Each memory is a bigger fraction of your life when you’re younger. As you get older, any time frame becomes smaller, relative to your experience, than it was before. Memory actually works on a logarithmic model, as do a surprising number of ways in which we count and measure.
Time is no longer set on a schedule for you and you take on more responsibilities. If you don’t fill up your time with tasks that mean anything to you, days start to run together, even though we’re “busy” or not. As an adult, we have fewer important timestamps to look forward to like first days in school, graduations, first dates, first jobs, driver’s license, voting, drinking, marriages, babies, etc. All these points are front-loaded in life.
It’s impossible to have scientific evidence for the fraction of experience hypothesis because it’s correlated with time in exactly the same way as perceiving time going faster: both are equal products of age and time’s passage. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. They could be entirely independent byproducts of aging. Moreover, experiencing more new things than other people does not make time go more slowly. Nor do slower perceptions of time—such as induced by drugs—make a person report more novel experiences.
I personally think adults perceive time as passing more quickly because they’re simply more aware. It’s mature to recognize death is at your doorstep too soon, and also that not everything is about “today, now”.
YRA, there are better ways to handle this situation. Some people blow out other people’s candles to make their own shine brighter. Time to show a little class and remember there is never a wrong time to say the right thing and and never a right time to to say the wrong thing. You are better than that.
Because when you’re a kid or even a teenager. You are constantly learning and experiencing new things. But once you’re an adult. You enter a monotonous routine. Every day you do the same thing over and over and thus time seems to go faster.
My personal theory is that your thinking is overtaken by work concerns, this means your free thinking time is halved. Which means your recollection is impaired.
Mostly it’s the fraction of your life thing that others have mentioned, but so far I haven’t seen anyone mention the auto pilot aspect of it.
Our brains are lazy. They automate as many things as possible because our brains doing work uses up a lot of energy. Things you do frequently, like driving, brushing your teeth, they become routine and your brain doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Like how sometimes you can zone out while driving and not remember anything from the journey. As we get older, we tend to fall into more and more routines, so we’re not forming any memories of those times, and when you try to remember, you find that you’ve gone years with only a handful of real, memorable experiences.
The trick is to avoid routine like the plague. Keeping things new keeps your brain in the moment. The more novelty you experience, the slower time seems to pass in retrospect.
My favourite idea on this and I’m sure others have said. Is that as you grow older, every single event is smaller in comparison to your overall life experience.
When your 10, life is super stuffed. When your 40 you have 40 years of reference and our internal clock seems to say the same.
The answer seems to be that time is relative. We are in it but our personal take on time is super personal. We all might exist in our own relative existence.
The way I had explained it to me is that there is more time for your brain to process, so it’s not that time moves faster, it’s that you have lived more time. At 5 years old, 1 year is 1/5th of your entire life. At 30, it’s only 1/30th. Which sum is bigger (for those bad at math, 1/5th is bigger than 1/30th. No judgements). So it feels like that year moved faster when in fact you just perceived it differently because it’s not as big of a chunk of your existence as it was when you were 5.
When u r one years old , a year is100 percent of your life, when u r 100 , a year is just 1 percent , so a year as a fraction of total life lived becomes seemingly smaller…
When you’re young, life changes more frequently, you discover new stuff..
When you’re older, got a routine job, a routine life there are less and less memorable moments in daily life and hence you feel it passes faster.
Wait until you have a major disruption, like becoming a parent, then life will be slow again. For some time.. until you’re caught up in routines again.
When you’re a child you lack certain privileges given to adults in society like being able to legally drive, not have a curfew, being forced to attend school, etc. Once you gain these privileges time flies.
You’re not doing enough new things the older you get.
When you’re young you’re learning and doing new stuff nearly every day but the older you get the less new things you do and the less the days get interesting.
i think about this so often because it is so crazy. to me, time is relative, so if i’ve only been alive for 5 years, 1 day is 0.05% of my lifetime, but if i’ve been alive for 21 years, 1 day is 0.01% of my lifetime. the only comparison we have for a time span is the time we’ve experienced. i also think that’s why it’s so hard to fathom long periods of time like 1000’s or millions of years.
also. ‘time’ is a thing that we kinda just made up. imagine if we had never put a concept to that. mind fuck :0
Think about it this way, when you’re younger you’re literally experiencing things for the first time, so the brain remembers the details more. When you repeat things, the brain will begin to ignore the event, as it’s already experienced this before and resources could better be spent elsewhere, such as puberty.
But when you’re growing up, the monotony of the daily job and lifestyle are more or less “ignored”, as nothing happens worth remembering. Next thing you know, it’s 3 years since you’ve last done your favorite hobby, even though to your conscious mind it only feels like a few months at most.
It’s why people recommend trying to branch out and explore different hobbies, slowing down to smell the roses and appreciate the finer things in life, as monotony only grows with time. That’s all easier said than done though lol
As you get older, experiences stop feeling novel, and more of it starts to get filled under the “unimportant, forget” section of your brain.
You lose time because your brain doesn’t record boring stuff. This is exactly what happened during COVID, and it’s why so many people feel like they lost 5 years in the blink of an eye. When you’re young, everything’s new. When you’re on your 7th year of accounting, you barely remember anything other than your first 6 weeks and now
There are also studies that show this type of experience is lessened in people who travel and gather new experiences routinely. It’s not inevitable; only common because of how society is structured.
Recently had this exact conversation with my therapist. She explained that when you’re young your brain is constantly processing new experiences making time feel slower. As an adult I’m basically running on autopilot most days.
Remember how an hour of math class felt like an eternity? These days I start making dinner get lost scrolling through recipes and suddenly three hours have vanished.
Comments
Less stuff we encounter is significant or important. You start to encounter and experience the same stuff over and over.
Each memory is a bigger fraction of your life when you’re younger. As you get older, any time frame becomes smaller, relative to your experience, than it was before. Memory actually works on a logarithmic model, as do a surprising number of ways in which we count and measure.
Time is no longer set on a schedule for you and you take on more responsibilities. If you don’t fill up your time with tasks that mean anything to you, days start to run together, even though we’re “busy” or not. As an adult, we have fewer important timestamps to look forward to like first days in school, graduations, first dates, first jobs, driver’s license, voting, drinking, marriages, babies, etc. All these points are front-loaded in life.
It’s impossible to have scientific evidence for the fraction of experience hypothesis because it’s correlated with time in exactly the same way as perceiving time going faster: both are equal products of age and time’s passage. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. They could be entirely independent byproducts of aging. Moreover, experiencing more new things than other people does not make time go more slowly. Nor do slower perceptions of time—such as induced by drugs—make a person report more novel experiences.
I personally think adults perceive time as passing more quickly because they’re simply more aware. It’s mature to recognize death is at your doorstep too soon, and also that not everything is about “today, now”.
YRA, there are better ways to handle this situation. Some people blow out other people’s candles to make their own shine brighter. Time to show a little class and remember there is never a wrong time to say the right thing and and never a right time to to say the wrong thing. You are better than that.
At 10 years old, the next year is 10% of your life.
At 50 years old, the next year is 2% of your life.
Because when you’re a kid or even a teenager. You are constantly learning and experiencing new things. But once you’re an adult. You enter a monotonous routine. Every day you do the same thing over and over and thus time seems to go faster.
My personal theory is that your thinking is overtaken by work concerns, this means your free thinking time is halved. Which means your recollection is impaired.
When you’re 10, each year is a tenth of your life. When you are 70, each year is 1/70th. So the years feel shorter.
Every year is a smaller percentage of our lives. What can be done is to fill your days with interests and to not just slide through life.
Mostly it’s the fraction of your life thing that others have mentioned, but so far I haven’t seen anyone mention the auto pilot aspect of it.
Our brains are lazy. They automate as many things as possible because our brains doing work uses up a lot of energy. Things you do frequently, like driving, brushing your teeth, they become routine and your brain doesn’t have to think about it anymore. Like how sometimes you can zone out while driving and not remember anything from the journey. As we get older, we tend to fall into more and more routines, so we’re not forming any memories of those times, and when you try to remember, you find that you’ve gone years with only a handful of real, memorable experiences.
The trick is to avoid routine like the plague. Keeping things new keeps your brain in the moment. The more novelty you experience, the slower time seems to pass in retrospect.
My favourite idea on this and I’m sure others have said. Is that as you grow older, every single event is smaller in comparison to your overall life experience.
When your 10, life is super stuffed. When your 40 you have 40 years of reference and our internal clock seems to say the same.
The answer seems to be that time is relative. We are in it but our personal take on time is super personal. We all might exist in our own relative existence.
The way I had explained it to me is that there is more time for your brain to process, so it’s not that time moves faster, it’s that you have lived more time. At 5 years old, 1 year is 1/5th of your entire life. At 30, it’s only 1/30th. Which sum is bigger (for those bad at math, 1/5th is bigger than 1/30th. No judgements). So it feels like that year moved faster when in fact you just perceived it differently because it’s not as big of a chunk of your existence as it was when you were 5.
When u r one years old , a year is100 percent of your life, when u r 100 , a year is just 1 percent , so a year as a fraction of total life lived becomes seemingly smaller…
When you’re young, you have a to look forward to, which makes the passage of time feel slow.
Once you get older and you’ve established a proper routine, you have nothing major to look forward to, other than continuing the routine
I reckon it mostly to routine lifestyles.
When you’re young, life changes more frequently, you discover new stuff..
When you’re older, got a routine job, a routine life there are less and less memorable moments in daily life and hence you feel it passes faster.
Wait until you have a major disruption, like becoming a parent, then life will be slow again. For some time.. until you’re caught up in routines again.
When you’re a child you lack certain privileges given to adults in society like being able to legally drive, not have a curfew, being forced to attend school, etc. Once you gain these privileges time flies.
Vsauce has a great video that talks about this. https://youtu.be/zHL9GP_B30E?si=EBXHDL8bdxL2owsB
When you’re 10 a year is 10% of your life. When you’re 40, it’s 2.5%
It’s a fairly straightforward mathematical calculation.
When you’re 10 years old, one year is 10% of your life. When you’re 40 it’s 2.5%.
Quite literally every year that passes is a shorter percentage of your life.
You’re not doing enough new things the older you get.
When you’re young you’re learning and doing new stuff nearly every day but the older you get the less new things you do and the less the days get interesting.
i think about this so often because it is so crazy. to me, time is relative, so if i’ve only been alive for 5 years, 1 day is 0.05% of my lifetime, but if i’ve been alive for 21 years, 1 day is 0.01% of my lifetime. the only comparison we have for a time span is the time we’ve experienced. i also think that’s why it’s so hard to fathom long periods of time like 1000’s or millions of years.
also. ‘time’ is a thing that we kinda just made up. imagine if we had never put a concept to that. mind fuck :0
Think about it this way, when you’re younger you’re literally experiencing things for the first time, so the brain remembers the details more. When you repeat things, the brain will begin to ignore the event, as it’s already experienced this before and resources could better be spent elsewhere, such as puberty.
But when you’re growing up, the monotony of the daily job and lifestyle are more or less “ignored”, as nothing happens worth remembering. Next thing you know, it’s 3 years since you’ve last done your favorite hobby, even though to your conscious mind it only feels like a few months at most.
It’s why people recommend trying to branch out and explore different hobbies, slowing down to smell the roses and appreciate the finer things in life, as monotony only grows with time. That’s all easier said than done though lol
Idk about you, but time goes incredibly slow for me?
I think dying might have that effect on you?
Ever since then? Time goes painfully slow.
Plus being an active dreamer, it’s like I live one continuous day.
My perception of time at 33 is selective. The good times happen in the blink of an eye, the shitty days with anxiety and depression last an eternity.
Piggyback on to this with a question. Is there a way to slow down our perception of time?
As you get older, experiences stop feeling novel, and more of it starts to get filled under the “unimportant, forget” section of your brain.
You lose time because your brain doesn’t record boring stuff. This is exactly what happened during COVID, and it’s why so many people feel like they lost 5 years in the blink of an eye. When you’re young, everything’s new. When you’re on your 7th year of accounting, you barely remember anything other than your first 6 weeks and now
There are also studies that show this type of experience is lessened in people who travel and gather new experiences routinely. It’s not inevitable; only common because of how society is structured.
Recently had this exact conversation with my therapist. She explained that when you’re young your brain is constantly processing new experiences making time feel slower. As an adult I’m basically running on autopilot most days.
It’s relative to the time you can compare it to. For example.
When you are 1, 1 year is 100% of your life
When you are 10, 1 year is 10% of your life
In comparison when you’re 50, 1 year is 2% of your life.
I hope that makes sense.
When you’re 10, a year is 10% of your life. It’s so much.
When you’re 30, a year is 3% of your life. It’s so short.
Remember how an hour of math class felt like an eternity? These days I start making dinner get lost scrolling through recipes and suddenly three hours have vanished.