Time
speeds up as you get older
by Marcus Loane
3rd October 2010
Does time
seem to speed up as you get older? Most people agree. This is a well recognised
subjective phenomenon. When you were seven years old the summer months seemed to
last forever. As an adult they seem to fly by in what seems like a few weeks.
The older you get the faster the Christmases and birthdays come round each year
and older people find themselves asking, “Where did the years go?”
There are
several attempts at explaining this. One is that we may view a time period as a
proportion of the time already lived. For example when you are seven years old,
one year is a seventh of the sum total of your life span so far so it seems
like a lot, but if you are 70 years old then one year is a seventieth of your
life so it seems less in comparison to all the memories of those years.
Another
theory is that when we are young a lot of our experiences are new to us and our
brains are working hard taking in and processing the new information. As we get
older, more of what we do and experience is repetitive, automatic and familiar.
An older person looking back over the years will not be able to easily
distinguish much between their 7000 commutes to work or 35 vacations to the same
destination. Even the big events such as anniversaries will start to blur into
each other if there are enough of them and they are similar enough. So when
older people look back in time there is a compression effect and this might be
increased by the events that are forgotten too. You may only remember 30% of
what you experienced so it seems like a shorter time when you look back on it.
Is there
anything we can do about this, assuming that we want to? One way to make your
life seem longer when you look back at it would be to pack more novelty into
it. If you worked the same job, lived in the same place, vacationed in the same
place and had the same habits for 40 years, and you celebrated anniversaries in
exactly the same way every year, then when you look back it will seem shorter
because there is less to distinguish one year from another, one week from
another or even one day from another. This works on shorter time scales too. If
you go to work five days a week, come home, eat your dinner, watch TV for a few
hours, go to bed and repeat the whole process then it is hard to distinguish
one day from another. Therefore even on shorter time scales it is worth trying
new things and finding new experiences.
However the
reverse seems to be the case when we get down to a time scale of hours or
minutes. If we are bored or doing a tedious task (every minute is the same) then time seems to go more slowly – it seems like a long time as we look back at the last few
minutes or hours. If we are busy and interested and absorbed in what we are
doing or enjoying ourselves then the minutes fly by.
The good news
is that this works in our favour. If you are busy, interested, absorbed and
enjoying yourself then time will fly by in the short term, but when you look
back on it weeks, months and years later, it will seem longer because you have
packed more into it and there will be a longer line of memories for you to
access.
Have your cake and eat
it by seeking out new experiences.
You can have
your cake and eat it. By seeking out novelty, time will fly by in the short
term (you are enjoying yourself and feeling alive with the newness) yet the
passing of time will seem slower when you look back at it from months and years
later because it is rich with different memories.
--
Marcus Loane
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Having children may affect our relationship with time. Children change a lot from year to year so they may act as a time stamp for our memories of occasions. You can remember that was the year when little Johnny was five for example.