So, I suppose I’m thinking about this since I’m in graduate school, and working on papers so dull that time hasn’t seemed to drag this much since I was five. Why is it that as we age, time seems to go faster?
I’d say because we judge an arbitrary time’s length by our past life’s experience.
One hour is proportionally longer to a 5 year old than the same hour is to a 35 year old. Using a year is even more dramatic.
You make up for it when those exceedingly long days happen at work… beleive me, time will stretch out for you then!
I remember reading that a – totally legit – scientist was touting a theory that time is in fact speeding up. He/she got turned on to the concept based on the phenomenon you describe, namely that time seems to pass faster as we age.
A few days ago, I was thinking about this, too. My thoughts:
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Time will seem to go by faster as you age because chances are, you’ll be undertaking more things that suck up your time. When you’re a five-year old kid, all you have is school. When you’re ten, you have school and chores. When you’re fifteen, you have school, chores, friends, and maybe a job. When you’re twenty, you might have school, chores, errands, a job, bills, friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, kids, etc. You’ll have a lot more going on in your life at twenty than you did when you were five. (Or at least you darn well better.) The trade-off is you have less good, free time.
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I get that “time’s going by too quickly” feeling whenever I go through a long stretch where I’m not doing anything that’s my idea of a good time. Once I break the routine and go out and do something fun, that feeling goes away (albeit for only a little while).
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Time always drags when you’re doing something unfun like paper-writing. Spend a day doing something you like, and that day will feel like it went by in a heartbeat.
Now all you need to do is find a way to make paper-writing fun. 
I think people spend less and less time being self-aware as they get older - when you are young you are constantly learning stuff and re-appraising your place in your world, when you get older you do more and more stuff automatically and you don’t think about the time passing while you are doing that.
I would lean toward enlancooper’s explanation – that’s the one I’ve been using everytime somebody brings up this question. Although elements of the other responses comes into play. When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. High school is a life-time and a half away. When you’re 25, you’re much more used to time in general. A year doesn’t seem like such a long time anymore. I have a lot of free time. I work well less than half the days in the year, and time still seems to pass as quickly as when I was in university, balancing classes with an almost-full-time job.
To me it’s like taking a long drive somewhere I’ve never been before. The road there always seems much longer to me than the road back. It’s because everything is new, I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know exactly how long it’ll take, etc … When I drive back, hey, it passes because I know when to expect to be home. As I pass familiar landmarks, time ticks away in my head.
There’s also the Special Theory of Relativity, that states: “Time seems to go slower when you’re with your relatives.” :D:D:D
Yes, I have to agree with enolancooper and pulykamel on this one. I think the constantly changing perspective is what does it to you.
My answer would be attention span.
Lets say for example that when you are young the average time you spend paying attention to one thing is 5 minutes. If that is so then you have 12 “episodes” every hour. So for you time is passing at 12 attention episodes per hour.
As you get older into your teens lets say your attention span gets longer, lets say 20 minutes. Now you are experiensing life at 3 attention episodes per hour.
As an adult you may be down to being able to concentrate on one thing for two hours at a time, reading a good book for example. Now you are living at .5 attentions episodes per hour.
So you see time really is passing faster subjectively as you mature. Your mind breaks time up into these “attention episodes” and that is how you expeience time. Hours and minutes are a artificial constructs. So even though you and your 5 year old are passing through the same number of minutes he may have experienced many times more personal “moments” than you did.
Sound reasonable?
I agree with AudreyK. Life gets busier as you get older so the days fly by.
That, plus your memory is not what it used to be. Looking back, you remember less of the details so, in retrospect, the time seems to have gone by faster. But in fact, you perceived 1 day = 1 day (at that time) no matter what age.
Fair enough, Phobos, but for me life has gotten less busy the older I’ve gotten… at least since university ended, and time still seems to fly by faster and faster. I still think it’s a matter of perspective.
I also think it’s perspective. When I was 10, 8 years ago was when I was 2. That was 80% of my life ago. An eternity! Now,8 years ago was the end of my freshman year of high school. That’s not so long ago. I remember all of it very clearly. It was only 1/3 of my life ago, not 4/5. Therefore, those 8 years seem like less time. I don’t think individual days seem to go by any faster than they did 10 years ago, but months/years certainly do.
Jman
I’ve wondered about this phenomenon a lot as I’ve gotten older and I’ve developed a few theories.
I think an individuals perception of time is a function of how fast that person thinks.
I think as a person ages, he/she thinks slower due to,
[ul]a)loss of brain cells,
b)a larger portion of the brain is already occupied with accumulated memories and associations, the consequent cross-indexing to those memories required, and,
c)thoughts of Opal taking up cycle time. [/ul]
I also like you folks’ theories, especially Degrance’s.
Probably it’s a combination of the above.
This reminds me of a conversation my sister had with a lady in her eighties. My sister was complaining about how the days seemed to go faster the older she got. The octogenarian replied, “Honey, when you hit my age, it feels like you’re having breakfast every 15 minutes!”
Personally, I like to think the days don’t just seem to go by faster and faster - they really are going faster because we’re accelerating through time. (Look closely at some old folks, you might notice a very slight red shift around them.) The good news is, we can actually achieve light speed - the bad news is, we’re dead when we do it.
Read a great theory about this a year or so back. The key [was theorized to be] body temperature. They showed that your perception of time is directly related to your body temperature. I may have this completely reversed, but I believe the warmer you are, the slower time seems to go. As we age, our bodies temperatures slowly drops, a few degrees over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, the “older colder” aged would percieve time going slower.
As we launch more and more stuff into space, the earth loses mass. This causes the earth to spin faster.
The theory proposed by some people on this thread that time is actually speeding up as we age is intriguing, but it can’t be true because then a child and his grandfather wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation. If time were really perceived slower by the child, the grandfather’s speech would sound like a vinyl record album on the wrong speed.
On the other hand, maybe time is speeding up for everyone, both young and old, as the universe expands at an ever more rapid pace. But most likely, it’s that “percentage” theory which is correct.
Ha! As grampa accelerates, it becomes more and more work for him to open and close his mouth, so his speech slows down drastically. With longish pauses in between. To the kid, who likely isn’t really listening anyway, the speech sounds quite normal. Of course, it can be a little off-putting when grampa breaks Mach I.
Dave wrote:
“…but it can’t be true because then a child and his grandfather wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation.”
Not true at all.
Allow me use a simplistic speed analogy.
Grandpa is born in 1930 when time is traveling at, say, (again, forgive me) 10 MPH.
Grandkid is born. He has a chat with Grandpa today (2001) when time has speeded up to, say, 20 MPH. Thus we see that the kid and grandfather share the same 20 MPH time “world” in 2001.
When the kid is grown and has a chat with his grandkid in 2050 time will be at, say, 30 MPH.
Thus Grandpa will have lived through a time-speed increase (10 to 20 MPH) in his lifetime, and the kid will have too (20 to 30 MPH).
The idea behind the theory is not that our personal time is speeding up, but that universal time (notice I did not say “absolute time”) is speeding up.
But hey, it’s not my theory. I’m just saying that I’ve heard of it.