Why does time seem to go faster as we get older?
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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.
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.
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.
Relativity. Each passing day is shorter in relation to the total time passed in previous days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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