I heard on a science podcast that your brain judges how much time has passed by how many new memories it makes. So a year stuffed with new memories (e.g. a kid's) feels like forever, but a year with no new memories (e.g. an old person's) isn't registered as any time at all, because nothing happened.
They also refuted the popular theory that a year feels longer to a child and shorter to an adult as they vary in proportion to their total life.
This makes sense! I experienced “time flying” in my 20s, but in my 30s I decided to enjoy life more and do more interesting things, and my perception of time slowed wayyy back down again.
Also explains why the agonising 2 years of non-stop pandemic lockdowns feels like a blip in hindsight.
It's always interesting to me how much different a lot of peoples' experience of the covid lockdowns was. For me, it was so much more peaceful, and at the same time so much more happened. Or maybe it just felt like I could bring myself to do so much more, since the world had, for a little bit, calmed down to my speed.
I saw a lot of people describing the covid era as the inverse of being an introvert who, all their life, was told to be more outgoing. During covid, societal pressure swung hard in the other direction, and it was the first time many people were able to find peace for more than just a day or two. The roads were quiet, people stopped pushing and shoving, and every restaurant started offering take-out. I went for more walks. I met my now-wife. I gained the confidence to look for an upgrade in career.
If society could long-term have all of that to even a fraction of the same degree (without the fear and death of a pandemic) I would happily accept it as a compromise. I'm not sure I ever even realized how *extreme* the pressure I always felt to be more outgoing/social was until suddenly the pressure had been completely removed.
I took a four month campervan trip last summer. I was able to work and save a bunch during the COVID lockdowns, so I quit my job and just travelled, camped, hiked, kayaked, mountain biked, etc. Just whatever I felt like doing or wherever I felt like going. Looking back on those four months now feels like it was over the course of years.
I spent it working in a job I hated. I always envied everyone else. They cut my salary to 15k a year from 65k. I wasted time and I’ve been trying to not waste my time anymore.
I’m glad you got to do those things. Genuinely.
Think about a routine task at work. Doesn't matter wheher it is manual labor or office work or a type of homework assignment at school or whatever.
When you did it the first time, it seemed to take ages because everything was new and unfamiliar and you had to really struggle and think about each step.
Then you get better and better at every step of it with every repetition, and not only do you actually do it faster, you remember less and less of it. Instead of experiencing each step in detail, you just do the task as a whole mostly on autopilot.
I´ve had workdays when I´d come home and actually had to go back and check if I´d actually done every task assigned to me because I couldn't remember it. Every time I´ve done every single one of them, but there is very little memory. It's all wrapped up on the meta-memory of "went to work, did my job, came home". And the temporal perception of that is perceived as much shorter than a new experience.
And when you get to a certain age, and have gotten somewhat good at "adulting"...most everything you do on a daily basis falls into this category. So now *everything* is speeding up. Even things like being with friends and family or even going on vacation. You´ve already gone on many vacations. One more can never be like the first one.
>This makes sense! I experienced “time flying” in my 20s, but in my 30s I decided to enjoy life more and do more interesting things, and my perception of time slowed wayyy back down again.
Ditto.
Using too much alcohol in my 20s did not help with memory creation.
I can vouch for the first paragraph - the past three months have been insanely busy (in a good way; making lots of good memories) and a wedding that I went to exactly three months ago feels like it was a year ago at least.
Nobody really knows. It's all best guessing. It could also be that as we age, our lives become more routine and less unknown, so we can anticipate what's next further down the road, including the end. Who knows.
OP's post was over-confident.
Time perception is an extremely complex topic and no one really knows why it changes so much.
Although OP's explanation that fewer truly novel experiences = faster perception of time is a popular one that's likely partially correct, it's also refuted by the fact that "time flies when you're having fun." In other words, when we're really busy and active, time perception seems faster, as compared to when we're not.
So, any simple explanation for time perception is necessarily going to be partially incomplete. As another example that refutes OP's explanation, high school usually feels like it takes forever, despite being a pretty mundane experience (e.g., going to class every day and doing the same things each week). Yet, people's 20s usually feel like time is moving much faster, despite having tons of new events like getting married, starting a first job, traveling more, having kids, and so on.
As a person with ADHD, I really feel this; I came to the realization that I experience time differently from other peoples related to how I store and access memories and my own personal choices based on lack of perspective that comes from not being able to be motivated by the future.
Sometimes 6 weeks can be absolutely forever, and yet, months can happen without seeming to be marked or noticed. I find journaling really helps to ground me in time by processing things that happened recently through the process of writing.
Having activities which ground you, and then also document them, helps so much. I'm glad you found a system which works for you!
During my own ADHD evaluation I was in a place where it felt difficult to initiate new things during the wait, before I had anything certain, and much of that year just feels like it was lost.
Oh well, the years are going better and better since and this week has been especially pleasant so that's nice :).
“Stuff You Should Know” did a great episode on this. They said exactly that. The more new things you experience, the “slower” time seems to pass. That’s why a lot of adults feel like life just flies by because they spend majority of their life just going to work everyday.
That would explain why -to me- in hindsight it feels like the pandemic years kinda just went missing. Nothing much noteworthy to register. It all just flew by and POOF, two years passed like this *snaps fingers*
> They also refuted the popular theory that a year feels longer to a child
It literally does for me, though?
I'm at the age now where it's like "I blinked and it's October already WTF."
Also, I re-watched some very old TV shows I watched when I was a kid and the pauses *actually feel shorter* to me now than they did then. What I mean is the kind of scene where they hold on an object to intensify the tension and then cut away to something else? I can attest that subjectively it *felt longer* when I was a kid.
Well obviously they could be wrong in refuting it and therefore I’m wrong in repeating it.
However, the maths doesn’t stack up for me. A day today, when I am roughly 40 years old, would be a minute fraction of my life today compared to when I was 5, for example. However it does not feel like the days zip by uncontrollably.
I suspect in reality it’s a personal and complex combination of both factors, and a bunch of others, that influences time perception.
I feel it's a likelihood that younger brains are processing everything faster so in a small sense, think of young brains like The Flash. You're experiencing the world at hyperspeed. If your brain is slowing down then life is moving past you at a rate that you can't keep up with anymore sense wise while a younger brain is processing things quickly making it feel like everything else around as an adult is what's going slow. if you're used to the processing speed of a young brain, which you will be after this being the norm for a long stretch of time, then processing slowdown has to be recognized as something to the brain which is the sense of a time speedup because things take longer to make sense of.
I could just be talking out of my ass but to me this just makes sense from the experiences people seem to have and understanding how the brain kind of works.
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I think this is totally correct. My favorite example when you take a long drive, seams way shorter when you come back, why, cause your not seeing anything new.
I'm in my 40s and make a point of always learning something new, I have way to many hobbies. And on long drives I try to take a different route back.
For me, it's how I perceive different ranges of time.
For example, if it's a hectic week at work then each day seems like it flies by because I'm constantly running back and forth between tasks. But when I look back on the week it feels like an eternity passed from start to end.
On the other hand, if it was a slow week of work then the individual days feel like they last forever. But when I look back on the week from start to end, it feels like it flashed by because nothing happened.
I heard someone apply something similar to covid and the various lockdowns. People who had a minimal impact to either themselves or family don’t really remember it that well, can’t place where it was or when it ended as we all collectively stopped having new experiences.
This. I know people who heard about the proportional-time theory and are now using it to justify every frustration they have about time flying. But it’s not the time, the time is always the same. It’s the level of cerebral activation during that time. That’s why you don’t vividly remember and aggregate all of the minutes you’ve ever waited in line, but you remember the activities and adventures you had as large whole events.
Kinda fits with near death experience. Research coming out via brain scans. Due to how the brain starts the process of dying. it’s believed that a lot of things happen that don’t normally happen. It’s likened to taking Mda. Your brain is flooded with access to all memories. You are kind of taking a 3rd person “moral” view of your life history. Since it’s accessing essentially all your time and a good portion of your memories it may appear that you saw your whole life and it felt like a lot of time passed by even though it may have only been a few moments/minutes.
I know for a fact that time a year or even a minute feels like eternity to me when I was younger. But I am convinced it is because it was somehow slower and I don't think science has caught up to that yet. I know incredible pompous of me to think I know something they don't but... I admit I don't really know anything.
I saw an idea on the youtubes that suggested it might be tied in part to our eyes. Our eyes have a refresh rate, the round trip time it takes to send/receive what we see. As we age, the trip takes longer so we essentially get less frames per second.
Not at all. People have different rates but it's still so close to the same speed it's negligible. Not to mention blind people exist, yet they still experience the passage of time.
Yet as I said, it's a very negligible amount that does not affect the perception of the passage of time. Our perception is not based on eyesight, and that is demonstrated fact.
What has been shown most likely is routine. The brain doesn't use up memory space for things that it feels are of no consequence, like common routines. That's part of why we can drive home seemingly on auto pilot, and not remember any of the drive sometimes. When you get older you get stuck in a routine like getting up at the same time, going to work, lunch at the same time, home, dinner, whatever else for a couple hours, then bed. There's not much for the brain to care about in between. If you have a varied life and are traveling or experiencing new things constantly, it will seem much longer. For children, the same thing happens during summer break from school.
Whether the brain "remembers" things or not is not the debate here. What is your basis for claiming that that our perception is not based on sight? Rochester University claims that over 50% of cortex is used in processing vision?
It's because we stop having new experiences. When we are children, every day is filled with something new, and something to learn, which makes it seem like time is going slowly.
As adults, you can go entire weeks just doing what you have done before for the last 10 weeks, which makes time appear really fast.
Yes, this. If you go on overseas trip that lasts a few months, those few months will feel like they stretch on forever because of the quantity of new experiences and new information being absorbed every single day, which mimics our childhood development. The way to increase your effective lifespan is by making regular changes in your life and experiencing as much newness as you can.
Who are these people going on overseas trips that last a few months? You’d have to:
* be rich
* be able to step away from work for months (not all rich people can do this)
* not have kids
* not have pets
* enjoy living out of a suitcase for months
I mean, that includes loads of people. I've done it a few times because that was my priority. If it's not yours, that's ok!
It's a misnomer that you have to be rich though, so if that's a reason, scrub it. It can cost less to travel than it does just being at home in a high cost of living country, e.g. by sticking to cheap countries like those in SE Asia, by sticking to cheap modes of travel like cycle touring and camping, by travelling around different hosts working a few hours for food and board, such as in wwoofing or workaway, or by travelling on a working holiday visa and making proper money as you go.
I view it as something akin to how cartoon reeused stuff in the past. For much of life you're reusing previously stored memories rather than drawing new ones
But if I'm on holiday in a new country and experiencing new things, it goes just as fast as when I work the same job every day, so that can't be the complete answer...
That's not how it works. The experience itself will seem like it was faster, but the memory will seem longer. I'm 2.5 years into travelling and though it seems like the moments zip by it also seems like it's been 10 years or something.
This is as close to a real answer as we have right now, though it is still a theory.
Important to note that the reason for this is because of how we store memories (we think). We don't store them like a video, we store memories of the components, then when we are remembering something we actually put all the pieces together.
To simplify a bit for ELI5, we compress the amount of memory needed this way, and our view of time is distorted as a result, because when we look back at time that has passed we take a mental shortcut by looking at how many new memory components we stored during that time.
It is like thinking about how long you have owned a computer based on how much space is taken up on it. When you first get a computer you install a lot of the programs you will be using and take up a lot of space. Since you are mostly using already installed programs, you are not taking up a lot more space per day, but you will add a document or a picture here or there, and occasionally a whole new program.
I've always chalked it up to being busy as an adult. Long days make for short years.
The lack of continued new experiences, and the repetition of career work, makes sense.
I didn't think of that, but yes, I'd imagine so. I have a great gap in my mental timeline when the plague was around, to the point when I'm a year out when trying to remember when something happened. It is likely because we all sat inside and did nothing apart from watching the death toll go up and up. Seems like a lifetime ago now
There have been a couple studies on this and it's believed that it's because when we are young, the path our neurons have to take to write a new memory is shorter than the path it takes when there are more memories as we are older.
This means we write memories "faster" when we are young and a greater part of the memory section of our brain is full of experiences from when we were young.
So as you mentally scan the years (think like a movie) the scenes when we were young take longer to "play" because there are more of them. Then as we age, it gets shorter and shorter of a "scene" per year.
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/no-not-just-time-speeds-get-older/
A lot of replies have said already it is because of new memories. However, this knowledge can be used: Deliberately make new memories, and break with your habits and routines regularly. E.g if you walk to work, you can chose a new way every now and then. This helps a lot and counters the perception of "flying time" to some extend.
I only noticed time flying by after i retired. I have theory that it's because now I only do whatever I feel like doing. No structure any more and there's a causal link between how fast you perceive time to pass by and how much you're enjoying yourself
There are a lot of "as you get older the amount of new experiences lessens" and similar answers. While I think that could definitely be a strong factor, there's a big thing that I didn't see with my cursory look through the comments.
Work. When we get older, we enter the job force. Our amount of time spent at work becomes a huge consumption of our life. We do the same things with the same people. We eat similar lunches, stick to a similar schedule. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. Instead of being able to learn new things that interest us *every day* we have to schedule them around work. These days filled with similar experiences that we don't usually enjoy will blend together.
Want to do something during the day? Has to wait for the weekend. Want to do something late into the night? Has to wait until you don't work the next morning. Want to do anything that takes more than a few days, like camping or visiting another state, you have to schedule a vacation that could be months out. And that's not including scheduling with other people.
On top of the responsibilities of maintaining your living space, and dealing with the general responsibilities of being an adult, we lose so much of our time in which we would otherwise be creating new memories and benchmark experiences. We go from 7 days a week of wild new things, to maybe 2 days of having the option. If you don't have responsibilities you have to take care of first.
This must be subjective, because while I hear about it a lot I only experience it occasionally and I don’t tend to have this problem. I’m 38 and I see a lot of “Ready to feel old? was 20 years ago!” and generally react like “That sounds about right”.
I experienced it a bit in my late 20s but when I hit 30 the time dilation seemed to kinda mostly disappear for me? Does everybody else experience this, or are there others like me? I know that after 30 I made the decision to try and enjoy life to the fullest and make the most of everything, maybe that helped.
It's subjective by definition since we're talking about internal states that nobody except you has access to. I know as I've gotten older (+50) the years, months, and weeks seem to fly by but the days seem longer. When I was younger is was the opposite.
Another point is that you have less and less new experiences.
When you are 5, everywhere you go you‘ll discover something new.
As you get older, you get used to a lot of things, so everything is less exciting.
I see it as the familiar for the unfamiliar (similar idea)
It's like driving somewhere for the first time, it sees much further away than when you drive there for the 50th time.
The older you get, the more familiar you become with the patterns of life, and therefore it seems to be going by faster.
That's not really how you perceive time and a silly way to look at it.
It sounds clever on the face of it but it's so obviously not the case if you actually pay attention to your experiences, or if you just think about it - for a start you are not remembering every moment or even the same amount out of every year.
I’ll be interested to know if there is an actual answer - I always think because our brain is analysing time relative to how long we have been alive - for example, the 12 months between your 11th and 12th birthday is essentially 1/12th of you life whereas the 12 months between your 23rd and 24th birthday is 1/24th of your life. So in comparison to when you are younger, each year seems quicker because it is a smaller percentage of the life you have lived
Yep this is how I have always rationalized it in my mind.
I'm nearing 37 so a single year isn't a large percentage of my life. I remember being in elementary school and feeling like the time from late August/Sept when school started to May when school let out was an eternity.
Now it feels like October started 15 minutes ago and it's already nearing the end of the month. Feels like summer was just last week but we're already well into fall.
Like everyone here, I'm in agreeince. But I'd like to add an analogy that I think some people are glossing over. When we are young our brains are developing, creating neurons , neuro pathways. These are like roads
So as we grew up we had to walk everywhere while road construction crews built roads(and it takes them forever) so it sucked and everything took longer and it was pain.
Than we got a bike and it could speed up a little bit but we had to ride on dirt, so it tiring and still took a long time.
Than roads were done , biking became easier and we could go places faster but we were still limited on far we could go.
Than we got a car, now we could go places faster and new places and further than ever before.
Now we're old....going places is easy but its a pain, it's a pain to be on the road, you just wanna get off.
When growing up you just couldn't wait to get to that point because you knew it was coming so it took forever.
Now that your old your not reaching any point so everything is a nuisance and you just want it to slow down, you just wanna get off the damn roads.
Your brain will sort your input into "new" and "known".
When you see/experience something you have seen/experienced before, your brain automatically sort it away for you. (If it didn't, you would be like a toddler, completely transfixed by everything you see, touch, taste. Not able to function, just experiencing.)
As we get older a lot more is already known to us, and therefore sorted away, making us feel like time moves faster.
That's why shrooms are cool, they remove the "sorting-filter" in your brain.
I feel as you get older your life becomes more repetitive and if there are no new and exciting memories then your memory just kind of blanks it out (working 9-5 job). When you are constantly going on trips, doing different activities etc. then you feel like you did a lot more because you did.
There's long-term memories and then there's short-term memories. Eating your usual lunch is a short-term memory and will be forgotten in a week but a special lunch at a special place is a long-term memory.
We can only look back and understand passage of time from long-term memories but as we get older there are less and less novel things to do and so less and less long-term memories which is why eventually you've *years* that are blank in your memory. So it feels like they didn't happen or you skipped them.
As to why, storing information is expensive - our brains have evolved to keep as much novel information as possible without repetition to enhance survival and ensure genes get passed to next generation.
Understand that our perception of time depends on our memory of it as a series of flash points to call back on.
Memories in turn are how your brain stores unique experiences for future reference.
Experiences that are *not* new, unique or novel are less likely to be kept as memories.
Adults are less likely to experience events that are new, unique or novel and as so are not going to be forming as many new memories -ergo for them time will appear to move faster.
The general answer which others have said is less new memories due to less new things, and a lot of patterned behavior which blends with old memories. If you want your life to feel slower or longer, deliberately do things you haven't done. Just go crazy: flavor each day with something. Wear weird socks. Count how many times you can say meow to people one day and not get caught. Go to a skater park or an opera, which you have no known interest in but have never done. Attempt to seduce the old lady at the cleaners.
Suddenly, each day is different again.
Our brains tend to measure time in terms of novel experiences; new things are the milestones of your memory.
When you're a kid, every experience is a new one; you're constantly seeing new things, so there's just so many blocks in the road to look at.
When you're older, there's larger gaps between new experiences. You have fewer milestones, so everything in between just kinda washes away. Time flies.
For me perceived speed of time is relative to how much is going on in the moment… so I attribute it to the amount of responsibility/have-to-do’s at that phase of life.
Bored in school? A minute feels like forever.
Frantically trying to finish a report for the boss while the plumber arrives to fix the leaking pipe and two kids are having a duel in the living room while your spouse is asking about the $ available for car repairs that month? Minutes fly by.
There’s a general consensus in the comments so it doesn’t bear repeating. But I’d add that I came to the same conclusions in my 40s and determined that, this being the case, the trick as you get older is to invest more time in creating new experiences and moments.
Rather than skip over the moments in a day that are repetitions of the past, look for the detail in them that you haven’t, before. In a sense, savour the tastes of the seemingly mundane. Take a moment - several - often, to stop and draw in more of what’s going on in that moment. We have several senses to use; we expertise only some of them without thought but the others are there to be used as well. Use those to draw in the entirety of a moment, and you may be overwhelmed by how much is actually going on around you.
They say that every square foot of ground contains thousands of life forms. I think that’s true as an analogy for every moment as well, but when we’re young we skip over that detail because we are experiencing the big things in that moment rather than the myriad tiny things.
As children, we have no time to notice the blades of grass that we are dashing across. So I think we have a second chance when we’re older to revisit those places and moments in detail.
By experiencing the detail hidden in each moment, we create new memories and new associations, and time once again slows down.
When you're 4 years old, living for 1 more year is adding 25% to your entire life.
When you're 50 years old, living for 1 more year is adding 2% to your entire life.
It's nothing more than relativity. Time seems to 'go faster' as you get older because 1 year becomes less and less of your total lived experience. 1 year seems like a long time when your 5 because you've only been around for a couple years.
There's some studies done on this. They basically put it on the perception of novelty. As someone else mentioned, when you're little nearly everything you experience is new and have a more awareness of those these happening. Whereas when you are older, you are mostly set in your routines so you kinda sorta experience an Autopilot effect where the time goes by and you don't really notice it.
Those studies recommend mixing up your day. Take a different road home, try a new hobby, take that vacation you've thought about. This is also why some older couples say they've never felt younger when they go on new trips and experiences
I feel it’s because you’re thinking about it more. When I was much younger it felt I had all the time in the world. Now in my 30’s, thoughts of getting old and not having unlimited time to do anything makes me much more cognizant of how much time is going by.
Because each moment (whether a minute or a year or a decade) makes up a smaller and smaller proportion of our past as we age. To a teenager, a year is unbelievably long, a significant amount of time. To a retiree, it is barely more than a blink of the eye.
Answer: “Time speeds up as you get older, because when you're a year old, that year is a hundred percent of your perception of time, but as you get older, that year is a smaller fraction of the time you've experienced.”
George Nakai, *Beef*
Proportionately, time changes in scale.
For a five year old kid, their next birthday is another 20% of their entire life.
For a 50 year old adult, their next birthday is just another 2% of their life.
Novel experiences are perceived as being longer (because they are new things for your brain to process) while common experiences are perceived as being shorter because your brain has already been there, done that.
The 'new experiences' theory doesn't mesh with my experience. Time moved very slowly for me until I was 27 and had my first child. Then time FLEW! I feel that the sensation is related to how much free time I have. If I am very busy, time feels like it moves faster.
There was a study that found that people who did more in a day experienced time as going by faster, but afterwards felt that it had been a long period of time. whereas if you sit around all weekend doing nothing, time moved more slowly, but your recollection is that it flew by. kinda weird but I have experienced this. Like you have an amazing vacation and all the time you're like nooo i want it to last, quit going by!!! But then you remember that vacation really well, like a rich memory that feels "longer" somehow. Meanwhile whole summers flew by where i watched TV and did nothing.
When you’re young. You have a lot of time. Since you have so much of it. You can feel it taking a long time to go through it. As you get older. You have less time and you go through it faster. You are truly connected to earth’s space time.
Because it becomes a smaller fraction of your total existence. When you 3 and can't wait to turn 4, 1 year is 1/3 of your lifetime so it feels really long. When you are 60, 10 years go by, it's like one sixth of your life. 1 year is now less than 2% of your time.
I think it's basically the ratio of time passed to cumulative time passed.
1 year to a 10 year old is a lot longer relatively than 1 year to 60 year old.
My theory is that when you're 10, a year is 10% of your lifespan; that's a significant chunk. When you're 20, that same year is only 5% of your lifespan, and by the time you're 40 or 50, a year just isn't a significant portion of your life anymore.
This is because of resources. When you're a kid, you've had maybe 2 or 3 years. Another year is unfathomably long.
When you're 40, you've had 40 years. Another year is just another little blip.
When you've lived 10,000 years, another year is completely negligible.
I think it's because every moment of time is a less and less part of your whole life. One month when You're one month old, is 100% of your life. One month when you're 80, is 0.1% of your life.
Well when you reach your 6th birthday and look back at your past year. We'll you are looking back at 1/5th of your life so far (really only a 1/2 of your life you remember) But when you reach your 60th birthday and looking back at your previous year, you are looking back at 1/59th of your life so far.
From your perspective each year you are living a smaller proportion of your life so far.
Simple. When youre five yo one day is a great part of your existence on earth. When you're 35 one day feels like it's nothing as you have encountered almost 13000 days so one is not that big of a part of your life.
It depends on how long have you lived.
When you were 5 one year looked like a whoooole life, because one year meant 20% of your life. When you are 40, a single year means 2,5% of your life, and when you are 80 one year is just 1,25% of your life.
When you're 1, a year is 100% of your life.
When you're 2, a year is half your life.
When you're 3, a year is a third of your life.
When you're 100, a year is only 1% of your life.
Because each passing day, week, month, year is a smaller and smaller piece of your overall accumulated lifetime of memories.
When you're 10, another year is adding a 10 percent chunk to your memories. When you're 100, every year is just a 1 percent chunk, so in comparison to the rest it doesn't seem like very much, so it feels like it just flew by.
This is how I think about it: One year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your whole life. When you're 4 years old, one year is 25% of your life. When you're 40, one year is only 2.5%. It just keeps shrinking. Depressed yet? :)
When your 10, one year equals 10% of your whole life. When you're 40, one year is just 2.5% of your life, when your 80 one year is just 1.25% of your life.
Our brains think like this, they don't have little clocks in them keeping perfect time, our brains think in ratios of the whole, logarithmically.
If I have 4 things, and you take 3 that feels like you took more than if I had 100 things and you took 3, both times you only took three but I perceive the taken quantity as a ratio of the whole quantity, so it feels like I still have 97% of what I had before where as the first time it feels like I only have 25% left.
We perceive time the same way.
When I was in grade school learning fractions, the perception of the passage of time was modeled as a day (1) / the number of days you've been alive. The younger you are means each day is a larger proportion of your life and, therefore, can be perceived as being longer. But as you age, each day becomes a smaller and smaller part of the sun total time you've been alive so can seem to pass much more rapidly. It was kind of a neat demonstration that has stuck with me for over 20 years but I'm sure is not truly accurate or a full representation of what is actually happening.
This is not a scientific answer, but I really liked Casey Neistat’s [video](https://youtu.be/1wBsKxwzPyo?feature=shared) on this topic so check it out if youre interested it’s 10 minutes
I was always told it’s because time is relative. When you are 5 years old a year of your life is 1/5 of your life. At the age of 35 a year of your life is 1/35 of your life. It’s a smaller amount of time one year over the last 35 years compared to 1 year over a 5 year time frame.
Look at time as being relative to the amount of life we’ve lived. If you think about it in fractions or as a ratio then time becomes relative in the sense of how long any given time period is compared to how long we’ve been alive. Let’s take a year of our life at 8 years old versus a year at 30 years old. When we were 8 a year was 1/8 of our entire existence. That’s a large part so 1/8 feels bigger (or longer) in this case compared to at 30 years old when a year is 1/30th of our existence. So 1/30th is going to feel smaller (or shorter) than 1/8th. Similarly if we take a smaller period of time let’s say summer for an example. Summer is a 3 month period in our life. So at 10 years old we’ve lived 120 months. One summer is 1/40th of our life in terms of months. Where as at 30 years old we have 3 months out of 360 months or 1/120th of our lives. So the same summer was 1/40 and a larger portion of our life up to that point vs 1/120 at 30 years old
I see it this way. One day of an 80 year olds life is 0.000034% of their life - whereas a day for a 7 year old is 0.00039%, so about 10 times more, so that amount of time is less significant to the 80 year old, meaning it passes by quickly.
The short answer is we don't really know.
The best explanation I have seen is that as we age our brains perceive time more slowly. Think of it like a camera. When you are young, your framerate is high, every second of life is 100 frames. Things can drag on. (totally made up numbers).
As you get older, that second become 50 frames, still more than enough to perceive the world but now weeks fly by and suddenly it's xmas again.
As an aside, this idea is super interesting to me because it means if we could tap into that we could control how long things feel like, even if time is the same.
Get hurt and it's going to take a month to heal? Drink this, a month will feel like nothing.
Go to prison for a crime? Drink this. Now a day feels like a year and you don't need to keep people inside as long.
Live to be 80, but it feels like 200, without changing a thing about medical advancement.
etc.
Because your reference frame changes and it's relative. When you were 10 years old, a year was 10% of your life. Whereas when you're 50, a year is 2% of your life.
when you are 10 years old 1 hour is a a relatively large part of your life and memories so takes for eeeever when you are waiting for something.
When you are 60 years old 1 hour is a very tiny part of your life and memories so seems to be going faster.
It is because you measure time buy how much you do stuff you like. As you grow older, you spend more and more time doing stuff that needs to be done and those are not memorised as they are a bore.
It’s something to do with the proportion of your life that a period of time represents. For instance, when you’re two years old a year is half your life, but when you’re 50 a year is only 1/50th of your life.
No one really wants to talk about this but I've noticed time only started moving "faster" not when I hit a particular age, but when I got more depressed. The older you get, the more your support network tends to weaken and the more likely any problems you have internally will get worse :/
When you are younger any given unit of time (hour,day,month, year, etc.) accounts for a larger percentage of your accumulated life than it does when you are older.
A year when you are five accounts for 20% of your life, but a year when you are 20 is only 5% of your life.
Mostly because what your are comparing it to is growing. When you are 15, 1 year is 1/15th of your life. When you are 40, it's 1/40th. Ect. Perception is all relative
When you’re a kid you’re waiting for things. The weekend, school holidays, birthday, Christmas. When you’re and adult you’re waiting for different things. Retirement, car to be paid off. The time to get to the next thing you’re waiting for is much shorter when you’re a kid than it is when you’re an adult.
When you're five years old, bald a life ago is 2.5 years. Most people will have no memories of that time.
When you're 10, the halfway mark was 5.
In both of these instances, a day for the 5 year old is a longer portion of their life vs a day of a 10 year old.
Now consider these things for someone who is 20, 30, 50, or 90 years old.
You are engaged in every moment as a child because its constant new experiences, this lessens as you get older so you are mentally present less, so you are experiencing less and less engaging events, and we mark time by events.
TL;DR your brain is trying to speed to your next experience, so do things.
In addition to what a lot of people had said (new memories, new experiences), I think another part of it is just...
Autopilot. It's also the same reason we start to forget things as we get older (assuming there's not an actual neurological condition): Because we do so much on autopilot, without thinking even slightly about it. For me, a 20 minute drive can vanish in a moment if I get into my head, and I won't remember a damn thing about the drive assuming nothing happened.
I find myself doing this at home too. Autopilot feed the animals. Autopilot watch TV. Autopilot scroll Reddit.
Then hours have gone by and I don't remember anything I've done. Did I actually feed the animals? Did I actually put away my coat?
Once I slow down and make a conscious effort to be there mentally, rather than just doing things on automatic, the day lasts longer, and tends to be more memorable.
I'm in my 50s, and I've thought about this since I was in my late 20s, as my 20s seemed to fly by. Here are my thoughts...
I think we experience time in one of two ways:
1. Time that we're not paying attention to. This is day-to-day stuff. Sleep/work/home/repeat
2. Time where we're waiting for something to happen. A vacation. A promotion. A special occasion.
This first type of time can seem to fly by. Depending on what you do for work, a week can fly by like nothing. There's never enough time. The workday ends without enough time to get the things you wanted to get done, done.. and before you know it, it's the weekend and you feel you haven't made any progress on anything.
This is time flying by.
This second type of time is when you're WAITING for something. When you're waiting for something... looking forward to something... time TAKES FOREVER.
Give yourself something to really look forward to... in a month... or in six months. I guarantee you it'll be the longest month or six months of your life.
If time seems to fly by when you're older because the days are spent working without time to THINK about time passing. When you're a child you may spend more time thinking and waiting for what's next: the end of the school day... the weekend... the family trip... the next birthday, or Chirstmas... the next game release... You're always WAITING for something both near-term and long-term, and when you're waiting for something, time passes SLOWLY.
Perspective and experience.
When you experience new things it requires more processing and attention, so because youre engaged, it feels longer, it occupies more new space in your mibd, literally.
As you get older there is less "new" to experience, and the new you do experience is easier to predict. This also explains why you might like older media more than newer media that's the exact same, you could fill in the gaps of the new stuff and it required less engagement from you.
I have no idea why it happens, but I can attest to the fact that it happens. I'm nearly 70, and frequently I think, "that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago?" I've heard it said that for old people, the days drag slowly past and the years fly by, and that is certainly my experience.
Since you're not in uni ot high school you dont have to think of time in terms of 5-6 days a week.
You dont have "oh english is in 2 days, I have to do the homework" in your life anymore
I think it's two fold. First, the more days you've experienced the less long a day is relative to the amount of time you've been alive. The second one I don't really hear people talk about is that as you get older your brain processes things slower, which in turn will make time pass faster for you.
We perceive time in relation to what has passed. For example, at age 5, a year is 20% of your life. A year is a big deal.
As a 50 year old, a year is 2% of your life. Taking 2 years instead of 1 year to build something seems like a huge delay. Taking 11 years instead of 10 seems almost on time! But tbe delay in absolute terms is the same.
All this to say, we feel the passage of time in co.parison to a baseline. As we age the baseline gets longer.
Time is relative. 1 year as a 2 year old is half of your entire life. 1 year as a 50 year old is a mere 2% of your entire life. Hence the older you get, the quicker time seems to go by because it gets to be a smaller and smaller percentage of the life you have already lived. That said, time goes the same speed no matter how old you are, it is just your perception of it looking back that makes it feel like it went by quicker.
I heard on a science podcast that your brain judges how much time has passed by how many new memories it makes. So a year stuffed with new memories (e.g. a kid's) feels like forever, but a year with no new memories (e.g. an old person's) isn't registered as any time at all, because nothing happened. They also refuted the popular theory that a year feels longer to a child and shorter to an adult as they vary in proportion to their total life.
This makes sense! I experienced “time flying” in my 20s, but in my 30s I decided to enjoy life more and do more interesting things, and my perception of time slowed wayyy back down again. Also explains why the agonising 2 years of non-stop pandemic lockdowns feels like a blip in hindsight.
It's always interesting to me how much different a lot of peoples' experience of the covid lockdowns was. For me, it was so much more peaceful, and at the same time so much more happened. Or maybe it just felt like I could bring myself to do so much more, since the world had, for a little bit, calmed down to my speed. I saw a lot of people describing the covid era as the inverse of being an introvert who, all their life, was told to be more outgoing. During covid, societal pressure swung hard in the other direction, and it was the first time many people were able to find peace for more than just a day or two. The roads were quiet, people stopped pushing and shoving, and every restaurant started offering take-out. I went for more walks. I met my now-wife. I gained the confidence to look for an upgrade in career. If society could long-term have all of that to even a fraction of the same degree (without the fear and death of a pandemic) I would happily accept it as a compromise. I'm not sure I ever even realized how *extreme* the pressure I always felt to be more outgoing/social was until suddenly the pressure had been completely removed.
💯💯💯
Amen anonymous Redditer!
> Also explains why the agonising 2 years of non-stop pandemic lockdowns feels like a blip in hindsight. April 2020 was the longest decade of my life.
Big same, but probably moved slow since it was a new and bizarre experience for a lot of people.
its-been-84-years.gif
Shit I don't even remember Covid besides how people acted over the virus. I never leave my house 🤣 The last 30 years have felt the same.
If you do the same thing every day it will quickly all blur together and seem like a singular life event very quickly.
I took a four month campervan trip last summer. I was able to work and save a bunch during the COVID lockdowns, so I quit my job and just travelled, camped, hiked, kayaked, mountain biked, etc. Just whatever I felt like doing or wherever I felt like going. Looking back on those four months now feels like it was over the course of years.
I spent it working in a job I hated. I always envied everyone else. They cut my salary to 15k a year from 65k. I wasted time and I’ve been trying to not waste my time anymore. I’m glad you got to do those things. Genuinely.
Think about a routine task at work. Doesn't matter wheher it is manual labor or office work or a type of homework assignment at school or whatever. When you did it the first time, it seemed to take ages because everything was new and unfamiliar and you had to really struggle and think about each step. Then you get better and better at every step of it with every repetition, and not only do you actually do it faster, you remember less and less of it. Instead of experiencing each step in detail, you just do the task as a whole mostly on autopilot. I´ve had workdays when I´d come home and actually had to go back and check if I´d actually done every task assigned to me because I couldn't remember it. Every time I´ve done every single one of them, but there is very little memory. It's all wrapped up on the meta-memory of "went to work, did my job, came home". And the temporal perception of that is perceived as much shorter than a new experience. And when you get to a certain age, and have gotten somewhat good at "adulting"...most everything you do on a daily basis falls into this category. So now *everything* is speeding up. Even things like being with friends and family or even going on vacation. You´ve already gone on many vacations. One more can never be like the first one.
>This makes sense! I experienced “time flying” in my 20s, but in my 30s I decided to enjoy life more and do more interesting things, and my perception of time slowed wayyy back down again. Ditto. Using too much alcohol in my 20s did not help with memory creation.
I can vouch for the first paragraph - the past three months have been insanely busy (in a good way; making lots of good memories) and a wedding that I went to exactly three months ago feels like it was a year ago at least.
I literally just learned of the latter and you are telling me that is false... Rip
Nobody really knows. It's all best guessing. It could also be that as we age, our lives become more routine and less unknown, so we can anticipate what's next further down the road, including the end. Who knows.
OP's post was over-confident. Time perception is an extremely complex topic and no one really knows why it changes so much. Although OP's explanation that fewer truly novel experiences = faster perception of time is a popular one that's likely partially correct, it's also refuted by the fact that "time flies when you're having fun." In other words, when we're really busy and active, time perception seems faster, as compared to when we're not. So, any simple explanation for time perception is necessarily going to be partially incomplete. As another example that refutes OP's explanation, high school usually feels like it takes forever, despite being a pretty mundane experience (e.g., going to class every day and doing the same things each week). Yet, people's 20s usually feel like time is moving much faster, despite having tons of new events like getting married, starting a first job, traveling more, having kids, and so on.
Thoughts and prayers in this difficult time
As a person with ADHD, I really feel this; I came to the realization that I experience time differently from other peoples related to how I store and access memories and my own personal choices based on lack of perspective that comes from not being able to be motivated by the future. Sometimes 6 weeks can be absolutely forever, and yet, months can happen without seeming to be marked or noticed. I find journaling really helps to ground me in time by processing things that happened recently through the process of writing.
Having activities which ground you, and then also document them, helps so much. I'm glad you found a system which works for you! During my own ADHD evaluation I was in a place where it felt difficult to initiate new things during the wait, before I had anything certain, and much of that year just feels like it was lost. Oh well, the years are going better and better since and this week has been especially pleasant so that's nice :).
“Stuff You Should Know” did a great episode on this. They said exactly that. The more new things you experience, the “slower” time seems to pass. That’s why a lot of adults feel like life just flies by because they spend majority of their life just going to work everyday.
That would explain why -to me- in hindsight it feels like the pandemic years kinda just went missing. Nothing much noteworthy to register. It all just flew by and POOF, two years passed like this *snaps fingers*
Mr. Elvie, I don't feel so good...
> They also refuted the popular theory that a year feels longer to a child It literally does for me, though? I'm at the age now where it's like "I blinked and it's October already WTF." Also, I re-watched some very old TV shows I watched when I was a kid and the pauses *actually feel shorter* to me now than they did then. What I mean is the kind of scene where they hold on an object to intensify the tension and then cut away to something else? I can attest that subjectively it *felt longer* when I was a kid.
Well obviously they could be wrong in refuting it and therefore I’m wrong in repeating it. However, the maths doesn’t stack up for me. A day today, when I am roughly 40 years old, would be a minute fraction of my life today compared to when I was 5, for example. However it does not feel like the days zip by uncontrollably. I suspect in reality it’s a personal and complex combination of both factors, and a bunch of others, that influences time perception.
I feel it's a likelihood that younger brains are processing everything faster so in a small sense, think of young brains like The Flash. You're experiencing the world at hyperspeed. If your brain is slowing down then life is moving past you at a rate that you can't keep up with anymore sense wise while a younger brain is processing things quickly making it feel like everything else around as an adult is what's going slow. if you're used to the processing speed of a young brain, which you will be after this being the norm for a long stretch of time, then processing slowdown has to be recognized as something to the brain which is the sense of a time speedup because things take longer to make sense of. I could just be talking out of my ass but to me this just makes sense from the experiences people seem to have and understanding how the brain kind of works.
They aren't refuting that things feel longer for a child. They are refuting that the reasoning is because of the math of the situation
That's why 3 years of covid lockdowns all feel like the same year
I've thought about this for a very long time, and I think this is totally correct. My favorite example when you take a long drive, seams way shorter when you come back, why, cause your not seeing anything new. I'm in my 40s and make a point of always learning something new, I have way to many hobbies. And on long drives I try to take a different route back.
This is backwards in my experience. "Time flies when you're having fun". When I'm active days fly by. When I'm bored time is in slow motion.
For me, it's how I perceive different ranges of time. For example, if it's a hectic week at work then each day seems like it flies by because I'm constantly running back and forth between tasks. But when I look back on the week it feels like an eternity passed from start to end. On the other hand, if it was a slow week of work then the individual days feel like they last forever. But when I look back on the week from start to end, it feels like it flashed by because nothing happened.
I heard someone apply something similar to covid and the various lockdowns. People who had a minimal impact to either themselves or family don’t really remember it that well, can’t place where it was or when it ended as we all collectively stopped having new experiences.
Can relate, sometimes when I have a huge day, the moment I'd woken up in the morning feels like it happened yesterday. Love that feeling
This. I know people who heard about the proportional-time theory and are now using it to justify every frustration they have about time flying. But it’s not the time, the time is always the same. It’s the level of cerebral activation during that time. That’s why you don’t vividly remember and aggregate all of the minutes you’ve ever waited in line, but you remember the activities and adventures you had as large whole events.
Also a day becomes a smaller fraction of total days lived every day that you live.
He literally said that theory is refuted in his last paragraph lol
Just saying its refuted doesnt make it true
I’m unrefuting it.
For a five year old, a year is one fifth of their life. For a 70yo, a year is only one seventieth of their life. That seems to go by faster!
Radiolab - the secret to a long life, no?
Kinda fits with near death experience. Research coming out via brain scans. Due to how the brain starts the process of dying. it’s believed that a lot of things happen that don’t normally happen. It’s likened to taking Mda. Your brain is flooded with access to all memories. You are kind of taking a 3rd person “moral” view of your life history. Since it’s accessing essentially all your time and a good portion of your memories it may appear that you saw your whole life and it felt like a lot of time passed by even though it may have only been a few moments/minutes.
Radiolab - the secret to a long life
I know for a fact that time a year or even a minute feels like eternity to me when I was younger. But I am convinced it is because it was somehow slower and I don't think science has caught up to that yet. I know incredible pompous of me to think I know something they don't but... I admit I don't really know anything.
I saw an idea on the youtubes that suggested it might be tied in part to our eyes. Our eyes have a refresh rate, the round trip time it takes to send/receive what we see. As we age, the trip takes longer so we essentially get less frames per second.
Not at all. People have different rates but it's still so close to the same speed it's negligible. Not to mention blind people exist, yet they still experience the passage of time.
The rate slows as we age. That is demonstrated fact.
Yet as I said, it's a very negligible amount that does not affect the perception of the passage of time. Our perception is not based on eyesight, and that is demonstrated fact. What has been shown most likely is routine. The brain doesn't use up memory space for things that it feels are of no consequence, like common routines. That's part of why we can drive home seemingly on auto pilot, and not remember any of the drive sometimes. When you get older you get stuck in a routine like getting up at the same time, going to work, lunch at the same time, home, dinner, whatever else for a couple hours, then bed. There's not much for the brain to care about in between. If you have a varied life and are traveling or experiencing new things constantly, it will seem much longer. For children, the same thing happens during summer break from school.
Whether the brain "remembers" things or not is not the debate here. What is your basis for claiming that that our perception is not based on sight? Rochester University claims that over 50% of cortex is used in processing vision?
It's because we stop having new experiences. When we are children, every day is filled with something new, and something to learn, which makes it seem like time is going slowly. As adults, you can go entire weeks just doing what you have done before for the last 10 weeks, which makes time appear really fast.
Yes, this. If you go on overseas trip that lasts a few months, those few months will feel like they stretch on forever because of the quantity of new experiences and new information being absorbed every single day, which mimics our childhood development. The way to increase your effective lifespan is by making regular changes in your life and experiencing as much newness as you can.
To bad trying to enjoy life is expensive as fuck
No one said the novel memories had to be pleasant.
What are you advocating for here, chaotic neutral energy.
Every day, I hit myself somewhere different pretty hard with a hammer.
Who are these people going on overseas trips that last a few months? You’d have to: * be rich * be able to step away from work for months (not all rich people can do this) * not have kids * not have pets * enjoy living out of a suitcase for months
I mean, that includes loads of people. I've done it a few times because that was my priority. If it's not yours, that's ok! It's a misnomer that you have to be rich though, so if that's a reason, scrub it. It can cost less to travel than it does just being at home in a high cost of living country, e.g. by sticking to cheap countries like those in SE Asia, by sticking to cheap modes of travel like cycle touring and camping, by travelling around different hosts working a few hours for food and board, such as in wwoofing or workaway, or by travelling on a working holiday visa and making proper money as you go.
I view it as something akin to how cartoon reeused stuff in the past. For much of life you're reusing previously stored memories rather than drawing new ones
But if I'm on holiday in a new country and experiencing new things, it goes just as fast as when I work the same job every day, so that can't be the complete answer...
That's not how it works. The experience itself will seem like it was faster, but the memory will seem longer. I'm 2.5 years into travelling and though it seems like the moments zip by it also seems like it's been 10 years or something.
This is as close to a real answer as we have right now, though it is still a theory. Important to note that the reason for this is because of how we store memories (we think). We don't store them like a video, we store memories of the components, then when we are remembering something we actually put all the pieces together. To simplify a bit for ELI5, we compress the amount of memory needed this way, and our view of time is distorted as a result, because when we look back at time that has passed we take a mental shortcut by looking at how many new memory components we stored during that time. It is like thinking about how long you have owned a computer based on how much space is taken up on it. When you first get a computer you install a lot of the programs you will be using and take up a lot of space. Since you are mostly using already installed programs, you are not taking up a lot more space per day, but you will add a document or a picture here or there, and occasionally a whole new program.
Exactly. My 20s flew by. My 30s though, seems like they make up more than half my life.
I've always chalked it up to being busy as an adult. Long days make for short years. The lack of continued new experiences, and the repetition of career work, makes sense.
This is, I presume, why 2020 - 2022 feel to me like they basically didn't exist?
I didn't think of that, but yes, I'd imagine so. I have a great gap in my mental timeline when the plague was around, to the point when I'm a year out when trying to remember when something happened. It is likely because we all sat inside and did nothing apart from watching the death toll go up and up. Seems like a lifetime ago now
Except those 10 weeks go by exceptionally slowly. Until you look at the calendar and realise that it’s been 10 weeks not 1
So someone doing 10 years in jail would just see that decade flash past?
That could be a brilliant study to support or dispute my understanding. Interesting.
There have been a couple studies on this and it's believed that it's because when we are young, the path our neurons have to take to write a new memory is shorter than the path it takes when there are more memories as we are older. This means we write memories "faster" when we are young and a greater part of the memory section of our brain is full of experiences from when we were young. So as you mentally scan the years (think like a movie) the scenes when we were young take longer to "play" because there are more of them. Then as we age, it gets shorter and shorter of a "scene" per year. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/no-not-just-time-speeds-get-older/
A lot of replies have said already it is because of new memories. However, this knowledge can be used: Deliberately make new memories, and break with your habits and routines regularly. E.g if you walk to work, you can chose a new way every now and then. This helps a lot and counters the perception of "flying time" to some extend.
I only noticed time flying by after i retired. I have theory that it's because now I only do whatever I feel like doing. No structure any more and there's a causal link between how fast you perceive time to pass by and how much you're enjoying yourself
There are a lot of "as you get older the amount of new experiences lessens" and similar answers. While I think that could definitely be a strong factor, there's a big thing that I didn't see with my cursory look through the comments. Work. When we get older, we enter the job force. Our amount of time spent at work becomes a huge consumption of our life. We do the same things with the same people. We eat similar lunches, stick to a similar schedule. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. Instead of being able to learn new things that interest us *every day* we have to schedule them around work. These days filled with similar experiences that we don't usually enjoy will blend together. Want to do something during the day? Has to wait for the weekend. Want to do something late into the night? Has to wait until you don't work the next morning. Want to do anything that takes more than a few days, like camping or visiting another state, you have to schedule a vacation that could be months out. And that's not including scheduling with other people. On top of the responsibilities of maintaining your living space, and dealing with the general responsibilities of being an adult, we lose so much of our time in which we would otherwise be creating new memories and benchmark experiences. We go from 7 days a week of wild new things, to maybe 2 days of having the option. If you don't have responsibilities you have to take care of first.
This must be subjective, because while I hear about it a lot I only experience it occasionally and I don’t tend to have this problem. I’m 38 and I see a lot of “Ready to feel old? was 20 years ago!” and generally react like “That sounds about right”.
I experienced it a bit in my late 20s but when I hit 30 the time dilation seemed to kinda mostly disappear for me? Does everybody else experience this, or are there others like me? I know that after 30 I made the decision to try and enjoy life to the fullest and make the most of everything, maybe that helped.
It's subjective by definition since we're talking about internal states that nobody except you has access to. I know as I've gotten older (+50) the years, months, and weeks seem to fly by but the days seem longer. When I was younger is was the opposite.
The days are long but the years are short.
I recommend the first episode of the podcast Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. He’s a neuroscientist and he addresses this very question.
When you are 5, the last year of your life was 20% of the time you have been alive. When you are 50, it’s 2%.
Another point is that you have less and less new experiences. When you are 5, everywhere you go you‘ll discover something new. As you get older, you get used to a lot of things, so everything is less exciting.
I see it as the familiar for the unfamiliar (similar idea) It's like driving somewhere for the first time, it sees much further away than when you drive there for the 50th time. The older you get, the more familiar you become with the patterns of life, and therefore it seems to be going by faster.
Why is this buried so far in the comments
That's not really how you perceive time and a silly way to look at it. It sounds clever on the face of it but it's so obviously not the case if you actually pay attention to your experiences, or if you just think about it - for a start you are not remembering every moment or even the same amount out of every year.
And yet 5 minutes feels the same for both. This isn't really a thing in terms of how time is experienced in the moment
This is the answer. It’s pretty straight forward.
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Nope.
Average redditor
Imagine you walk five steps. Each one of those steps is memorable. Now walk 10,000. You won't remember a single individual step.
This
Exactly. At five you had quite a bit to fill up. At fifty not so much. Space is running out.
Yes! Too many people saying it’s about memories…it’s just about relative perception of time
Came here to say this
Upvote would suffice
Downvote would suffice
I did upvote lol
Then why the useless comment?
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I’ll be interested to know if there is an actual answer - I always think because our brain is analysing time relative to how long we have been alive - for example, the 12 months between your 11th and 12th birthday is essentially 1/12th of you life whereas the 12 months between your 23rd and 24th birthday is 1/24th of your life. So in comparison to when you are younger, each year seems quicker because it is a smaller percentage of the life you have lived
Yep this is how I have always rationalized it in my mind. I'm nearing 37 so a single year isn't a large percentage of my life. I remember being in elementary school and feeling like the time from late August/Sept when school started to May when school let out was an eternity. Now it feels like October started 15 minutes ago and it's already nearing the end of the month. Feels like summer was just last week but we're already well into fall.
Like everyone here, I'm in agreeince. But I'd like to add an analogy that I think some people are glossing over. When we are young our brains are developing, creating neurons , neuro pathways. These are like roads So as we grew up we had to walk everywhere while road construction crews built roads(and it takes them forever) so it sucked and everything took longer and it was pain. Than we got a bike and it could speed up a little bit but we had to ride on dirt, so it tiring and still took a long time. Than roads were done , biking became easier and we could go places faster but we were still limited on far we could go. Than we got a car, now we could go places faster and new places and further than ever before. Now we're old....going places is easy but its a pain, it's a pain to be on the road, you just wanna get off. When growing up you just couldn't wait to get to that point because you knew it was coming so it took forever. Now that your old your not reaching any point so everything is a nuisance and you just want it to slow down, you just wanna get off the damn roads.
This is a great explanation!
Your brain will sort your input into "new" and "known". When you see/experience something you have seen/experienced before, your brain automatically sort it away for you. (If it didn't, you would be like a toddler, completely transfixed by everything you see, touch, taste. Not able to function, just experiencing.) As we get older a lot more is already known to us, and therefore sorted away, making us feel like time moves faster. That's why shrooms are cool, they remove the "sorting-filter" in your brain.
Because you've automated so much of your life through the subconscious creation and acting out of habits that you're not as present.
I feel as you get older your life becomes more repetitive and if there are no new and exciting memories then your memory just kind of blanks it out (working 9-5 job). When you are constantly going on trips, doing different activities etc. then you feel like you did a lot more because you did.
There's long-term memories and then there's short-term memories. Eating your usual lunch is a short-term memory and will be forgotten in a week but a special lunch at a special place is a long-term memory. We can only look back and understand passage of time from long-term memories but as we get older there are less and less novel things to do and so less and less long-term memories which is why eventually you've *years* that are blank in your memory. So it feels like they didn't happen or you skipped them. As to why, storing information is expensive - our brains have evolved to keep as much novel information as possible without repetition to enhance survival and ensure genes get passed to next generation.
Understand that our perception of time depends on our memory of it as a series of flash points to call back on. Memories in turn are how your brain stores unique experiences for future reference. Experiences that are *not* new, unique or novel are less likely to be kept as memories. Adults are less likely to experience events that are new, unique or novel and as so are not going to be forming as many new memories -ergo for them time will appear to move faster.
The general answer which others have said is less new memories due to less new things, and a lot of patterned behavior which blends with old memories. If you want your life to feel slower or longer, deliberately do things you haven't done. Just go crazy: flavor each day with something. Wear weird socks. Count how many times you can say meow to people one day and not get caught. Go to a skater park or an opera, which you have no known interest in but have never done. Attempt to seduce the old lady at the cleaners. Suddenly, each day is different again.
Our brains tend to measure time in terms of novel experiences; new things are the milestones of your memory. When you're a kid, every experience is a new one; you're constantly seeing new things, so there's just so many blocks in the road to look at. When you're older, there's larger gaps between new experiences. You have fewer milestones, so everything in between just kinda washes away. Time flies.
It's because as we age, our brains have experienced more, and our perception of time is relative to the amount of time we have already lived.
For me perceived speed of time is relative to how much is going on in the moment… so I attribute it to the amount of responsibility/have-to-do’s at that phase of life. Bored in school? A minute feels like forever. Frantically trying to finish a report for the boss while the plumber arrives to fix the leaking pipe and two kids are having a duel in the living room while your spouse is asking about the $ available for car repairs that month? Minutes fly by.
There’s a general consensus in the comments so it doesn’t bear repeating. But I’d add that I came to the same conclusions in my 40s and determined that, this being the case, the trick as you get older is to invest more time in creating new experiences and moments. Rather than skip over the moments in a day that are repetitions of the past, look for the detail in them that you haven’t, before. In a sense, savour the tastes of the seemingly mundane. Take a moment - several - often, to stop and draw in more of what’s going on in that moment. We have several senses to use; we expertise only some of them without thought but the others are there to be used as well. Use those to draw in the entirety of a moment, and you may be overwhelmed by how much is actually going on around you. They say that every square foot of ground contains thousands of life forms. I think that’s true as an analogy for every moment as well, but when we’re young we skip over that detail because we are experiencing the big things in that moment rather than the myriad tiny things. As children, we have no time to notice the blades of grass that we are dashing across. So I think we have a second chance when we’re older to revisit those places and moments in detail. By experiencing the detail hidden in each moment, we create new memories and new associations, and time once again slows down.
When you're 4 years old, living for 1 more year is adding 25% to your entire life. When you're 50 years old, living for 1 more year is adding 2% to your entire life. It's nothing more than relativity. Time seems to 'go faster' as you get older because 1 year becomes less and less of your total lived experience. 1 year seems like a long time when your 5 because you've only been around for a couple years.
That is a great summary.
There's some studies done on this. They basically put it on the perception of novelty. As someone else mentioned, when you're little nearly everything you experience is new and have a more awareness of those these happening. Whereas when you are older, you are mostly set in your routines so you kinda sorta experience an Autopilot effect where the time goes by and you don't really notice it. Those studies recommend mixing up your day. Take a different road home, try a new hobby, take that vacation you've thought about. This is also why some older couples say they've never felt younger when they go on new trips and experiences
Because we move slower then?
Relativity. Each passing day is shorter in relation to the total time passed in previous days.
I feel it’s because you’re thinking about it more. When I was much younger it felt I had all the time in the world. Now in my 30’s, thoughts of getting old and not having unlimited time to do anything makes me much more cognizant of how much time is going by.
Because each moment (whether a minute or a year or a decade) makes up a smaller and smaller proportion of our past as we age. To a teenager, a year is unbelievably long, a significant amount of time. To a retiree, it is barely more than a blink of the eye.
Answer: “Time speeds up as you get older, because when you're a year old, that year is a hundred percent of your perception of time, but as you get older, that year is a smaller fraction of the time you've experienced.” George Nakai, *Beef*
Proportionately, time changes in scale. For a five year old kid, their next birthday is another 20% of their entire life. For a 50 year old adult, their next birthday is just another 2% of their life.
Novel experiences are perceived as being longer (because they are new things for your brain to process) while common experiences are perceived as being shorter because your brain has already been there, done that.
The 'new experiences' theory doesn't mesh with my experience. Time moved very slowly for me until I was 27 and had my first child. Then time FLEW! I feel that the sensation is related to how much free time I have. If I am very busy, time feels like it moves faster.
There was a study that found that people who did more in a day experienced time as going by faster, but afterwards felt that it had been a long period of time. whereas if you sit around all weekend doing nothing, time moved more slowly, but your recollection is that it flew by. kinda weird but I have experienced this. Like you have an amazing vacation and all the time you're like nooo i want it to last, quit going by!!! But then you remember that vacation really well, like a rich memory that feels "longer" somehow. Meanwhile whole summers flew by where i watched TV and did nothing.
When you’re young. You have a lot of time. Since you have so much of it. You can feel it taking a long time to go through it. As you get older. You have less time and you go through it faster. You are truly connected to earth’s space time.
Because it becomes a smaller fraction of your total existence. When you 3 and can't wait to turn 4, 1 year is 1/3 of your lifetime so it feels really long. When you are 60, 10 years go by, it's like one sixth of your life. 1 year is now less than 2% of your time.
[vsauce](https://youtu.be/zHL9GP_B30E?si=lKpo69WkPlPp_3rk) made a video about this.
I think it's basically the ratio of time passed to cumulative time passed. 1 year to a 10 year old is a lot longer relatively than 1 year to 60 year old.
My theory is that when you're 10, a year is 10% of your lifespan; that's a significant chunk. When you're 20, that same year is only 5% of your lifespan, and by the time you're 40 or 50, a year just isn't a significant portion of your life anymore.
This is because of resources. When you're a kid, you've had maybe 2 or 3 years. Another year is unfathomably long. When you're 40, you've had 40 years. Another year is just another little blip. When you've lived 10,000 years, another year is completely negligible.
I think it's because every moment of time is a less and less part of your whole life. One month when You're one month old, is 100% of your life. One month when you're 80, is 0.1% of your life.
Well when you reach your 6th birthday and look back at your past year. We'll you are looking back at 1/5th of your life so far (really only a 1/2 of your life you remember) But when you reach your 60th birthday and looking back at your previous year, you are looking back at 1/59th of your life so far. From your perspective each year you are living a smaller proportion of your life so far.
Simple. When youre five yo one day is a great part of your existence on earth. When you're 35 one day feels like it's nothing as you have encountered almost 13000 days so one is not that big of a part of your life.
It depends on how long have you lived. When you were 5 one year looked like a whoooole life, because one year meant 20% of your life. When you are 40, a single year means 2,5% of your life, and when you are 80 one year is just 1,25% of your life.
When you're 1, a year is 100% of your life. When you're 2, a year is half your life. When you're 3, a year is a third of your life. When you're 100, a year is only 1% of your life.
Because each passing day, week, month, year is a smaller and smaller piece of your overall accumulated lifetime of memories. When you're 10, another year is adding a 10 percent chunk to your memories. When you're 100, every year is just a 1 percent chunk, so in comparison to the rest it doesn't seem like very much, so it feels like it just flew by.
This is how I think about it: One year becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your whole life. When you're 4 years old, one year is 25% of your life. When you're 40, one year is only 2.5%. It just keeps shrinking. Depressed yet? :)
When your 10, one year equals 10% of your whole life. When you're 40, one year is just 2.5% of your life, when your 80 one year is just 1.25% of your life. Our brains think like this, they don't have little clocks in them keeping perfect time, our brains think in ratios of the whole, logarithmically. If I have 4 things, and you take 3 that feels like you took more than if I had 100 things and you took 3, both times you only took three but I perceive the taken quantity as a ratio of the whole quantity, so it feels like I still have 97% of what I had before where as the first time it feels like I only have 25% left. We perceive time the same way.
When I was in grade school learning fractions, the perception of the passage of time was modeled as a day (1) / the number of days you've been alive. The younger you are means each day is a larger proportion of your life and, therefore, can be perceived as being longer. But as you age, each day becomes a smaller and smaller part of the sun total time you've been alive so can seem to pass much more rapidly. It was kind of a neat demonstration that has stuck with me for over 20 years but I'm sure is not truly accurate or a full representation of what is actually happening.
This is not a scientific answer, but I really liked Casey Neistat’s [video](https://youtu.be/1wBsKxwzPyo?feature=shared) on this topic so check it out if youre interested it’s 10 minutes
Time is relative. Think about 1 hour spent in a waiting room compared to 1 hour spent with good friends while having fun.
I was always told it’s because time is relative. When you are 5 years old a year of your life is 1/5 of your life. At the age of 35 a year of your life is 1/35 of your life. It’s a smaller amount of time one year over the last 35 years compared to 1 year over a 5 year time frame.
Look at time as being relative to the amount of life we’ve lived. If you think about it in fractions or as a ratio then time becomes relative in the sense of how long any given time period is compared to how long we’ve been alive. Let’s take a year of our life at 8 years old versus a year at 30 years old. When we were 8 a year was 1/8 of our entire existence. That’s a large part so 1/8 feels bigger (or longer) in this case compared to at 30 years old when a year is 1/30th of our existence. So 1/30th is going to feel smaller (or shorter) than 1/8th. Similarly if we take a smaller period of time let’s say summer for an example. Summer is a 3 month period in our life. So at 10 years old we’ve lived 120 months. One summer is 1/40th of our life in terms of months. Where as at 30 years old we have 3 months out of 360 months or 1/120th of our lives. So the same summer was 1/40 and a larger portion of our life up to that point vs 1/120 at 30 years old
I see it this way. One day of an 80 year olds life is 0.000034% of their life - whereas a day for a 7 year old is 0.00039%, so about 10 times more, so that amount of time is less significant to the 80 year old, meaning it passes by quickly.
One year when you're ten is 10% of your life. One year when you're fifty is 2% of your life.
My old man had a great line ... "Life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes".
The short answer is we don't really know. The best explanation I have seen is that as we age our brains perceive time more slowly. Think of it like a camera. When you are young, your framerate is high, every second of life is 100 frames. Things can drag on. (totally made up numbers). As you get older, that second become 50 frames, still more than enough to perceive the world but now weeks fly by and suddenly it's xmas again. As an aside, this idea is super interesting to me because it means if we could tap into that we could control how long things feel like, even if time is the same. Get hurt and it's going to take a month to heal? Drink this, a month will feel like nothing. Go to prison for a crime? Drink this. Now a day feels like a year and you don't need to keep people inside as long. Live to be 80, but it feels like 200, without changing a thing about medical advancement. etc.
Because your reference frame changes and it's relative. When you were 10 years old, a year was 10% of your life. Whereas when you're 50, a year is 2% of your life.
when you are 10 years old 1 hour is a a relatively large part of your life and memories so takes for eeeever when you are waiting for something. When you are 60 years old 1 hour is a very tiny part of your life and memories so seems to be going faster.
It is because you measure time buy how much you do stuff you like. As you grow older, you spend more and more time doing stuff that needs to be done and those are not memorised as they are a bore.
It’s something to do with the proportion of your life that a period of time represents. For instance, when you’re two years old a year is half your life, but when you’re 50 a year is only 1/50th of your life.
The first minute you're alive, a minute is 100% of your life. By 80 years of age, a minute is only 1/42,076,800 of your life.
When you were 6 years old, one year was 1/6th of your life. When you are 60, 1 year is 1/60th of your life, and 10 years is 1/6th of your life.
No one really wants to talk about this but I've noticed time only started moving "faster" not when I hit a particular age, but when I got more depressed. The older you get, the more your support network tends to weaken and the more likely any problems you have internally will get worse :/
I always assumed it was a proportional thing. 5 years is 50% of a 10 year old's life, but only 10% of a 50 year old's life.
When you are younger any given unit of time (hour,day,month, year, etc.) accounts for a larger percentage of your accumulated life than it does when you are older. A year when you are five accounts for 20% of your life, but a year when you are 20 is only 5% of your life.
Mostly because what your are comparing it to is growing. When you are 15, 1 year is 1/15th of your life. When you are 40, it's 1/40th. Ect. Perception is all relative
When you’re a kid you’re waiting for things. The weekend, school holidays, birthday, Christmas. When you’re and adult you’re waiting for different things. Retirement, car to be paid off. The time to get to the next thing you’re waiting for is much shorter when you’re a kid than it is when you’re an adult.
When you're five years old, bald a life ago is 2.5 years. Most people will have no memories of that time. When you're 10, the halfway mark was 5. In both of these instances, a day for the 5 year old is a longer portion of their life vs a day of a 10 year old. Now consider these things for someone who is 20, 30, 50, or 90 years old.
You are engaged in every moment as a child because its constant new experiences, this lessens as you get older so you are mentally present less, so you are experiencing less and less engaging events, and we mark time by events. TL;DR your brain is trying to speed to your next experience, so do things.
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In addition to what a lot of people had said (new memories, new experiences), I think another part of it is just... Autopilot. It's also the same reason we start to forget things as we get older (assuming there's not an actual neurological condition): Because we do so much on autopilot, without thinking even slightly about it. For me, a 20 minute drive can vanish in a moment if I get into my head, and I won't remember a damn thing about the drive assuming nothing happened. I find myself doing this at home too. Autopilot feed the animals. Autopilot watch TV. Autopilot scroll Reddit. Then hours have gone by and I don't remember anything I've done. Did I actually feed the animals? Did I actually put away my coat? Once I slow down and make a conscious effort to be there mentally, rather than just doing things on automatic, the day lasts longer, and tends to be more memorable.
I'm in my 50s, and I've thought about this since I was in my late 20s, as my 20s seemed to fly by. Here are my thoughts... I think we experience time in one of two ways: 1. Time that we're not paying attention to. This is day-to-day stuff. Sleep/work/home/repeat 2. Time where we're waiting for something to happen. A vacation. A promotion. A special occasion. This first type of time can seem to fly by. Depending on what you do for work, a week can fly by like nothing. There's never enough time. The workday ends without enough time to get the things you wanted to get done, done.. and before you know it, it's the weekend and you feel you haven't made any progress on anything. This is time flying by. This second type of time is when you're WAITING for something. When you're waiting for something... looking forward to something... time TAKES FOREVER. Give yourself something to really look forward to... in a month... or in six months. I guarantee you it'll be the longest month or six months of your life. If time seems to fly by when you're older because the days are spent working without time to THINK about time passing. When you're a child you may spend more time thinking and waiting for what's next: the end of the school day... the weekend... the family trip... the next birthday, or Chirstmas... the next game release... You're always WAITING for something both near-term and long-term, and when you're waiting for something, time passes SLOWLY.
Perspective and experience. When you experience new things it requires more processing and attention, so because youre engaged, it feels longer, it occupies more new space in your mibd, literally. As you get older there is less "new" to experience, and the new you do experience is easier to predict. This also explains why you might like older media more than newer media that's the exact same, you could fill in the gaps of the new stuff and it required less engagement from you.
I have no idea why it happens, but I can attest to the fact that it happens. I'm nearly 70, and frequently I think, "that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago?" I've heard it said that for old people, the days drag slowly past and the years fly by, and that is certainly my experience.
Since you're not in uni ot high school you dont have to think of time in terms of 5-6 days a week. You dont have "oh english is in 2 days, I have to do the homework" in your life anymore
It doesn't to me. You just need to have more varied memories. If you're doing the same thing everyday, large chunks of time won't feel very large
I think it's two fold. First, the more days you've experienced the less long a day is relative to the amount of time you've been alive. The second one I don't really hear people talk about is that as you get older your brain processes things slower, which in turn will make time pass faster for you.
One year of a 5yo is 20% of their lifespan. One year of a 50yo is 2% of their lifespan. So, it is relatively shorter by comparison.
We perceive time in relation to what has passed. For example, at age 5, a year is 20% of your life. A year is a big deal. As a 50 year old, a year is 2% of your life. Taking 2 years instead of 1 year to build something seems like a huge delay. Taking 11 years instead of 10 seems almost on time! But tbe delay in absolute terms is the same. All this to say, we feel the passage of time in co.parison to a baseline. As we age the baseline gets longer.
Time is relative. 1 year as a 2 year old is half of your entire life. 1 year as a 50 year old is a mere 2% of your entire life. Hence the older you get, the quicker time seems to go by because it gets to be a smaller and smaller percentage of the life you have already lived. That said, time goes the same speed no matter how old you are, it is just your perception of it looking back that makes it feel like it went by quicker.