I remember being a kid thinking waiting for an event that was 2 weeks away felt like 2 years away.
I remember school days feeling like it dragged on and on.
Now as a working adult, I can’t remember what day is is tomorrow or even today. My days bleeds in together in a good way.
As a kid, having less things to do was a factor. As an adult, you find there’s not enough hours in a day.
How do you remember experiencing time as a child?
In: Biology
All the answers here talk about % of time lifed so far, but that is generally not how our memory works. We don’t have a solid block of time we compare the current passage of time too. It might appear to make sense, but human memory isn’t a hard drive in which we notice that 1 year at 50 now only increases the volume of data by 2%, not doubling it, as it did in our second year.
What is more important is the things that are happening to you and the difference between your “now” perception of time and you retrospective memory of it. In your “now” perception, time can fly by if you’re having fun or are working on something that requires your attention, while it can seem to crawl if there is nothing to do. Ask yourself how time is going on a thursday afternoon in the office, with nothing left to do for the day but the clock still demanding 3 hours of your time be spent in a boring cubicle compared to how a party at which you’re having a blast can seem to last only two hours, when 8 have already elapsed.
But these same memories get handled differently in long term memory. Once that thursday has passed and nothing happened there, your brain (which is not a hard drive just recording every second 1:1) will not keep memories on things that were uneventful, if it was a week like any other you had for the past 10 years, there is no reason to have 500 copies of that week in your head, all perfectly memorized. That is while a day can feel like a drag when living through it, it can feel like weeks passed in an instant.
Thats why time as a kid felt so much longer. Things are constantly changing, you’re learning new concepts in school all the time, you’re aging into new things and aging out of others things, the media and products made for kids are evolving extremely fast and you’re generally not yet acustomed to many things that will become routine once you’re an adult.
I mean, just think about your own life, if the “% of your life” idea were true, why do especially eventful periods of you life seem so long in retrospective, even if there are shorter than longer stretches of calm periods, which seemed like they were over in the blink of an eye?
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