured because everything went in layers.
Now I’m back in a routine, this time with work paying bills from this month seems the same as paying bills for last month. Things seem to be flying by because looking back I have a hard time coming up with 3 months worth of stuff to fill the last three months with. In other words it’s perspective.
I think your experience of time is simply very dependent on what you do with it. If you look back 10 years and you’ve been doing the same job, day in day out, with little change in your life, it will feel like life has flown by, regardless how slow it felt while living it.
If, on the other hand, you’ve done tons of different things, experienced lots, and have grown as a person, then looking back, 10 years will seem ages ago. I’m 30 and to me it feels that way.
Arwin beat me to it…as a good example of how this mechanism works, do you recall how long a day is when you are on vacation, doing active stuff?
The way to make a day last as long as it did when you were eight, is to concentrate on new experiences. Find your way around a place you haven’t been before. Do stuff that’s new to you, but it has to be stuff that requires attention. Attention, IMHO, is crucial; the amount of attention you pay determines the mental time it will take up in your mind.
Reading, being driven around, lounging or chatting, the usual vacation passtimes, don’t require attention so much, so they don’t count. They are just things you do and see all the time, only in a different décor.
I also find that it helps to have scrapbooks. Besides pasting holidaypics in them, I paste mainly everyday-memories in them. Restaurantbills as reminders of happy conversations over nice food; Little dried flowers and descriptions from wonderful walks, pictures of favourite stores, or a pic of the supermarket I visit everyday; pictures of memorabilia, when the memorabilia themselves take up too much space to keep around.
If I ever wonder if I had any fun in the last 10 years, my scrapbooks will assure me that that was, indeed, the case. I call it “memory management” and I think it is a very important thing to do.
I hope you will forgive me for embarrassing you like this, but I have to say that I think you are just really a cool person. You seem like someone who is really together and who knows how to get the most out of life. I always look forward to reading what you have to say when I see that you’ve posted something.
Last day of school, my senior year in high school, one of my teachers played Pink Floyd’s “Time”. I don’t think I’m supposed to post lyrics here, so I won’t but it starts out “ticking away the moments that make up a dull day”…and proceeds to say things like “and then one day you find…ten years have got behind you” and “every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time”.
So the teacher explained how when you’re 10, a year is 10% of your life, but when you’re 30, it’s 3%…so in a relative sense, time seems to go faster. And he told us as we left high school, to keep this in mind, live every day to the fullest, etc…
Well, at the time, I was probably thinking, ‘yeah, yeah, when do we get out of here’, but now, every time I hear that song, I think of that day, and think “Sweet merciful crap! That was more than 10 years ago!”…then I realize that before I know it, I’ll be thinking “Sweet merciful crap, that was more than 20 years ago!”
But, there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well enjoy each day and make the most…ah, you know.
And how many 10 year periods have you experienced? My previous answer was a joke. Truth is that as I get older time goes by faster and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with what I’m doing. It just goes by faster, period! :smack:
You can always start a second childhood…
Other than that, welcome to the tip of the mid-life duldrums…
It does go fast. Each year zips by faster and faster. You gotta really do all you can to live life to the fullest and enjoy the good times. My friends and I were shocked by the reality that, when we were 18 years out of college, kids just starting college were JUST BORN when we were starting college!!!
It really sucks, but you can’t obsess about it. Make plans, set (realistic) goals, and keep striving towards them - no matter what. And if you faulter, just dust yourself off and try again…
Above all, remember this: Get out of the office as much as possible. No one ever looked back and said “Gee, I wish I would have spent more time at the office!” But seriously, I used to have a window seat at a boring job. I was amazed how quickly the seasons passed into years. But, you do get married, buy a house, have a kid, etc… so life has it’s happy milestones, too!
I agree that the key is to keep doing new things and having new experiences. Or look at it this way - do you think that for WWII veterans, the years between 1941 and 1945 occupy 1/20 of their memories of self? Probably not.
It’s exactly my stance on this issue. I don’t believe time passes faster and faster because a day/month/year is a smaller part of your whole life, but because you don’t experience as many new things.
For instance, if I spent a week working, and doing nothing noticeable and look back to this week, there are no markers, indeed…it just went away. Now, if I left for vacationning in an unknown place, met new people, tried things I never tried before and look back at this week it seems to me it lasted way way longer than a mere week. Just because there are so much things to remember.
