Why does time seem to go so much faster as an adult? When we were kids, everything seemed to go on forever.
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I noticed this effect strongly in my teens and late childhood when I compared time passage to what I remembered it was like when I was 6 or 9. Especially when I started working my first job at 19, I was astonished by how fast it felt like time was passing. However, for me at least, time seems to pass at the same rate now (age 39) as it did when I was just out of college (say, age 23.)
I’m sympathetic to the idea that this shortening of time has to do partly with the fact that each day makes up a smaller and smaller percentage of the time we’ve existed as we get older. (At least for the day-to-day and week-to-week scales.. I think something else must be going on to account for the difference in how long it feels like each minute takes to pass, comparing my adult experience to what it was like when I was younger. Especially before I was 6 or so, every minute felt much longer! I think it has to do with our consciousness developing as we age so that it relates much more abstractly to moment-to-moment sensory experience. Taking psilocybin seems to forcibly remove that abstraction and force the consciousness back down to the immediate sense experience – and it does make time pass more slowly in the way I remember from when I was really young.)
Perhaps the fact that the slowing of the passage of time has stopped for me has to do with the fading of detailed, consecutive memory from earlier years – although I’ve been alive for longer, the amount of memory I have from earlier years feels about the same now as it did in my twenties, so each day *feels* like it’s the same percent of my lived experience.
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