Why does time seem to speed up as you age?

reply to post by amatrine


I agree with amatrine post about breaking things down to patterns. Once you start going through life you start seeing things as a repeating task - like Christmas.

For me it started in High School. I was just noticed the same routine and things just started to fly by.

Time speeding up is not a mental preception. A poven fact is that time has a direct coralation to movement. Our entire universe is is expanding and time directly mirrors that. Since the expansion is speeding up so does time. Only one mystery remains in its course. Will the expansion continue to accelerate ?

yeah the awareness, relish it.

Life can seem to move in slow motion as you extract the nuances of pleasure from each minute you are awake.

i have had a blast the last two years. life is certainly not mundane. i am self employed, so i create my own routine. so, i actually enjoy the discipline of learning guitar. it's a space in time. fulfilling and gratifying. also, i started writing my book, so i have spent much wonderment remembering my childhood. i guess, i was stuck in a routine; and, all that i thought was so important--wasn't really. then again, my kid is grown and i am single now. i am not making the $$ i used to. it's more an inner journey than outer.

keep the kid alive, and you will live much happier.

reply to post by drock905


Strange thing is, time seems to go slower when you're watching paint dry.

It's all pretty much relative to your point of view.

Could it be similar to a a computer whose memory is filling up all of the time. Perhaps less events register in the memory near the latter years because of this and the days seem as though there were less events i.e shorter.

reply to post by drock905


When you are young your heart beats faster....Therefore the time around you moves slower. As you age, and your heart slows down....time around you speeds up.

I was thinking about this the other day too.

I think when you are young you dont have to keep track off when christmas or easter , holidays or new years etc when it is coming because it just comes out off the blue for you. You never have to worry aboutadults problems till you reach that stage.

When you are an adult you worry and life becomes more stressful, you know when all the above is coming, You have to keep track off everything & you bore easily. So time will seem to speed up due to those feeling also. We have responsibilities where areas children do not worry about that most of their childhood. Everyday is like new magical discovery or surprise for them whilst adults know ahead of time what holidays are coming and what needs to be done so for that reason it seems we speed up time. We set our sites on doing things on certain days and keep track off it and children dont.

reply to post by meadowfairy


Yeah, everyday is like a holiday...that's how it should be, not always preparing for this and that and making sure this and that gets done. Eat when your hungry, stop when your full, live your life like you want to.

Originally posted by drock905
I think most people would agree that as you get older time seems to go faster. Why is that?

I remember when I was a kid, the walk to & from school seemed to take forever. However, as the months moved on, I started to look at the trip differently.

Instead of perceiving it as one big walk, I started to break it into manageable chunks... lots of little check points. A certain house here, a letterbox there, a big tree that dripped sap on to the footpath, a corner, a piece of graffiti on a fence, a hill... and so on.

With repetition, the time moving from checkpoint to checkpoint took very little time and before I knew it, I was at school.

I see a passing year as being the same as my trip to school. I starts off as a big blank canvass.. a huge expanse, but then it becomes filled with lots of little events (or checkpoints) that repeat on a yearly basis. A birthday, a public holiday, a change in season, an end of semester.. and so on.

On a smaller scale, say a weekly basis, we have things like the start of the working week, favorite tv shows on particular nights, perhaps a rostered day off mid week, gym after work on certain days, and before you know it, your at the weekend. Blink a couple of times and we are getting up for work on a Monday again.

In short, I believe that through a mixture of repetition and social checkpoints/signposts, we concentrate less on the year as a whole, and perceive it in much smaller chunks. Before we know it, years pass by.

John Lennon said it perfectly.

"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans".

IRM

reply to post by drock905


Attention span.


When you were a kid, could you sit for 5 minutes without fidgeting with something, or blowing bubble with your saliva, or making up a song as you go along, or anything which if an adult chose to do,would deem them "mentally challenged" ?

I think it has something to do with attention span. But then again, some people may have short attention spans all their lives'.

On the contrary, the old saying, "time flies when you're having fun" applies in this case, example - Action figures/dolls/etc. I remember staying over at my cousins house years ago and we used to play with his action fgures for like almost 8 hours or something. It never seemed like that long, always flew past us as we were engrossed in some weird situation where Chewy, Bosshk, The Undertaker(lol) and a transformer would end up in the same universe.

It could be this or it could be what the majority are saying about time being perceived differently by olderand younger people.

Its natures morphine. The older we get the more tuned in we are as to how screwed up everything is. Even if we live for today and seek love and peace some manner of BS will manage to creep into our life , even in the most simple of ways...sooooo...nature speeds it up a little so we can manage the pain a little better until the cancer called flesh is rotted and only the flawless remains.

Everything is too slow for me. Everything has an attention span limit. I'm 35 now. True fun ends way too soon but, as I got older and the fun things dissipated into a routine everything seems boring and slow...at least most of it.

When we are kids, we live every second "in the moment". As adults, we live in the past and the future. Everything moves faster when you aren't paying attention to it. Everything slows down when you are! A cool concept.

I can't explain why. Something to do with attention and consciousness. David Sereda explains it better than I can in his DVD "The Voice". It's not even the subject of the DVD. He's talking about cellular aging, which also speeds up.

Whenever you want time to slow down, do something that is worthy of your undivided attention. In "The Now", time practically stands still. In regret and fear, it flies.

The program accelerates time as the individual ages. It is all designed to keep everyone under control. A big loop that "nobody" is supposed to be able to escape from. Do you dare to go against the program? We are all "software"

reply to post by Mean Red Spider


yeah,

that's a ZEN principle. be here now. if we spend all our time in anticipation of a future event, we may be worrying. if we are living in the past--it could be guilt.

i like the analogy of a long trip. have you ever been on a road trip with someone, who is like compulsively anxious to get wherever it is you are going. afraid to stop or waste a single minute. well you may very well spend 12 hours getting there, then 12 hours getting back. let's say its a weekend trip. 24 hours getting there and and 48 hours at the destination. now your friend has spent 1/3 of the whole vacation in an
anxious and uneasy state.

so, it's not necessarily where you are goin it' gettin there that counts; and, you will have a much better trip if you can enjoy slow down a bit and enjoy the scenery.

IMHO before you can even begin to answer this question you have to ask yourself the question, "what is time", Does it flow in one constant stream from beggining, middle and end? Does it flow backwards in a contant stream from end, middle, beggining? Does time flow from one point to another in a non-linear fashion? IMO time is not a constant flow, I see it as a fluid like substance... one point in time being able to flow amongst other points in time, sometimes crossing over and intermixing.
Using Einstein's Special theory of reletivity time is dependent on space, creating space-time. Time itself being a part of space yet in itself being a seperate entity... Time would have a different pace if you were closer to a stronger or weaker field of gravity, time would speed up if you were closer to the gravity feild and slow down if you were further away.

You also have to ask yourself questions like, how small can we divide segments of time into? what defines a moment? What defines now?

I think time speeds up as you grow older because our sense of "reality" becomes numbed, dulled and fixed to a certain set of beliefs... we think time is flowing on and on along so therefore we perceive it as doing so.
A childs mind has not yet been influenced by "reality" or should I say "mass perception of reality", a childs mind is free from any existing influences... their imaginations are much wilder. So with this in mind, a child can get lost in their own imaginations whilst playing... not thinking about reality or any adult concerns, they are free to imagine and perceive reality in a much different way. With this perception they can then lose themselves so completely that time, for them, does indeed slow down.

Sub atomic particles have been caught, "misbehaving" and once they are physically observed they stop, "misbehaving". Actually observing the sub atomic particles influences their behaviour... so IMO time would react the same, our perceptions influences how we see it. If we were to have no concept of time, no sense of now, how would time react? lol. Would it start "misbehaving"? Is it because we are conscious of "now" and have a fixed perception of "now" through our lifes experiences that dictates time?

Just a few thoughts...




Resentedhalo08.

I believe that the longer we are alive, a certain amount of time (lets say a year) becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life. So, compared to how long you've lived, it is shorter.

reply to post by Resentedhalo08


I would be greatfull if you would have a look at what has been happening in my life over the last few days. On reflection I would describe the incidents as time skipping. Like an old record jumping or repeating for a second.

The description of the events can be found here :

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Respects

It does, doesnt it! I remember as a kid the summer use to last FOREVER. Now its gone before I know it. Although lately, the days seem to go by EXTREMELY slow for me.

Im Gonna chime in and just say that time is a relative factor. The speed of time slows or speeds up depending on your point of view or reference point. Just like some would say the faster you go, the slower time becomes for you, its relative to your situation.

Rekar