Why does time seem to speed up as you age?

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes...



But really.. I experience this speed up every day in my life. I have a 7 year old son. I recall just recently how exited he was for Christmas break. To me (32 years old) it was no big deal, and in 2 weeks it was over. To me it seemed like time flew. For him it was different. Why? Because for me it was just "another 2 weeks.. more crap to do, more BS to deal with". For him it was something exciting to look forward to.

Think in terms of Christmas time. When your a kid your excited for presents and Santa and time off from school.. playing with friends, sleigh riding etc etc etc. As an adult all you see is bills, shopping, more bills, cooking, dealing with relatives etc etc etc. As we get older, we block things out because instead of having "positives" associated with something, we dwell on negatives. Therefor we sort of mentally "skip" through the time and thus it seems like time flies.

At least thats my opinion.

reply to post by drock905


CRAZY thing is, I was getting out of the shower this morning and thought about this same EXACT topic.

My main reason was because when I was younger I FELT that summers lasted forever.
Secondly, my immediate next thought was, hey... why not start a thread and see what the others have to say on the topic.

WEIRD

A very wise person once told me that humans unconsciously measure time as the interval between events.

In the last few decades, we have seen the world grow much "smaller" through things like global communications, faster travel, and the internet. When something happened in Africa, Asia, etc, it used to be weeks before we'd here. Now, that information transfer is virtually instantaneous.

So now we move through life working harder and longer than ever, many of us in nationwide or global companies. We are constantly bombarded with news from across the globe. There is always something to be done, somewhere to go, anything and everything that can be done to distract us from the passage of time. On the rare instance that we stop to take a moment, we realize just how much time has passed and then we realize how quickly time is flying by.

I must agree with BlackOps719...whom obviously shares my affinity for the beloved fictional Prophet- Ferris Bueller.

I have considered this question also and have come to the following conclusion:
It all has to do with EINSTEIN'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY: "The faster an object moves through space, time slows down, and conversely the slower it moves, time speeds up". Therefore when we were young and full of energy everything seems to take forever, Christmas seems like light years away, especially birthdays. As we get older and physical infirmities start to affect us, as we slowly struggle to get out of bed in the mornings you glance at the clock and wonder where did time go since the alarm went off? Yep. the theory of relativity holds the key._javascript:icon('')

time is all relative.
when you are 10 those 3 months of summer made of a larger percentage of your life then when your 20. Also when you're 10 years old, you only have about 5 years of conscious memory out of it. So the summer is perceived as long compared to the time span of your other memories.
This made me think.
Here is what I've hypothesized since reading this thread.


If summer seems long when you're a kid and when you're an adult 6 months feels like an equal time span, then time perception in the brain is relative to years of conscious memory.


If time perception is relative to years of conscious memory, then the brain has a limited amount of space to store memories and time so it compresses them as time goes by.

FOR EXAMPLE; take 12 sponges. now imagine that those sponges represent memories and time perception. Get a ruler and imagine that it represents the space in your brain allowed for long term memory and time. Now if you are young, you dont have alot of memories, so take 3 sponges and line them up along the ruler. The 3 sponges fit well without being compressed and you see the full length of the 'memories'. Now as you increase age, you add more 'memories' and when you add more sponges to fit within the 12 inch space, you do not have to toss out the old 'memories' you just compress them. While it is the exact same sponge, (or memory), it is still there yet it looks shorter.


I hope my example worked for all of you. Also I hope you found this helpful.

reply to post by drock905


I agree that people perceive time as speeding up the older we get. And I have a theory:

We measure time, among other things, in terms of the new experiences that we have, the number of surprises, and the degree to which we ourselves experience change and growth. the older we get, the more we have experienced, and those experiences shape our model of the world, which allows us to cope with new situations. As experiences pile up, the number or really new situations that come up is smaller, because somehow we believe that we've already experienced something similar. So they contribute very little to our memory and growth.

One could also say that the older we get, the more cynical we become and the more we take the status quo for granted.

It's somewhat similar to saying that our perception of time is logarithmic: we perceive order of magnitude growth, but time causes us to acrue experiences linearly.

-rrr

Originally posted by BlackOps719


Time doesnt actually speed up, it only seems to because once we get older we are typically obligated to a job, spending most of our good waking hours tied to some stupid desk or what have you. When working 50 hour weeks to make ends meet a year can slip by before you know it. The monotony and what I attribute to the "groundhog day" phenomenon in which every day seems like the previous.

Before you know it you are 40 and wondering where the hell your life went. This is why it is so important to stop and smell the flowers as often as possible

I like what he had to say on only one point that being obligated to do something.

I believe its a sense of urgency to do things that makes time go by quicker. As we get older our "responsibilities" increase, and as such we are almost always feeling a need that something must be done. Kind of like one thing going a miss in the morning routine, say for example the alarm off button gets hit instead of the snooze button, or the snooze button gets a couple extra hits in the morning it shouldn't get, when you do finally wake, it's then noticed your 18 minutes behind. So starts the morning of rushing to catch up to that small bit of lost time, in the haste you make mistakes putting you further behind, and giving the illusion "times going by faster" as you can not seem to catch up.

Back to BlackOps719 point, the thing is when your on that monotonous daily grind at the job, does time while at that job not seem to last forever? I know when I would go to work on Sundays at the corner store I dreaded it, because I knew the day was going to go by slow. While at the same time on Fridays the time would fly as there was always urgency to keep things clean and stocked.

This also goes back to your younger ages, I see most people remembering Summer specifically lasting longer, well there's a couple reasons that may be. For one you were young and had little to no requirements of things to do. Some days of boredom, or monotonous days of the same play. You may also perceive it as lasting longer because you no longer get that break. While the kids get out of school we continue the daily grind at work. Also to point out, when you were young time seemed to have flown by at the end of the day when it was time to leave that amusement park, or go to bed after a birthday party.

I think as you get older the realization that time spent alive is running out so you perceive it to go by faster as there are things you want to do before your time is up. When your young you don't think about that time coming as most children believe life is forever.

Well, time IS speeding up.

The earth has an electromagnetic field and also what we would call pulse. It is scientifically measurable. This pulse got first measured in 1899 and has been around 6.8 Hz per second if I remember it right. Now, recent measures showed that it is around 12 Hz per second and constantly speeding up.
Since every human being is connected to the earth's field we experience this as a speeding up of time.

schumann resonance, one term that will explain it all. I won't go into detail, but think of it this way; physical time and space time are not the same thing, and only one is the real gauge of time.
Physical time is what 'we' made up to gauge 'time', however, space time is something that exist and changes while our 24 hour days remain the same.
As the universal time speeds up or slows down according to nature, our clocks here on earth actually never change. So, as the schumann resonance suggest, the earth has a 'heart beat' which has been speeding up gradually.
The resonance used to be a certain frequency which translated into a 24 hour cycle. As the frequency speeds up, a day consist of less hours and we do nothing to coincide with it! Our clocks still consist of a 24 hour day. When in fact the space time (universal time here on earth) has reduced to approximately 16 hours in a day. Therefore the days go by quicker as do the years...but your age actually seems to slow! It is a matter of physics and the lie of 'time'. There is no such thing as time as you can see with the enigmatic change in weather and seasonal cycles. How do you gauge something accurately when your using a asinine method?!?!?
I did the math using the resonance theory, and what I concluded is that at the rate the frequency of the earth is at, in a four year period you've actually only lived through about 2!! Do the math and you will see!!
Thus, you are not living a full day, week, month or year let alone a second. So, in conclusion, if you still carry on as if the day has 24 hours in it when in fact it only has 16, you are short each day by 1/3, thus an accelerated physical time!

Time is the same no matter what age. As others have already mentioned. It seems faster because you have experienced everything day after day, over and over again, to the point of doing things without thinking about it, almost. When we were much younger we had many things going on in our lives that were new and fresh.. We could spend the day hanging out with friends and it would seem that we would experience it so vivid and every moment was something that we haven't been through.
So the answer of slowing time down would be to continue to do new things and take chances and not live life with so much repetition.
To say that it's faster because of fractions and percentages is ludicrous. I'd consider it common sense that it's because of us becoming accustomed to what we do and how we do it, compared to when we were young and everything was new.

There is no such thing as TIME. Time is just a mental construct/illusion of the primitive mind of man to be able to keep track of things and create an order of things perceived.

If you can prove to me that Time actually exists; I'll pay you $18 for a shoebox full. And if you get more, perhaps we can negotiate on a lower unit price.

However I do have some SPACE for sale on a first come first served basis.



[edit on 17-1-2009 by whaaa]

reply to post by whaaa


I agree. But there is actually a reason why we on earth perceive time as speeding up. It's not just a subjective feeling. It's true for everyone on this planet.

But, you are right time is a construct to perceive space. If we could eliminate time we could eliminate space as well. So, instantaneous travel would be possible.

reply to post by kcired_tsew

Absolutely spot on!
Common sense and a known fact - as we age another year as we get older the year represents a much smaller fraction of our age.

Here's a weird one: I came back recently from a 3 month stay in another country, in a very different latitude than mine. I CAN SWEAR that time passed noticeably slower there. I never believed or experienced this kind of phenomena and sadly I see no way to back up my words with something concrete, but I know it wasn't just my perception.

I would like to know if someone else experienced this, having been in a very different latitude than their home. I insist on "latitude" since it's the only thing I can come up with to try to explain this to myself.

I have had the same question lately, but for a different reason. Things used to mean so much more. We didn't have so much and we appreciated things so much more. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, which means without so much, we anticipated events more passionately, which made those events come around slowly.

What really brings this to mind to me today is that my 8 year old daughter admitted that the years are speeding by. An 8 year old!!!! When that happened, it made me realize that she doesn't have the anticipation of things that I did as a youth. We are inundating our children with things to make sure that they have a "taste" of everything before they grow up so that they can decide what to be.

Kids don't get to be kids anymore. They don't get to roam the neighborhood in their downtime to be relegated to using their imaginations to fill their time. Too much stuff to do...to many video games to spend their time on...

It will be interesting to see what this generation turns out like and their children after that.

Wow. Even though I got my answer from the second and third posts this thread is helpful. I never even thought of it like fractions. No wonder our childhoods are so important and awesome

Time is relative and as you gain more experience under your belt, time shrinks. A second is a longtime when your whole experience is two seconds long.

Goes along with the theory that it is easier to learn something as more people learn the subject, saturating the normal world with the knowledge.

ConfirmedDead.com

Necromancer

reply to post by drock905


I agree my husband and I also noticed that time seems to go faster now that we are middle age.

In my opinion I believe that we during our younger years are too busy with getting marry, having children, raising children and working that we don't have time to think about time.

As life gets easier and children grows and get out of the nest, we have more time to analyze our lives and revising the past to remember what we have forgotten.

Interesting that is so true, that as we age time seems to fly by.

time is speeding up,

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