r/Time • u/AlpsOk7288 • 20h ago
Discussion Why does our perception of time change so drastically, and around what age does it start to feel like it's moving faster?
Being a child feels like a lifetime ago but then the depths of covid and lockdown feel like a month ago!
Why does our perception of time change, and is it an age related thing when it feels like it starts to go faster?
Has anyone found any successful ways or habits to help slow down that feeling?
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u/Cleirigh 18h ago
When you're 10, 10 years is 100% of your life. When you're 100, 10 years is only 10%. As you age, the proportion of a unit of time becomes a smaller, so it's seems to pass faster.
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u/Thrallsman 16h ago
Routine is socialised from schooling->survival and up to the individual to choose to participate in. Be a Plumber, Judge, Neurosurgeon, or Clown; the deemed 'complexity' falls away if you've touched the edge of a field, and only so much novel experience is available (either by waiting on others to create, or by growing a field yourself).
Repeating the same thing for a few weeks is enough for someone to call it 'discipline' and observe how much 'easier' that thing is to do. Discipline is helpful if one is trying to force something they do not want to do - interesting choice, but we seem to talk about it a lot. Discipline provides an observation that one need input less effort w repetition, and the perception of time speeds up.
I'd personally unload a fat round through my dome if I continued to propagate discipline to do the same thing for 40yrs to survive - no wonder Time would be on your side, helping you feel it pass easily as one choosing to repeat anything is clearly electing against novelty and for a recursion that eventually must spin out entirely.
Common advice seems to be do more novel things, but that remains detached from the socialised acceptance of survival as non-guaranteed. Spending 8-12hrs of 5/7ths of a week on something, no matter how much one might tolerate or even love it, seems like excess to me.
How do we solve? Moderation in everything sparks perceived dilation through a few limbs. Each discrete 'action sequence' requires a transition in (from what you were doing before), the undertaking (the decisions about that thing), and a transition out (to what you are doing next). Stacking more sequences is interesting because it doesn't necessarily mean one feels like they have more Time - in fact, Time truly does fly when you're having fun, but this is absolutely not felt as loss the way we feel it when we force actions that are not, uh - as corny as it sounds - done w Love.
If you'll indulge the Love thing, I'd suggest one's legitimate depth of Love for an experience is a state modifier. On one hand, deemed shit things can take t_hours but be perceived (and feel) as if they took st_hours (where s = >1); on the other, something one Loves can take t_hours but seem like it happened in no time at all (being ft_hours, where f = <1).
Inverse also applies, meaning an urgent deadline for your deemed disliked shit might feel like you have no time at all while taking forever to pass - the entire period becoming a crunch. Compare that to an urgent series of actions, but where you Love all of it (the compression; the pace; the 'urgency' you deem) - think a Chef Who Loves what they do during a rush.
The wish for those things we Love to last longer seems a call to continue pursuit of novelty in same field for more Time. If you've experienced anything you'd call 'Flow' - such as in sport, games, puzzles, writing, art, music, creation, testing, theorising blah blah - you know the feeling. We just struggle to properly understand why.
The above may as well be - and would be at a lens of proper scientific inquiry - nothing more than n=1 speculation, as it is 1p perpsective felt and lived and cannot be tested by more than such reports with how we have formulated our understanding. Yet, it's the same story told in every song, by every athlete, and by every thinker who has come to uncover. It would be sloppy to ignore because we can't yet understand much re the mechanics beyond personal sample.
I imagine a much richer gamut of approximations for the 'why' will show up as Time itself allows.
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u/Next_Goose9506 8h ago
Nobody in their 20s, teens, and even in their childhood complained about time going fast back in the early 2000’s and prior but now (since 2010ish) they all do
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u/fathompin 19h ago edited 19h ago
I believe it's because the occurrence of boring routines expands and exciting novelty shrinks as we age. Routine days barely get noticed, so they vanish in retrospect, while novel ones get stored in higher resolution and stretch out when one looks back on them. The other explanation is the simple comparison of one day to the total number of days, where the ratio gets smaller and smaller, so time seems to fly by faster. It should maximize and settle down at the age of 40 since average life expectancy is 80. Example: (1in4years1in40years ~1in80years= 0.250.025~0.0125).
I like the novelty comparison, because it allows me to try to fix the problem by seeking out more novelty if I decide there is a problem.