Why time seems to pass faster as we age

I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc.

For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps me to feel that there's so much life left to live. Looking back at the phenomenal changes of the last 5 years (or 10), shows me that I can do a lot with the next 5 years.

Novelty and so on may help to "slow" time, but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short, and there is so much change coming - more than you could imagine.

(and I'm horrible at doing it every day, maybe every week or so during slumps)

We're at our computers all day every day. So I just lowered the barrier to entry with a few bash tricks. It's helped me keep the habit up.

https://jodavaho.io/tags/bullet-journal.html

Now, I review 1, 5, and 10 years ago every day, to re-live my life from those years, so to speak:

    # list dates from 10 years ago +/3 3 days
    # get years and day range from args
    echo "### $years years ago"
    for i in `seq -w -$days $days`
    do
      olddate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%Y-%m-%d`  
      longdate=`date -d "$years years ago $i days" +%A\ %B\ %d,\ %Y`
      echo "### $olddate.md ($longdate)"
      cat $olddate.md
    done

One thing I love about the speedup of time is that picking a compounding habit (say, doing something for 10 minutes each day) feels like having an almost instant pay-off.

"Oh wow 3 years already passed" -> "Oh wow I got pretty good at this thing I picked up just yesterday"

I picked up biking during the pandemic, and 3 years later I have legs of steel, 10k miles under my belt, and people know me as "the bike guy", when I think of myself as "ok this biking thing is kind of fun".

I’ve learned that the passage of time is extremely relative. My college years were extremely full of new experiences and they feel like ages. Once I started working, my life was very rote and consisted mainly of driving from home to work and back again. I worked a lot of hours and vacations and weekend trips were infrequent. Time flew by.

Then I ditched settled life and started traveling year round with a couple of bases i spend more time in between traveling. I’ve learned that the change in environment keeps putting the mind back into a more neuroplastic state where we are more open to the experiences around us, can change our habits more easily and just generally turn off autopilot for awhile.

I’ve been doing this for about 9 years. It’s been like a century. I feel like a very different person then when I started. I have some friends who still live in the same city at the same job that I left originally and it absolutely blows my mind that they stood still while it feels like I went to Mars and back.

There is already a body of research on the perception of time as a function of age, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#Changes_with_a....

It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.)

In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)

I've always rationalised it as:

When you're one years old, 1 year is your whole life.

When you're 100 years old, 1 year is 1/100th of your life.

One very simple explanation I’ve read is that time perception (as time itself) is relative. Time goes slower when you are a child because your perception of time is relative to the totality of time you’ve experienced.

So for instance, when you go from 1 to 2yrs old, it’s double the amount of your entire life, but from 80 to 81 it’s just a small fraction.

Not sure if this has been proven or is even possible to prove.

I think mediation and gratefulness is a good way around this too.

If your take explicit time to recognize and examine the world around you, even in your backyard, time seems to stretch and you notice and retain more.

I’m lucky enough to have lots of different colored birds show up in my backyard, so sometimes I sit out there and wait for them.

It’s not exciting, but every time I see one it’s a new memory and those new memories make time feel more.

I'm also obsessed with this and have mostly countered it so far by moving house every few years, living and studying in several countries and trying new things. The negative being that I don't have any stability.

Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.

Nice hypothesis. I've always thought that it had to do with the percentage of life already spent. When you're a teen, an afternoon counts as 0,004% of your whole life thus far. In your mid 30's, it gets down to 0,001%. So to me it's only fair that it feels to pass four times faster now. But this is just a random thought.

I don't agree that it does. Something I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it feels like time is passing more slowly. My late 30s is when time felt like it passed the fastest.

On the other hand, if you're talking about "that happened two years ago, but it feels like it was yesterday" I agree. I don't think that's what the post is talking about.

This is one of those things that seems true, but is it? They’ve presented no evidence whatsoever. Even the question itself carries with it an assumption. Does time seem to pass faster as we age? I bet you could find some people for whom it does not.

I think this blog post of mine from 2007 gives a better (or at least more succinct) answer to this question: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life

I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated.

I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. All I can tell you is "they are sponges" is a common description. It blows me away they can learn how to recognise faces, walk, speak a language in the space of a few years.

As a kid I recall getting bored very easily. I needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed my brain.

As a young adult I recall a friend asking me to look up a telephone book to find the a persons address. I got back to the car and told them the address. "Oh", they said "I must have the spelling wrong, try ...". No problem, I remembered every name and address on the page I've just seen.

But as I grew older, remembering stuff came less easily. Now at over 60, if I put in a situation where I'm forced to remember a while pile of new stuff I feel distinctly uncomfortable, whereas before I was better at it than most.

And during all that time, the passage of time has sped up. Ergo, my theory is I gauge the amount of time that has passed between events X and Y by the number of memories accumulated in the period.

I think it is much simpler. When you are 4 years old, a year us a quarter of your life. When you ate 40, it is a mere 2.5%.

Comparatively, that difference is huge: a year is far more significant to the child than to the adult.

I have been able to avoid this by just immediately switching to something else when I feel things are getting too comfy. Doing things that are not comfortable seem to stretch time for me. It works so well that for me (at 50) time is moving incredibly slowly and I like it that way.

1. Time is, literally, relative. We have nothing to compare things to when we are young, so everything takes for-ev-eeeeer.

2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar.

Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.

I feel that as children your experience is lot more variable... Every year of school or even university is slightly different, but once you get to work life many years can mostly be same or at least weeks and months...

On other hand I am sure there is some difference with perception of time when you get older and you will handle boredom better or can take something nap like just easier...

If anyone’s keen to journal on iOS, I’m looking for beta testers! No login, social, tracking, etc. Saves to plain text.

https://xenodium.com/an-ios-journaling-app-powered-by-org-pl...

I assumed it was just short term memory loss perceived as a framerate

No mention of energy? I think energy plays a big role because your movement and energy literally becomes less and less each year. At 80 you don't have much energy, forget about any other thing

See also Greek chronos versus kairos:

It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time,[2] kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos

The ancient Greeks recognized the difference between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception

I have a memory from my childhood that still makes me smile.

At six years old I have been told that old people tend do sleep less.

So I went to my father and asked: "Daddy, why do old people sleep so little?"

He looked at me and said: "Because in a way they always sleep".

I try to balance my life between new and exciting experiences and more routine and mundane experiences. The routine and mundane are important. They are how I maintain my important relationships and pay the bills. But when it all becomes routine, time will fly by regardless of age (at least for adults). But my sense of time reliably slows to a crawl if I have enough new stimulus. And the older I have gotten (40's currently) the more I have gone out of my way to purposefully generate experiences that slows things down.

I lived abroad for 2 months a few years back and it felt like 6 months. I moved states not long after and once again, massive slowdown. That first year in a new city felt like three. New relationships can do the same thing. As can new jobs or, even more so, a career change. And let's not forget drugs.

But those are all things a person can completely avoid if they don't make a conscious effort not to. My default for many years was to sit snuggly at a boring job, travel only intermittently and otherwise immerse myself in repetitive media. I refer to those as the lost years (mid-to-late 20's).

A year as a 36-year-old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

You think that's fast? Just wait till you're over 75!

Does it? Not if you switch away from the 9-5 routine. Daily work makes life feel fast, as do routines of all kinds, family kids etc. Switching to on-demand employment leaves a ton of opportunities for our attention to drift away and travel.

It s true that novelty is rewarding. When mice are placed in a novel environment, their neurons become more excitable, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with subjective perception of time

It is a progression:

year 1 = 100% of your life year 2 = 50% of your life year 3 = 33% of your life ... year 10 = 10% of your life ... year 50 = 2% of your life

etc.

Let T be the life span and t be the age. Let s = T - t.

Remark 1: dt / s is small when t is small.

Remark 2: Perception of s (call it p) is in reality a function of t. For small t, p(t) is perceived to be near infinity. For t > 40, p(t) rapidly decays to a small number.

My father in law opined that life is a toilet paper roll. It spins faster towards the end

Watching my children, they appear to have more time. I expect it is not so much that time seems to pass faster, but that as you age you move into loftier goals that take longer.

Modern society and work makes people have less free time to form memories. Certainly, people felt time is running fast even in older times but I doubt if time ran faster at the same rate for people from say 50s as much as it is for us today?

I wonder if the way the author describes it, ie. new memories are just diffs against older experiences, is scientifically grounded.

I came up with another explanation: My thought processes have slowed, so the world has sped up, relative to myself.

Is there scientific evidence for either explanation?

My thought has always been that the ratio of lifetime to any given sublifetime unit of time is always increasing, leading to a change in relative experience. But if you focus on the fact that a second is constant, you always have the same amount of time right now.

This is the part I found most interesting about the first few episodes of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" anime. The main character is an elf. In this world elves are rare so she hasn't see another in 100s of years. Time for her passes differently than humans. She's got 1000s of years so for her, spending 10yrs in some library researching a hobby topic is not a big commitment. For her human friends it would be a large portion of their life. She commits to multi-year projects easily (10 years of a 5000 year life is 1/500th of your life vs a human where it's more like 1/8th). And, she watches her human friends pass away. Societies form and collapse. Etc...

Recently I've been listening to the song "Time and I" by Jukebox the Ghost on this very topic.

This is a lot of speculation about the brain and how memories are recorded, by someone with no apparent training on the subject, and with no sources cited.

Maybe they're right. But I'd prefer more reliable sources, which other commenters here have provided.

it's just simple math, when you're 1 year old 1 year is the totality of your experience, when you're 2 years, it's half, etc.

The explanation is probably simple in the end: children are mentally more present and mindful, and thus bored, and as adults we become increasingly distracted by higher order thoughts and projections and plans so we're considerably less mindful of the present.

I think long periods of time are experienced logarithmically, with a base of around 2. So the period from, say, 10 to 20 years is comparable to the period from 20 to 40 years, and then 40 to 80 years. The seasons really start to zoom by at my age. (I'm in my late 50's.)

This sounds highly rational and also comes across to me as completely wrong.

I have maintained a fairly tight circle of friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. One of the patterns that stands out very strongly is the high variability in the perception of time. Those who have settled into a routine such as a relationship that endures and work that remains highly similar even if the company and title change tend to experience this time flying by effect strongly. Others who have had major complications to deal with like relationships coming and going, medical problems, big changes to location, fundamental changes in work situation and so on end to have a critical time slowing effect. Coming to grips with big changes and getting settled again requires a lot of attention and work and does not allow for a relaxed grip on life events. Try getting mugged, dumped, fired, sick, and then moving somewhere unfamiliar and you might find this time passing faster effect disappears, if only until adjustments are made.

This implies the whole effect may be about how humans must focus when pushed but then tend to zoom out and ease up when ongoing attempts to steady themselves are successful. Reminds me of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/).

Yesterday I watched a video that described a two-dimensional grid where the x and y axes were “skill” and “challenge” respectively. A range surrounding y=x was the flow state. Below it was boredom (skills exceed demands) and above it was anxiety (demands exceed skills). Flow arises when our skills align to what we must do; not something easy, not something hard. The presenter also noted that amount of time in flow correlated with life satisfaction, and that it’s also when people do their best work, and time moves the fastest.

That’s the sweet spot to be. Where life is challenging, so you aren’t bored, but not so challenging to where you are overwhelmed. It seems the author urges people to flip from the boredom side of the flow state to the anxiety side because both of those are where time feels like an eternity (which anyone who has been in either of those states can attest to). I think a better idea is to question if what the author is proposing, trying to make time feel slower, is a good idea. Personally, I think the exact opposite is the case; all the best moments I’ve had are ones that went by “too quick”, and we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Time going by slowly is likely a canary in the coal mine for something being wrong.

I always thought of it as each unit of time being relatively shorter in relation to your life on earth. A year is 20% of the time a 5-year old is aware of, but only 2% of a 50-year olds life. But the boredom argument is pretty strong. I remember vividly the time when I moved to another country and those first three months still feel like they lasted longer than the last three years.

It would be interesting to know when the subjective midpoint of your life is. I mean, if you lived to 80, and time seemed to speed up as you get older, is the subjective middle of your lifespan more like age 35, or more like age 25? I recognize it's impossible to answer this question from inside a life, but I have wondered it many times.

Nah

Actually we do have very little time, its just that the upswing and downswing have different feels to it. You might have noticed this even when you are driving for a vacation. Drive to the picnic spot feels like an eternity, drive back home feels quick.

There are ~52 weeks a year. Which makes a week 2% of a year. That's already a fast enough tick. Weeks do go by fast. An year is like 10% of a decade. Once you are past the age of 40. You indeed have little time left.

Human life is short if you are doing remotely well in life. It can be a suffering if you are not doing great.

it might be because schools are just more interesting than adult existence. Everyone comes from all walks of life and all you seem to think is to have fun (and other wholesome things)

Take on projects that you have no idea about.

The idea of high correlation between predictability and time flying is interesting.

I'm working on patenting an idea and have filed the provisional. This gives me exactly 1 year to file the full application. There's so many unknowns between now and then which has me very aware of time and actively wanting to slow it down.

I'm not certain it always applies though. I've definitely had periods of high unpredictability where I enjoyed what I was doing and it didn't seem to go by slow at all.

Dopamine also plays a role in the perception of time. Basically, high dopamine gives more processing power it means you get higher frame rates so time feels slower. similarly, low dopamine leads to time flying quickly. Moreover, the speed at which we blink eyes also affects the perception of time.

(Learned this in one huberman podcast)

I think that the older you get, the less new milestones/events you have (that impress you and remember in detail). This results in having less moments to refer to when looking back in time, (skipping uneventful timespans). This makes things seem closer to the current time than they really are as everything in between is empty noise.

My way to slow down time is using git to write a diary with every day is a commit.

I try to be careful not fall on the fallacy that "I get it" and draw assumptions about things.

If not, after your pass your 50s time turns into blurring mashup of deja-vu's and the feeling that you are Fred Flinstone rolling in my Flintmobile while the background scenery, the houses, the palm trees and buildings repeat every 3 seconds.

My dad (who is in his late seventies) told me that while years seems to pass faster and faster with age, the future is still as far away, as it has always been.

Seems like time goes the same for me. I don’t ever do the same thing each day, I don’t keep a routine or show up consistently and sort of follow my interests and they change constantly. This makes me utterly incompatible with most people but I kind of like this more, I want to enjoy life as it comes. I am in no rush.

I wonder if people who daily reflect on their day and write in a journal experience time passing more slowly?

I’ve heard that time seems to pass faster because it is such a smaller percentage of our life. For a 2 year old, 1 year is 50% of their life. For a 100 year old, 1 year is 1% of their life.

In my early and mid 30s, as a result of visionary experiences, my experience of "lived time" changed. In general, moments lasts a lot longer.

This doesn't really have to do with the brain becoming a better prediction machine so much as how mindful and present you are in the moment. While it is true that doing the same things over and over creates habits (ruts) of the mind, the practice of mindfulness reverses this.

These days (in my early 40s), when I spar with swords, time stretches out by a lot. Especially during tournaments.

LSD can put you in a childlike state, increasing neuroplasticity.

"My grandfather used to say: 'Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride.'"

- Franz Kafka, The Next Village

Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth).

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

This post is extremely speculative and the author stretches the CS analogies way, way too far, but the gist is reasonably accurate. Time does pass faster on average as you get older because our brain doesn't bother to record repeated experiences.

But guess what? That means that all you have to do to make time pass more slowly is bring more novelty into your life. I can say from personal experience that the year I spent living abroad seemed to go on forever. Every single day was filled with new experiences. There was a huge amount of continuous novelty and learning and growth. It was really nice. I need to move to a new country again.

I had some very long periods of intense suffering over the last decade. After... a lot, I'm in a much better place now.

I made some minor lifestyle changes to make things a bit easier on myself, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of my days are largely the same.

However, life moves much more slowly now. When I get to the end of a week, Monday seems quite a long time ago.

I'm not sure about the predictability thesis. The way I think about it is that I have no expectations from life anymore; I take what I can get, give what I can, and focus on one day at a time. I think this more than anything has contributed to a feeling of my life slowing way down.

I always thought it was because it's a ratio of how long we've been here, at 10 a year is an eternity, it's 10% of your life - you could do so much during the 6 weeks of summer holiday.

At 48 a year is just over 2% of your life, it's so fast almost supersonic.

We've known this for over a decade at least https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flie...

I was always told it's because as you age a year becomes a smaller portion of your life. When you are 35 a year is 1/35th of your life, compared to 1/5th as a 5 year old.

Another explanation: https://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html

I think with these things it helps to reflect. If you reflect you can either glean the truth about it or make up some intuition that is instrumentally useful. I think a lot of use manage to reach some wisdom milestones completely independently by just reflecting.

And if you are concerned about this feeling of time going by faster: being less of a tunnel-visioned adult who is mostly focused on the extrinsic can maybe counteract this feeling.

I came here to see what the 60 somethings have to say - the comments are from 30 somethings. The 30 somethings feeling old are in for a ride.

It's also the reason going back feels much faster despite the fact you're exhausted and probably walking/biking slower. You know the route so you switch to automatic more often and remember less.

According to this book: https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power... , it basically happens because the number of snapshots you encode per second goes down. Snapshots are visual cues that we encode. The best example is that if we are watching a fan start, after a certain speed, we cannot tell how many wings are there on the fan. We are not snapshotting fast enough. Younger people can probably tell the number of wings on a faster fan :). Various things slow down this snapshotting in our brain, and the best antidote is to get in the zone and do things with immense attention.

The vsauce video on time reminds me of this thread

This touches the personal topic of life choices and I find many posts here inspiring.

I'm striving for not causing harm to others, avoiding things that lead to ill mental states like compulsion or anger, seeking things that lead to healthy mental states like calmness and focus.

This seems to be a boring life from the outside, but doesn't feel like that to me. Maybe because I've got enough challenges. Time perception is not important to me.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls it 'Zenosyne' [0], or the sense that time keeps going faster. I quite like it and have found myself coming back to rewatch it every couple years.

[0] = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgyEmYyQF4

The concept of tolerance is most often used in the context of drugs, but it applies here too.

I wonder if prisoners feel the same way.

I think time seems to pass by quickly because as we get older we get busier with family, work, children, spouse, friends, a few side interests etc.

I remember discussing this in Psychology about a decade ago.

Supposedly it's quite a bit to do with routine and not having new experiences.

My advice: Start a company. Every day is a new adventure.

You all should checkout https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time

It explains and illustrates why time flies so well, love that site.