Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.
Why time seems to pass faster as we age
11–20 of 272 posts
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#12I'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.
I did this for quite a while. I am able to tell roughly when something happened based on where I was living at the time. I’ve moved 26 times and finally got sick of it. While I’m not sure how I’ll tell time now, I’ll figure something out.
A lot of people use their kids for this. “Bobby was in 2nd grade, must have been 2014.”
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#13it'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.
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#14Nice 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.
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#15I'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.
That's the explanation I came up with for myself, too. As humans, we rate most things not in absolute but in relative terms to what we are used to (see studies about happiness or how rich people don't realise how wealthy they are when they don't leave their bubble). Why should we perceive time differently than in comparison to our timescale?
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#16Nice 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.
This is what I've always thought - time is relative to how long you've lived.
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#17I'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
doneRe: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#18I 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 ne…
I heard someone on a podcast talk about the compression of new experiences during the pan / lockdown as a reason why time became meaningless. That seemed right, to me. I can hardly believe that it's been almost four years since that started.
> If you have a stable job, you can pretty much mentally time travel a full year and find your days to be similar.
> But if I ask you to imagine doing a PhD in Sanskrit at a foreign university, you would have no idea what your days are going to look like.
This also feels right, to me. But also, I spent nine months learning new languages to try to build a service to launch with a friend and that didn't turn into a long memory of effort. In fact, I recall it as sandwiched. It was a blip.
I think the real key is new experiences, not the aspect of study. Maybe that's the foreign university aspect: what happens when you aren't at study. The people you meet, the places you go, etc.
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#19I'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.
So, if I suddenly have amnesia and don't remember the past 99 years, will my time slow down?
It is just a thought experiment...
Re: Why time seems to pass faster as we age
#20Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.
I’m not sure you’re optimizing correctly here…