wannabenakid247

I did a search for this subject and couldn't find anything but sorry if this question has already been asked.


How come it seems that the older you get the quicker your life goes.

I was thinking the other day that the last half of my life has gone much quicker than the first half. When i was a kid everything seemed to go slower. Now i am getting older it seems like my life is going faster and faster.

This is really scary because my mum said when i asked her about it that it would just get worse.

Why does it feel like this?

anti fishstick

because we have death in our concept of time. and we are the only animals with this concept. your dog or cat does not know it is going to die someday. perhaps this is why they seem so happy and in-the-moment. if i were anyone for a day, i'd be a cat :P

but anyway, when you're a kid, you haven't lived or experienced very much. and you probably aren't that aware of death either. you realize, and are taught that it can be a "scary" thing (i sure as hell was afraid to die) but you are much more carefree about life and risking things like climbing on trees, high places, etc. becoming afraid of these things are learned behaviors, as your mom says "careful, you might fall" or "do you want to die!?" your concept of time appears slow based on the lack of experience. you are still learning about the world. what makes the grass green and the sky blue, etc. as our experience grows, so does that everlooming death clock.

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lordjeebus

Just an idea:

Perhaps our internal representations of time passing are not based on absolute measures (eg. the minute, the year), but on relative ones, with spans of time compared to the length of the lifespan so far.

In other words, the ratio of absolute time to time alive so far.

Hence, 6 days to a five-year-old would be like 60 days to a fifty-year old. Time would seem to move twice as fast as it did at half your current age.

This seems close, at least.

Any other ideas?

wilbjammin

Maybe it just has to do with having memories.

I'm currently teaching 6th graders for my practicum and I'm absolutely horrified that most of these kids were born after Nirvana's Nevermind came out.

The more memories you have the more distance you feel from your youth, the faster things seem to be moving.

At least, that might contribute to that feeling somewhat.

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ARTelevision

anti fishstick says good stuff...

shaking that fear of death once and for all is worth doing.

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hy_

because you are more conscient of time

rogue49

hmm...I was thinking the exact opposite.

But maybe that's because I notice more than I used to.

wannabenakid247

All those ideas are really good ones. They all make sense to me. Maybe its a combination of them all. Has anyone got any other ideas?That is a good point because it is a fear i do have lately. How is the best way to approach this?

ARTelevision

well, the best way to get something done is to focus your mind on it...

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CSflim

Thats a good question. I can honestly say that I do not fear death. And that is not because I believe in some sort of eternal salvation, or anything like that. I believe in "real" death.

I am perfectly comfortable with my own mortality. By this, I do not mean in any sense that I am depressed, or that I "want" to die. I mean, I like my life, and hope to live for another long time yet, and as such, I will always struggle to stay alive, not out of fear of death, but out of a love for life.

But I guess the real thing to bear in mind, is that you cannot do anything about it. You are going to die, end of story, so why worry about it? (Very flippant attitude, I know).
But, also, you have to ask, what it is you fear? Perhaps you find the thought of non-existence scary...but don't worry about that...you won't be around to experience it!

I guess I can't really put it into words, but an acceptance of your own mortality will come in time.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I think lordjeebus, is pretty much on target.
You can only really "measure" time based on previous experiences.

I also find it likely that the fact that children form memories faster than adults plays a large role. Children are more attentive than adults. They are drawing in more information from the world around them. As such, more seems to happen, in a short space of time.
Both of these, coupled with the hypothesis that consciousness and memory are inextricably linked, would go very far to explaining a lot.

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Kyo

This particular phenomenon was brought to my attention during my first year as an undergraduate student. It seemed to me that time was passing faster than it was in high school, in all degrees. By that, I mean, a year seemed to go by faster, semester after semester, but so did weeks, and days. I would get up, do what I had to do, and suddenly it'd be 11:00 pm and I'd be sleeping again. Watching time fly by, indeed.

I sat down to think about it during one of my strange depression periods, and the answer, at least for myself, dawned upon me. I'm going to explain this the long way, in part to defend my idea, as well as to make the idea more clear.

First, what is time? There are a lot of answers to this question, but if we want a practical (ie, non-theoretical, non-scientific) answer, I believe it is the currency with which we do things - what we spend in order to accomplish something. We need time because that is what allows things to happen. Our lives are ruled by deadlines, appointments, etc. This project is due to the boss this coming tuesday, so I have 3 days to work on it. I have to meet my sister at the opera at 7:00 pm, so I have 2 hours to get ready. The airplane leaves at noon, and I want to get there one hour ahead, and the airport is half an hour away, so I have to leave the house at 10:30.

Now that we have our definition of time, we can answer the question of why it seems to pass so quickly. When you are a child, what do you do with your time? Very little. For the first several years of your life, your existence is an erratic cycle of sleeping, eating, and minor physical activity and social interaction with family and friends. I argue that at this point time has no meaning for you. There is nothing you have to do, no deadlines, no set times for anything. You wail, and you are fed. You sleep when you are tired. The rise and fall of the sun, as well as the activities of those around you, do not affect your stomach's needs or your fatigue.

Once you reach grade school, time becomes more important. You have to wake up a certain time, and get to a certain place at a certain time, in which you must spend some amount of time doing work (which may or may not be enjoyable - which also affects your perception of time), after which you return home and either do homework or play. At this point, the quantity of time becomes important - how long must I sit in class? You can no longer do what you want whenever you want, so you have to worry about things like lunchtime and naptime. If you have homework that needs to be done by tomorrow, you need to keep in mind how much time you have to play and still be able to finish your homework.

As we grow older, our lives continue to grow in complexity. As we continue to add events and activities to our schedules, we must pay an ever increasing amount of attention to exact times - when do I have to wake up for my first class? When is my term paper due? When does the boss want this paperwork? When am I supposed to meet John for lunch? What time does Best Buy close? When will the pizza get here?

So in addition to having more things to do in a day, we must also pay more attention to time - both may increase the speed at which you perceive time to pass.

The theory is sound, at least for me. Lazy summer days pass very slowly for me - lounging around the house does not require any real concept of time, after all. Only when I have something to accomplish that I feel the passage of time, the pressure of a deadline.

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Xell101

Take a new route walking to something a mile away. Then take the same route as usual and the one that is routine with a well structure pattern used for traversing this route, and it will seem rather quick, whereas the new route seems to take a while.

Nazggul

I like to think that when I was a kid I had so many milestones to anticipate. I was always looking forward to something be it the summer vacation, start of baseball season, christmas, birthdays, etc. Once you reach a certain point life just rolls on. Yah we still have these things to look forward to, but not with the same fervor of a child. That fervor makes time *seem* to pass more slowly when it really isn't.

"A watched pot never boils."

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Bloodslick

wilbjammin and Kyo both have the right idea, I think. The present passage of time seems quicker when there are things to do that take up that time. Times past seem more distant when more memories have been packed into them.

Either way, if you're actually living life, it's going to seem pretty short, both while you're living it and when you're looking back at it.

Smoey

Kyo said it right, as we get older we have more things to do, and time is allocated in specific ways.

One more thing that helps time slip through our fingers is "routine", everybody sets up a routine, and we become very comfortable with it, we can tell by what we are doing, what time it is. It is hard to break that routine, but once you have time is on your side

GuttersnipeXL

Crap...I just posted this in general discussion....couldn't find it in a search....Here is a question for ya wannabenakid247...Why is it that we both thought of the same thread topic only 2 days apart? I hadn't really ever come to this forum before today. So I didn't see your thread....weird, i'll go see if they'll combine my thread with yours.

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Amarth

Because life slows down as you learn new things. When you're older, you begin to act in repitition more and more so time speeds up cause you don't waste time paying attention to things you already know.

PulpMind

Most of the reasonings I've read here deal with what we do with time, and not our perceptions of time.

I've been thinking about this alot lately... I'm 22 years old, and becoming an insomniac because the days are over before I wake up.
My thought:
When we are observing, learning, and actively engaged in new experiences, our minds are focused on individual moments. Weather this is learning to drive, pondering social interactions, taking pictures of new places, or learning as a child that spinning around makes you dizzy - when we are focused on these new experiences, our perception of time "slows."
As we get older, we become more and more accepting of what occurs around us and within our bodies. We do not question, we simply accept, and focus our energy on the things in general. We stop focusing on the fancyness of each individual moment, and focus on days, weeks, months of processes.

Or that's my take on it.. I recently went to Morocco, and everything there was a new experience. With the two weeks I spent there, I carry more time with it than a friend who spent a year in Iceland (they got in their groove, and that was that, nothing new).

hm... /end ramble .. time to sleep..

Jasmar

Its just a matter of perception. a year to a five year old would seem longer then a year to a 50 year old because a year to a five year old is a lot of time in comparison to how long he's been around. he's lived one fifth of his life in that year. one fifth of a 50 year olds life would be 10 years. thats why things pass faster the older you get

KellyC

thats not really true...at least for me...as a kid i DO have a lot of time..and i spend those times playing rather than paying attention to time so time flies when i was little. Now, as an adult, i'm more "time concious," i tend to look at the time every 30 minutes, especially when i'm bored I'd say "WTF!! only 5 minutes had passed so far?!?!" or something similar to that nature...

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It's all a matter of perception and state of mind.