Why does time seem to go faster as we get older?
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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 recommend the first episode of the podcast Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. He’s a neuroscientist and he addresses this very question.
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.
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.
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.
I recommend the first episode of the podcast Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman. He’s a neuroscientist and he addresses this very question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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