Why does time seem to go faster as we get older?
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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? <Thing> 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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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