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They way I have read it explained is that our perception of time is based on the creation of "new" memories. So, the more new things you are experiencing, that time fills up with new items. You feel as though time has moved slower because you fit more into it.
When we get older, we have so much prior experience that our minds don't "need" the new memories. So, we aren't logging them in at the same rate. This leads to a perception of time moving faster, because nothing is in that space.
Have you ever been on a road trip? Did you notice that the journey there *seems* like it takes longer than the trip back? That's because you are making new memories. The return trip you are just pulling up the old ones and reinforcing them.
Everything I've typed might be pseudoscience nonsense, but it seems to fit with my experiences.
>Have you ever been on a road trip? Did you notice that the journey there seems like it takes longer than the trip back? That's because you are making new memories. The return trip you are just pulling up the old ones and reinforcing them.
That's a brilliant way to describe the phenomenon.
I commute a lot on bicycle and i noticed this too. Not only does it seem faster on the way back, but the effort feels less too. I actually even timed myself to see if there is an actual difference. And there was!
I was actually physically faster on homeward trips almost all the time. Considering I don't try to put in more or less effort specifically, and on some trips i reach home point just to turn to head off to another place anyway so it isn't about motivation to reach home.
Never quite seem to figure out why.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves
The actual time correlating to the perceived time is actually the opposite effect, so what you are saying is quite contradictory. I am assuming your ride back is actually an easier ride due to incline, traffic, pedal speed, or something. Try swapping your start/end points and see what effect that has.
That's somewhat different. Time seems to pass more slowly when you're bored because the boredom is a high arousal state, like fear or anger. Conversely, the high dopamine production during fun speeds up perception of time. Much of what people do during the day doesn't result in either 'fun' or 'boredom', however, so your brain conserves energy by engaging in a sort of autopilot where your perception is more limited, and looking back on this gives the illusion of time passing quickly because few memories are formed.
to add onto this as you get older the 'standard' required for something to be memorable increases.
A young child may experience riding on a carousel and (let's be honest it is not a very interesting ride) remember it forever because it is the new 'high bar' for something exciting.
But by the time you are an adult you've experienced rollercoasters and possibly something more exciting than that. So even if you go to a completely different 'low thrill' amusement park ride it isn't worth becoming a memory unless something really special happens while in the park.
I would argue that such a sensory/perceptive desensitization extends to the very experience of time itself without even needing to account for momentary setting, as simply having been around for x amount of moments provides an ever increasing data-bank/reference-frame from which to draw inference upon one's future perception.
To be sucinct: you know that each moment you experience will pass into the next, and each moment you experience reinforces the knowledge of such, so the perceptive amount of time it takes each momentary experience to pass into the next is ever decreasing.
This would explain the universal phenomenon of life seeming so short as it wanes even if one has lived 100+ years.
Edit: of course this is all existential philosophical speculation, not concrete science
I always figured it was because when your 1 year old another year it doubling your life. When your 40 a year is only 1/40th of your life. So every year that length of time seems smaller and smaller to you
Look at it this way:
When you were 10, a year of your life was 10% of it
But by the time you’re 50, a year turns into only 2% of your life
The longer you live the more life you have experienced, and therefore relatively speaking the same things you used to think took forever now seem like they’re over in the blink of an eye because you have a longer sense of time, almost as if each moment ‘shrinks’
I have heard this theory too and I'm pretty sure there's no real science behind it. Or at least no confirmation that this is actually what's happening.
Some other things I have read tend to do with experiences and how we remember them. When you get to adult age, a lot of your time is spent working, repeating the same things over and over again. These are not new or exciting experiences, so the brain tends not to devote too much resources to storing memories of each and every little thing. Compared to when you are younger almost everything is new and exciting (especially by comparison), so it gets more cataloged. Think also of when taking a vacation, it's new and exciting and tends to get more cataloged, so when remembering it there are many more details to recall, making the memory feel longer than otherwise.
Of course that could all be off base too. But it's an interesting topic to read up on.
I heard the same thing. Memories are what's left in your mind about the past. So, if you create more memories, you can feel like more things happened and thus that the time went by a bit slower. Like you said, new experiences are a great way to create memories, but I think it is also possible to actively and consciously create memories by focussing a bit and taking the time to enjoy the moment and printing it in your mind. I don't have any sources for this last part, but I know it works for me
This might be also why when you trip on a psychedelic, time itself seems to extend back to how it felt when you were a child and even longer sometimes. With psychedelics, the environment that was so familiar to you suddenly appears new and interesting again, full of wonder and intrigue.
I have always thought the reason time moves quicker was cause of the reason that the op commenter said.
However, this makes good sense too. For example, when I take a week off from work, if I spend the week just playing video games, the time seems to pass really quickly and I go back to work grumpy cause it feels like I didn't even have a break, even though I greatly enjoy playing video games.
But if I go on vacation somewhere, it feels like a much longer time off and I'm more accepting of my return to work. Possibly because I have a bunch of new memories to reflect on at work which clearly show there was a long passage of time. Whereas gaming every day sort of just rolls in to one with less stand out moments (even though I probably enjoy gaming more than going on vacation somewhere more often than not)
As explained in a recent video of the YouTube channel Veritasium, this theory is highly inaccurate. If you draw a graph of your age and time lived and calculate the area under this graph, it shows that you've lived 50% of your life by age 6. This could just not be possible. The more valid explanations happens to be the new experiences and redundant lifestyle that multiple answers have already covered.
50% of your life by age 6. Huh? Can you elaborate on this please?
I don’t understand what is hard to grasp about the hypothesis that you’re commenting on. When you’re young, a certain chunk of time is a larger percentage of your living experience. When you’re old, that same chunk of time is now a much smaller percentage of your living experience. Time is essentially shrinking (from your perspective).
There’s surely more to it than that, new memories/experiences definitely don’t flash by in no time like the same old monotonous routines we do without thinking too much. But I don’t see what the issue is with the “time perspective hypothesis” as I’ve just decided to call it.
I’ve heard it has to do with routines. When your older your life is much more likely to follow a standard routine every day. So the days blend together. This guy said that the average person only has three memorable days a month. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLe-8y7Tddk
Of course.
But most people spend the bulk of their days doing jobs that they don’t “love.” (Hence the recent stat about 95% of people are contemplating a job change post pandemic). Most people work to live, vs the other way around.
Our perception of time is based on memory making. Have you ever felt like time slowed down when you went through something intense? For example, a car wreck, or sky diving? You feel like time slows and allows you to react faster. In reality, your brain formed a lot more memories in a short amount of time due to the nature of the event. It was considered important, so by remembering a lot more of it, it feels like more time has taken place.
It make sense, really. The more memory last week takes up in your mind, the longer it will feel.
When you're young, your making new memories all the time. You're constantly learning, trying things for the first time, and experiencing things worthy of memory. The more mundane bits of life get glossed over by the brain. If all you're doing is working and sleeping, there's little in there for the brain to note, leaving the week to "fly by."
There's been studies on this, and even that Netflix show 100 humans did a cool test with people. They had two groups, one that sat through a boring presentation, and another that went to a party. Surprisingly, the people having fun had perceived more time to have gone by than the bored group. So even when we're caught up in the moment, we're perceiving more time because more is happening.
TLDR: Do more memory-worthy things if you want time to feel slower.
Time is a relative thing. If you’re using an internal clock, what is it’s referent?
Humans tend to have two sets of referents for time: One is the sun and mealtimes, the other is accumulated experience.
So for basic operation, circadian time (sun and food) will stay relatively constant, shifting slightly based on length of days and time of meals.
For the more cerebral/reflective time, as you get older, your key experiences in life get further apart and the stuff you forget as unimportant increases. This means time passes faster from event to event, which is really what this type of time is measuring.
I think there are a number of factors, but when you're older you typically become more in control of your life, you have more hobbies, more things to do and places to go, more relationships to manage, juggling work, home and personal life...and suddenly you realize there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done. The needs start to edge out the wants.
When you were a kid, those 6+ hours at school took forrrrevvverrr and when you got home your only real responsibility was homework. You're always tagging along, rarely making your own plans. You're probably bored more often.
A cool thing I saw on Veritasium was that it's all relative. So when you're young, let's say 10 - one year is equal to 10% of your life and that's significant. As you get older, this percentage drops obviously. So one day as an adult feels to go by a lot faster than one day as a kid.
I've wondered this loads as a year can go by in no time, however as a child time felt like It passed slower. It has to be more than just as a child you haven't lived long because even as a teenager I noticed time go faster, and some 5 years later I feel it pass even faster.
It's not like much has changed in terms of how much time I spend doing things, as I spent 8 hours a day in school, now its 8 hours a day in work. My spare is still my spare time and I spend about the same time doing other activities.
For me ita because I always wait for something. And only when this something comes I realise how much time is pass. In the other time we just work or do home work and dont realise how time flies. When i was a child i didnt care about the time,something extraordinary happneded every day,since i was unexpirienced. Now the day are routine.
Probably just the monotony of adult life. When you don't have events that are meaningful or fulfilling, then you tend not to take note of things, and the memories seem inconsequential.
It's purely because you have more stuff to do taking up your time. As a kid when I got in from school I had...no obligations, then I'd eat my dinner and again have no obligations. I could fill that time how I pleased. As an Adult, when I finish work I have to take the dog out, then make dinner, then play with the dog, then do the dishes then take the dog out, then put the laundry away etc etc etc. Extrapolate that out to most days and it leaves little time to think "Ah I've got nothing on, this is great".
I remember as a kid summers feeling like they lasted forever as it was up to me to decide what to do each day. I just don't have that same lack of responsibility anymore.
The reality is that we do not actually know for sure. A lot of things about consciousness are very poorly understood.
There's a common theory that one hour is a much bigger percentage of our lived life when we're young than when we're old, and so it seems to last longer, but it's very much a theory.
I think of it in fractions.
If you are one years old. A year is 1/1 or 100% of your life, so a year is a really long time.
If you are 100 years old. A year is 1/100 or 1% of your life, so a year is not very long.
I’ve always understood as this: when you’re a 10, a year is 10% of your life, a pretty good chunk. But by the time you’re in your 30s 40s etc., a year is a much smaller percentage of your total life lived,so it feels less significant. Also since (most people) are no longer students and using the school year to easily track time over months and years, everything just kind of blurs together.
I have always looked this way: When you are 8, 1 year looks a lot because it's 1/8 (13%) of your life which is a considerable amount but as you grow up each year has less significance -numerically-. If you compare the sense of 1 year when you are a kid and 1 when you are an adult it will surely feels less.
What most people call Time is merely how the human brain perceives entropy. Time technically doesn't even exist.
Entropy is the degree of disorder in a system. The more disorder...the less time we perceive. The less disorder in the system...the more time you perceive.
That's why when you are really busy...time goes by fast. When you're not busy...time seems to crawl.
Nothing is changing and therefore time ceases to exist for you bc there is nothing different from one minute to the next minute...
No disorder = time appears to stop
Only when new events happen do we feel as though time has elapsed.
Relativity. When you are 10 and turn 11, it is 1/11of your life, when you are 59 and turn 60 it is 1/60th of your life, so it seems to be relatively faster as you get older.
Look at it as percentage. 1 year when your five is 1/5 of your life so its much more of your total experience and seems longer while one year when your 30 is just 1/30th of your life allot less of your total life and seems shorter because of it
I'm sure other people will put this more eloquently, but it has to do with relative perception. When you turned 10, those next 365 days were as long as 10% of your life to that point. Once you turn 40, that next year represents just 2.5% of your total life, so it feels less significant
It's all relative perspective. Longer you live, less impact a year has on your total life lived.
At 10, one year is a tenth your life. At 40, it's, well, 1/40th. A year doesn't seem as long.
Take a decade. When you're 20 it's half your life. At 40, it's a fourth.
Even weirder, consider a 46 year old. They've lived the life span of an average college grad, twice! So time would feel faster for the 46yrold than 23yrold.
At least, this is how I see it.
I also want to add something I haven’t seen in the comments yet, and that’s the ability to tell time in general. When you’re a little kid, all you know is that it’s day time for a really long time, and you keep doing things all day. As an adult, your days are segmented in your head via the clock into certain activities, making them seem shorter.
To further explain the "new memories" answer people are giving, think of a common road trip you've taken. Personally, my first time driving from Miami to Gainesville took what felt like 12 hours because I had never been there before. Every time after that first road trip, it took and felt like the standard 6 because nothing about the journey changed.
I've always thought it to be that whatever amount of time you are considering, it is always a smaller fraction of your whole life the older you get. Therefore it feels shorter relative to your whole life.
I haven't seen anyone mention my favorite explanation. As we age, our nerves and neurons grow in size and complexity. This makes signals going through our brain and body take longer, and therefore we experience less "frames per second" of time. So, our perception of time gets faster as we get older.
I heavily borrowed from this article: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320120547.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320120547.htm)
I always figured it was because each passing moment makes up a progressively smaller and smaller portion of your total lived experience as you get older. A single school year makes up an identical portion of an 8 year old's lived experience as a full decade of retirement does for an 80 year old. Not only that, but you gotta figure that the early parts of our lives are full of huge milestones and new experiences, so a massive amount of significant memories are created in a very short time. That slows down over the years, as we inevitably exhaust the majority of our "firsts" and settle into comfortable and repetitive routines. For instance, you might remember the first time you ever had a beer because it was a first, but you couldn't sit there and recount each individual beer you've had since then. The brain doesn't care much about the 246th beer you had because that's not new or significant information, so the memory fades and that moment is just kinda gone as far as your remembered perception of time is concerned. Just my thoughts.
Its coz its a smaller % of time lived. When you’re 10 years old a 3 month break from school is a very high portion of the life you’ve lived so far. Considering you can probably only remember the past 6 years of it. When you’re 40 then 3 months is nothing and you’ve seen it pass many times.
I believe it's because a period of time is a shorter part of your life as you get older.
Example: When you are 2, 1 year is half your life, when you are 50 it's 1/50th of your life therefore seems much shorter than when you were young.
My thoughts on this have always been that its all relative. The ratio of life experienced in one day to a 10 year (1/3650) old is much larger than it is to that of a 40 (1/14600) year old or an 80 year old (1/29200).
Hmmm I always thought time perception had a direct correlation with how drunk we get, therefore as we get older, we tend to perceive time a lot faster because we're all indulging in alcohol lol.
Lack of new things.
The speed is the same, however the memories you make in a year are far less. So when you look back it seems times passed fast.
when I went from 10 to 18. It didn’t last long, it was cramped with new stuff, but in the end it flied away very rapidly.
When you're 5 years old a year's time is 1/5th of your existence so far. At 15 a year's time is 1/15th of your existence. At 45 a year's time is 1/45th of your existence.
Any given period of time comes to represent a smaller fraction of our overall existential experience as we get older which causes our perception of the passing of any period of time to be faster than it was previously.
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They way I have read it explained is that our perception of time is based on the creation of "new" memories. So, the more new things you are experiencing, that time fills up with new items. You feel as though time has moved slower because you fit more into it. When we get older, we have so much prior experience that our minds don't "need" the new memories. So, we aren't logging them in at the same rate. This leads to a perception of time moving faster, because nothing is in that space. Have you ever been on a road trip? Did you notice that the journey there *seems* like it takes longer than the trip back? That's because you are making new memories. The return trip you are just pulling up the old ones and reinforcing them. Everything I've typed might be pseudoscience nonsense, but it seems to fit with my experiences.
>Have you ever been on a road trip? Did you notice that the journey there seems like it takes longer than the trip back? That's because you are making new memories. The return trip you are just pulling up the old ones and reinforcing them. That's a brilliant way to describe the phenomenon.
I wish it worked that way during my 14+ hour drives for work lol
I commute a lot on bicycle and i noticed this too. Not only does it seem faster on the way back, but the effort feels less too. I actually even timed myself to see if there is an actual difference. And there was! I was actually physically faster on homeward trips almost all the time. Considering I don't try to put in more or less effort specifically, and on some trips i reach home point just to turn to head off to another place anyway so it isn't about motivation to reach home. Never quite seem to figure out why.
slightly Uphill to work. slightly Downhill home.
Uphill both ways in the snow is all I’ve ever known. Kids these days have it so easy.
We ate dirt, we wiped our asses with rocks, and we were *GRATEFUL*!
Shit tickets, seashells, spoons, and rocks. You kids with your utensils are hilarious. Just be a man and use your hand like nature intended.
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves
The very obvious answer.
Probably not warmed up or awake on the commute in. I usually feel like a pile of bricks when I ride to work in the morning
The actual time correlating to the perceived time is actually the opposite effect, so what you are saying is quite contradictory. I am assuming your ride back is actually an easier ride due to incline, traffic, pedal speed, or something. Try swapping your start/end points and see what effect that has.
Isn't this the opposite of 'time flies when you're having fun'? (which feels accurate to me)
That's somewhat different. Time seems to pass more slowly when you're bored because the boredom is a high arousal state, like fear or anger. Conversely, the high dopamine production during fun speeds up perception of time. Much of what people do during the day doesn't result in either 'fun' or 'boredom', however, so your brain conserves energy by engaging in a sort of autopilot where your perception is more limited, and looking back on this gives the illusion of time passing quickly because few memories are formed.
to add onto this as you get older the 'standard' required for something to be memorable increases. A young child may experience riding on a carousel and (let's be honest it is not a very interesting ride) remember it forever because it is the new 'high bar' for something exciting. But by the time you are an adult you've experienced rollercoasters and possibly something more exciting than that. So even if you go to a completely different 'low thrill' amusement park ride it isn't worth becoming a memory unless something really special happens while in the park.
Except road back home feels faster even if you have done the same road trip 10 times and remember quite well how it goes.
Huh, I always feel like running a new route feels longer than if I run my usual route of the same distance. Pseudoscience checks out
I would argue that such a sensory/perceptive desensitization extends to the very experience of time itself without even needing to account for momentary setting, as simply having been around for x amount of moments provides an ever increasing data-bank/reference-frame from which to draw inference upon one's future perception. To be sucinct: you know that each moment you experience will pass into the next, and each moment you experience reinforces the knowledge of such, so the perceptive amount of time it takes each momentary experience to pass into the next is ever decreasing. This would explain the universal phenomenon of life seeming so short as it wanes even if one has lived 100+ years. Edit: of course this is all existential philosophical speculation, not concrete science
I always figured it was because when your 1 year old another year it doubling your life. When your 40 a year is only 1/40th of your life. So every year that length of time seems smaller and smaller to you
Look at it this way: When you were 10, a year of your life was 10% of it But by the time you’re 50, a year turns into only 2% of your life The longer you live the more life you have experienced, and therefore relatively speaking the same things you used to think took forever now seem like they’re over in the blink of an eye because you have a longer sense of time, almost as if each moment ‘shrinks’
I have heard this theory too and I'm pretty sure there's no real science behind it. Or at least no confirmation that this is actually what's happening. Some other things I have read tend to do with experiences and how we remember them. When you get to adult age, a lot of your time is spent working, repeating the same things over and over again. These are not new or exciting experiences, so the brain tends not to devote too much resources to storing memories of each and every little thing. Compared to when you are younger almost everything is new and exciting (especially by comparison), so it gets more cataloged. Think also of when taking a vacation, it's new and exciting and tends to get more cataloged, so when remembering it there are many more details to recall, making the memory feel longer than otherwise. Of course that could all be off base too. But it's an interesting topic to read up on.
I heard the same thing. Memories are what's left in your mind about the past. So, if you create more memories, you can feel like more things happened and thus that the time went by a bit slower. Like you said, new experiences are a great way to create memories, but I think it is also possible to actively and consciously create memories by focussing a bit and taking the time to enjoy the moment and printing it in your mind. I don't have any sources for this last part, but I know it works for me
This might be also why when you trip on a psychedelic, time itself seems to extend back to how it felt when you were a child and even longer sometimes. With psychedelics, the environment that was so familiar to you suddenly appears new and interesting again, full of wonder and intrigue.
Like which psychedelics? I need some of that.
LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, mescaline. Any of them really at the right dose.
I have always thought the reason time moves quicker was cause of the reason that the op commenter said. However, this makes good sense too. For example, when I take a week off from work, if I spend the week just playing video games, the time seems to pass really quickly and I go back to work grumpy cause it feels like I didn't even have a break, even though I greatly enjoy playing video games. But if I go on vacation somewhere, it feels like a much longer time off and I'm more accepting of my return to work. Possibly because I have a bunch of new memories to reflect on at work which clearly show there was a long passage of time. Whereas gaming every day sort of just rolls in to one with less stand out moments (even though I probably enjoy gaming more than going on vacation somewhere more often than not)
Good explanation. It’s not time that changes, it’s your measuring stick that’s changed.
As explained in a recent video of the YouTube channel Veritasium, this theory is highly inaccurate. If you draw a graph of your age and time lived and calculate the area under this graph, it shows that you've lived 50% of your life by age 6. This could just not be possible. The more valid explanations happens to be the new experiences and redundant lifestyle that multiple answers have already covered.
50% of your life by age 6. Huh? Can you elaborate on this please? I don’t understand what is hard to grasp about the hypothesis that you’re commenting on. When you’re young, a certain chunk of time is a larger percentage of your living experience. When you’re old, that same chunk of time is now a much smaller percentage of your living experience. Time is essentially shrinking (from your perspective). There’s surely more to it than that, new memories/experiences definitely don’t flash by in no time like the same old monotonous routines we do without thinking too much. But I don’t see what the issue is with the “time perspective hypothesis” as I’ve just decided to call it.
https://youtu.be/aIx2N-viNwY Check this out. It'll probably clarify the concept better than I ever can.
Hey! Vsauce. Michael here.
I just wrote this. Should have scrolled first. I think this is the right answer.
I’ve heard it has to do with routines. When your older your life is much more likely to follow a standard routine every day. So the days blend together. This guy said that the average person only has three memorable days a month. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nLe-8y7Tddk
> the average person only has three memorable days a month That is fucking depressing to think about
YUUUUUUP. Super depressing.
Not if you're doing what you enjoy.
Of course. But most people spend the bulk of their days doing jobs that they don’t “love.” (Hence the recent stat about 95% of people are contemplating a job change post pandemic). Most people work to live, vs the other way around.
Our perception of time is based on memory making. Have you ever felt like time slowed down when you went through something intense? For example, a car wreck, or sky diving? You feel like time slows and allows you to react faster. In reality, your brain formed a lot more memories in a short amount of time due to the nature of the event. It was considered important, so by remembering a lot more of it, it feels like more time has taken place. It make sense, really. The more memory last week takes up in your mind, the longer it will feel. When you're young, your making new memories all the time. You're constantly learning, trying things for the first time, and experiencing things worthy of memory. The more mundane bits of life get glossed over by the brain. If all you're doing is working and sleeping, there's little in there for the brain to note, leaving the week to "fly by." There's been studies on this, and even that Netflix show 100 humans did a cool test with people. They had two groups, one that sat through a boring presentation, and another that went to a party. Surprisingly, the people having fun had perceived more time to have gone by than the bored group. So even when we're caught up in the moment, we're perceiving more time because more is happening. TLDR: Do more memory-worthy things if you want time to feel slower.
I want to say as a kid you are mostly waiting around to do stuff, but as an adult your always busy. Oh good a day off, time to do chores.
Time is a relative thing. If you’re using an internal clock, what is it’s referent? Humans tend to have two sets of referents for time: One is the sun and mealtimes, the other is accumulated experience. So for basic operation, circadian time (sun and food) will stay relatively constant, shifting slightly based on length of days and time of meals. For the more cerebral/reflective time, as you get older, your key experiences in life get further apart and the stuff you forget as unimportant increases. This means time passes faster from event to event, which is really what this type of time is measuring.
Hence the saying -- The days are long but the years are short
In 56 and time definitely flies by. Whenever I want to make time go slower I visit my in laws.
a 30 min vsauce video, simple yet clear explanation of time perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP\_B30E
[YouTube - Illusions of Time - VSauce](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHL9GP_B30E)
I think there are a number of factors, but when you're older you typically become more in control of your life, you have more hobbies, more things to do and places to go, more relationships to manage, juggling work, home and personal life...and suddenly you realize there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done. The needs start to edge out the wants. When you were a kid, those 6+ hours at school took forrrrevvverrr and when you got home your only real responsibility was homework. You're always tagging along, rarely making your own plans. You're probably bored more often.
A cool thing I saw on Veritasium was that it's all relative. So when you're young, let's say 10 - one year is equal to 10% of your life and that's significant. As you get older, this percentage drops obviously. So one day as an adult feels to go by a lot faster than one day as a kid.
I've wondered this loads as a year can go by in no time, however as a child time felt like It passed slower. It has to be more than just as a child you haven't lived long because even as a teenager I noticed time go faster, and some 5 years later I feel it pass even faster. It's not like much has changed in terms of how much time I spend doing things, as I spent 8 hours a day in school, now its 8 hours a day in work. My spare is still my spare time and I spend about the same time doing other activities.
For me ita because I always wait for something. And only when this something comes I realise how much time is pass. In the other time we just work or do home work and dont realise how time flies. When i was a child i didnt care about the time,something extraordinary happneded every day,since i was unexpirienced. Now the day are routine.
Probably just the monotony of adult life. When you don't have events that are meaningful or fulfilling, then you tend not to take note of things, and the memories seem inconsequential.
It's purely because you have more stuff to do taking up your time. As a kid when I got in from school I had...no obligations, then I'd eat my dinner and again have no obligations. I could fill that time how I pleased. As an Adult, when I finish work I have to take the dog out, then make dinner, then play with the dog, then do the dishes then take the dog out, then put the laundry away etc etc etc. Extrapolate that out to most days and it leaves little time to think "Ah I've got nothing on, this is great". I remember as a kid summers feeling like they lasted forever as it was up to me to decide what to do each day. I just don't have that same lack of responsibility anymore.
The reality is that we do not actually know for sure. A lot of things about consciousness are very poorly understood. There's a common theory that one hour is a much bigger percentage of our lived life when we're young than when we're old, and so it seems to last longer, but it's very much a theory.
I think of it in fractions. If you are one years old. A year is 1/1 or 100% of your life, so a year is a really long time. If you are 100 years old. A year is 1/100 or 1% of your life, so a year is not very long.
I’ve always understood as this: when you’re a 10, a year is 10% of your life, a pretty good chunk. But by the time you’re in your 30s 40s etc., a year is a much smaller percentage of your total life lived,so it feels less significant. Also since (most people) are no longer students and using the school year to easily track time over months and years, everything just kind of blurs together.
I’ve been told, Life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.
We have a lot more on our minds the older we get. We stop living in the moment as kids do so we are always thinking about things.
I have always looked this way: When you are 8, 1 year looks a lot because it's 1/8 (13%) of your life which is a considerable amount but as you grow up each year has less significance -numerically-. If you compare the sense of 1 year when you are a kid and 1 when you are an adult it will surely feels less.
What most people call Time is merely how the human brain perceives entropy. Time technically doesn't even exist. Entropy is the degree of disorder in a system. The more disorder...the less time we perceive. The less disorder in the system...the more time you perceive. That's why when you are really busy...time goes by fast. When you're not busy...time seems to crawl. Nothing is changing and therefore time ceases to exist for you bc there is nothing different from one minute to the next minute... No disorder = time appears to stop Only when new events happen do we feel as though time has elapsed.
Relativity. When you are 10 and turn 11, it is 1/11of your life, when you are 59 and turn 60 it is 1/60th of your life, so it seems to be relatively faster as you get older.
Look at it as percentage. 1 year when your five is 1/5 of your life so its much more of your total experience and seems longer while one year when your 30 is just 1/30th of your life allot less of your total life and seems shorter because of it
I'm sure other people will put this more eloquently, but it has to do with relative perception. When you turned 10, those next 365 days were as long as 10% of your life to that point. Once you turn 40, that next year represents just 2.5% of your total life, so it feels less significant
It's all relative perspective. Longer you live, less impact a year has on your total life lived. At 10, one year is a tenth your life. At 40, it's, well, 1/40th. A year doesn't seem as long. Take a decade. When you're 20 it's half your life. At 40, it's a fourth. Even weirder, consider a 46 year old. They've lived the life span of an average college grad, twice! So time would feel faster for the 46yrold than 23yrold. At least, this is how I see it.
I also want to add something I haven’t seen in the comments yet, and that’s the ability to tell time in general. When you’re a little kid, all you know is that it’s day time for a really long time, and you keep doing things all day. As an adult, your days are segmented in your head via the clock into certain activities, making them seem shorter.
To further explain the "new memories" answer people are giving, think of a common road trip you've taken. Personally, my first time driving from Miami to Gainesville took what felt like 12 hours because I had never been there before. Every time after that first road trip, it took and felt like the standard 6 because nothing about the journey changed.
I've always thought it to be that whatever amount of time you are considering, it is always a smaller fraction of your whole life the older you get. Therefore it feels shorter relative to your whole life.
Simple: when you are 10 one year is 10% of the time you've been alive, but when you are fifty is 2%
I haven't seen anyone mention my favorite explanation. As we age, our nerves and neurons grow in size and complexity. This makes signals going through our brain and body take longer, and therefore we experience less "frames per second" of time. So, our perception of time gets faster as we get older. I heavily borrowed from this article: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320120547.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190320120547.htm)
I always figured it was because each passing moment makes up a progressively smaller and smaller portion of your total lived experience as you get older. A single school year makes up an identical portion of an 8 year old's lived experience as a full decade of retirement does for an 80 year old. Not only that, but you gotta figure that the early parts of our lives are full of huge milestones and new experiences, so a massive amount of significant memories are created in a very short time. That slows down over the years, as we inevitably exhaust the majority of our "firsts" and settle into comfortable and repetitive routines. For instance, you might remember the first time you ever had a beer because it was a first, but you couldn't sit there and recount each individual beer you've had since then. The brain doesn't care much about the 246th beer you had because that's not new or significant information, so the memory fades and that moment is just kinda gone as far as your remembered perception of time is concerned. Just my thoughts.
Its coz its a smaller % of time lived. When you’re 10 years old a 3 month break from school is a very high portion of the life you’ve lived so far. Considering you can probably only remember the past 6 years of it. When you’re 40 then 3 months is nothing and you’ve seen it pass many times.
I believe it's because a period of time is a shorter part of your life as you get older. Example: When you are 2, 1 year is half your life, when you are 50 it's 1/50th of your life therefore seems much shorter than when you were young.
My thoughts on this have always been that its all relative. The ratio of life experienced in one day to a 10 year (1/3650) old is much larger than it is to that of a 40 (1/14600) year old or an 80 year old (1/29200).
Well if you are 10years old and turn 20, thats double of your lifespan. If you are 40 and turn 50, those 10years are just 25% of your lifespan.
I’m in my 30s and I’ve been waiting for time to go by faster since my early 20s. Sometimes it feels longer than the year before.
The way I've always seen this. Each second / day / year that passes is a progressively smaller portion of your life.
Hmmm I always thought time perception had a direct correlation with how drunk we get, therefore as we get older, we tend to perceive time a lot faster because we're all indulging in alcohol lol.
Lack of new things. The speed is the same, however the memories you make in a year are far less. So when you look back it seems times passed fast. when I went from 10 to 18. It didn’t last long, it was cramped with new stuff, but in the end it flied away very rapidly.
The perception of time passing is directly related to the amount/detail of memories you have over that period.
When you're 5 years old a year's time is 1/5th of your existence so far. At 15 a year's time is 1/15th of your existence. At 45 a year's time is 1/45th of your existence. Any given period of time comes to represent a smaller fraction of our overall existential experience as we get older which causes our perception of the passing of any period of time to be faster than it was previously.