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Why does time seem to speed up as we get older?


geko

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I'm intrigued about people's thoughts on this. Most people i meet seem to have the same idea, and i'm no different. I remember the 6 years of my secondary school seem to take a lifetime, but the 12+ years since i've left have completely flown by. Even the '6 weeks summer holiday' seemed to take forever.

 

They say time flies when you're having fun, but i can tell you with hand on my heart that my school time was more fun than my day job (which is sad... but that's another story...).

 

I thought maybe i'm busy now and wasn't so much then, and the hours tick by faster when you're busy than when you're not, but when i think about it i'm no more 'busy' now than i was then. 8 or so hours a day school/work. Then out with friends, read, home work, video games, and not much has changed with my adult life.

 

So i have no theory why it's so.

 

This was interesting i thought.

 

NPR Media Player

 

What's your idea?

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I've actually given this some thought over the years, even when I was young, this is my take on it.

 

When you are 5 years old a year is 1/5 of your life, when you are 10 a year is 1/10 of your life. From your stand point a year gets to be less and less of your past. if you are lucky enough to reach 100 a year is just 1% of your life equal to 18 days at age 5 or 36 days at age 10 or 72 days at age 20 or 180 days at age 50 and so on. Your perception of how fast time passes has to do with how much time was already passed. Or at least that's what I concluded :)

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  • 11 months later...

Young people want time to speed up but feel as if it's moving in slow motion. Older people wish that time would slow down but feel it's moving at fast forward. It seems the opposite happens to our desire.

 

All the people I've spoken with, old and young, have these same common experiences with time. Therefore, I have to conclude that time affects us all the same way, is relative to our situation, which also means that time is a fallacy.

 

I believe that anxiousness is the culprit and causes time to fluctuate but I also think that we can trick time by refusing to become anxious (really hard for little kids though).

 

This time fluctuation based on our thoughts makes me believe more and more in the collective consciousness of the human race. If it wasn't a collective thing, time would affect us all differently.

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It's simple. The earlier in life it is, the more things you are unfamiliar with. Learning new things is emotional... and you store strong memories when experiencing something emotional.

 

So you have a ton of stored memories from being a kid, when you first learned and experienced a whole lot of things.

 

Then you get older (and this problem is worse the smarter you are) and go through life seeing less and less things that you didn't already expect. Less memories, and the ones you do store don't stick out quite as much.

 

So you have one period of time that is extremely dense with memories, and another period in which memories are sparse. How do you gauge how fast your childhood went by compared to the last 5 years of your life? It's not like you can go back and observe the speed of time passing. You are using the density of memories to gauge this.

 

But by experiencing new things and learning I am not talking about school subjects. I am talking about forming associations in general... even ones like patterns in things you see or hear ( like in music )

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  • 6 months later...

The way I see it, it is like an egg timer or the tide and it is the effect of emptying and filling. When we're young, our energy floods out and memories start to flood in. When we're older both drain out (grasping and letting go). Moontan's point fits in with this, in my opinion(It's like we're on a conveyor belt and at the start we cannot see the end but as it approaches, we know we're running out of time).

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When I'm working at something I really enjoy time feels suspended even though in reality it has ripped by at almost supersonic speed. On one occasion I recall sitting down at my computer to write and my concentration was such that when I looked up six hours had passed though it felt to me as though only minutes had gone by!

 

It seemed to me that my mind was in a state I can only describe as something like sleep (after I snapped out of it I didn't feel tired but rejuvenated), yet I know that I was fully conscious.

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I tend to indentify with Kriminal99 on this. In my life, time seems to be going ever faster. Things that used to get me upset or extremely anxious at work and home don't anymore. I've seen (xxx) situations like this before and was always able to overcome them in the past. With that in mind it's nothing new. It's like watching your favorite movie, you still like it but you know what to expect.

 

Once I passed 40 I felt I was closer to death than I was to birth. Both my paerets died in their early fifties. In my mind I don't expect to live past 65-70 if I'm lucky. When I was little it was climb up to the summit to be old enough to do what adults can do. Once over the summit and sliding down the otherside I keep falling faster and faster.

 

I spend a lot of time focusing on this perception. Latley I have cashed in some stock I had for years and bought a hot tub. I feel I need to start enjoying the accumulation of money from years of work. I'm not due to retire for some time, but the "save it for a rainy day" attitude has turned into a "enjoy it while you can" attitude.

 

I know time is a dimension, but that doesn't make it any easier to perceive the speed at which time now passes.

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Although I only understand physics at a rudimentary level, if time is a vacuum wouldn't that mean it would speed up the closer it got to the apex?

 

If say we enter time via a sort of spinning vortex (wormhole) it would just naturally always be pulling us to the apex and of course the closer we get to the apex, the faster it (and we being carried along by its momentum) move?

 

Does this make any sense or is it completely out to lunch?

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  • 4 months later...

With regards to time, the way I see it is that time appears slow when you're not busy because it is a constant stream, whereas activity breaks it up into small pieces or segments of time - hence it doesn't seem one long span of uninterrupted time.

 

With regards to it speeding up as we get older, I liken it to being on a conveyor belt or a roller coaster ride. As you near the end, you are aware it is getting closer - where at the start you are looking at eternity (end not in visible / immediate sight). Also as with boredom and nothingness (infinity), limit speeds up our perception.

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  • 2 months later...

To Geko,

Time is not "fast" or "slow". Time does not speed up (go faster) as we get older or go slower when we are young. However, because time is continuous it can be experienced as being either "long" or "short", and because time is a number it can be counted as being "many" or "few". As humans age, time (that which is intermediate between moments) becomes increasingly experienced as being "shorter in duration" and "fewer in number" as we move closer to the end moment of death.

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I don't think that time speeds up as we get older, I think that we slow down the pathways. I think that time energy flows between lanes, and I think that the older we get the more likely this energy is to become rotational, and caught up in a spin. Spin loses direction, and if time is a vortex then all of our spin material will eventually become similar in state. The more memories we get, the stronger the spin force, and loss of random pathways. Imagine a stream meandering through the countryside. The stream is youth. But the final destination is a whirlpool, and the whirlpool is loss of direction. As we get older we lose new directions to go in. Our time energy gets caught in a spin, and the spin goes nowhere. Our lives become repetitive, we are like tigers pacing up, and down. I think this is the importance of music. It messes around with our spin cycle, and slightly randomizes it. It is picking the right music for the right time in your life. Mess up your life a bit, make changes, and try to get the random events occurring more often.

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Guest MacPhee

Could it be, because old people have superior brains? Their brains are full of knowledge. A rich store of data, gained from a lifetime's experience of previous events.

This enables them to process, and interpret, events in the world very quickly. Which gives them an impression of time passing quickly.

 

Whereas, by contrast, young people have poorly stored brains, not containing much knowledge. So their brains take longer to interpret events. Events appear to take longer - hence the young brain gets the impression of time passing more slowly.

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Could it be, because old people have superior brains? Their brains are full of knowledge. A rich store of data, gained from a lifetime's experience of previous events.

This enables them to process, and interpret, events in the world very quickly. Which gives them an impression of time passing quickly.

 

Whereas, by contrast, young people have poorly stored brains, not containing much knowledge. So their brains take longer to interpret events. Events appear to take longer - hence the young brain gets the impression of time passing more slowly.

 

It's the opposite. If you process quickly the day slows down. Try a movie camera on slow motion, and you will see that it runs much faster. So old people need to slow down for the day to go faster.

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Guest MacPhee

It's the opposite. If you process quickly the day slows down. Try a movie camera on slow motion, and you will see that it runs much faster. So old people need to slow down for the day to go faster.

 

Thanks Pincho - your example of the movie camera is thought-provoking. I take it, that when you say "movie camera", you don't mean a modern digital job, which records images instantly on a silicon chip. Rather, you mean an old-fashioned film camera, using a spool of 16mm or Super-8 film, which has to be run through the camera in long strips.

 

If so, the film camera might give an excellent illustration of how human memory works. In this way:

 

Human memory is like a long - but limited - spool of film in the brain. The film records successive images, or "memories". But as the film runs, it starts to get near the end of the spool - ie, there's a diminishing supply of film left in the brain, to record new memories. So memories now have to be recorded more quickly, and "compressed" into fewer frames.

 

This has two results:

 

1. The perceived time-interval between successive memory frames reduces - things seem to happen faster;

2. The resolution of memory frames reduces - they become blurry and vague.

 

Doesn't this explain why as we get older, time seems to speed up, and our memories get vague?

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Thanks Pincho - your example of the movie camera is thought-provoking. I take it, that when you say "movie camera", you don't mean a modern digital job, which records images instantly on a silicon chip. Rather, you mean an old-fashioned film camera, using a spool of 16mm or Super-8 film, which has to be run through the camera in long strips.

 

If so, the film camera might give an excellent illustration of how human memory works. In this way:

 

Human memory is like a long - but limited - spool of film in the brain. The film records successive images, or "memories". But as the film runs, it starts to get near the end of the spool - ie, there's a diminishing supply of film left in the brain, to record new memories. So memories now have to be recorded more quickly, and "compressed" into fewer frames.

 

This has two results:

 

1. The perceived time-interval between successive memory frames reduces - things seem to happen faster;

2. The resolution of memory frames reduces - they become blurry and vague.

 

Doesn't this explain why as we get older, time seems to speed up, and our memories get vague?

 

Yeah that's more or less what I meant. The movie camera thing does also work with digital as well. The faster the frame recording speed, the more images you get per second. So a child would perceive each frame of memory much more vividly than an adult. Say a child stores 1000 frames per second, and an adult store 100 frames per second. The day for a child has 10 times more storage capacity, so the day can be explored in more detail, which makes a day seem like slow motion. The adult, trying to cram in a lot of maths in a day has gaps between each second, making the day seem shorter, and achieving less work potential. I have noticed that my potential has just slowed down in the last two months, so I am observing it right now. Although I am hoping it is a time reversal, so that means it could speed up again in the opposite direction, and I could get a second wind. Although rewinding time is also what kills us. Energy traveling into us instead of out of us is like deflating a balloon. You get wrinkly, and old. On the other hand, if the energy is traveling back into us it gives us hope of dying with a stored life, and so we have an optimistic chance of a second life ahead. Reincarnation of some sort.

Edited by Pincho Paxton
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I'm intrigued about people's thoughts on this. Most people i meet seem to have the same idea, and i'm no different. I remember the 6 years of my secondary school seem to take a lifetime, but the 12+ years since i've left have completely flown by. Even the '6 weeks summer holiday' seemed to take forever.

 

They say time flies when you're having fun, but i can tell you with hand on my heart that my school time was more fun than my day job (which is sad... but that's another story...).

 

I thought maybe i'm busy now and wasn't so much then, and the hours tick by faster when you're busy than when you're not, but when i think about it i'm no more 'busy' now than i was then. 8 or so hours a day school/work. Then out with friends, read, home work, video games, and not much has changed with my adult life.

 

So i have no theory why it's so.

 

This was interesting i thought.

 

NPR Media Player

 

What's your idea?

 

 

I'm pushing 60. My observations are not time speeding up but my body slowing down. I cannot accomplish all I want to in an hour like I used to be able to. Perhaps once we turn 18, our bodies sleep for 1/2 second out of say 5, then eventually 2 seconds out of 5 till eventually we are lucky to be awake for 1/2 a second out of 5. By awake, I'm truly meaning "energetic." I would think that in my 20's I was excited about getting accomplished all I could before that big date on Friday or Saturday night... :D

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