I'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.
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
done
You're apparently in a good place so looking back is your path to your joyful present. I'm in a bad place so looking back is my seeing back when I was still hopeful for my various life goals. I'd meet someone and have someone to share my life with, do activities with, travel with, raise kids with, etc. I never met that person and now at 60+ that's nearly impossible so looking back hurts. It hurts a-lot. Seeing the opportunities I missed, the time I squandered, the naiveté that "it will happen when it happens" etc.. I absolutely want to strangle Google/Apple/Facebook when they shove "memories" in my face. I didn't ask for it, piss off!
As for the topic itself. The obvious reason time passes faster when we're older to me is that each day is less of my life. At 1 week old a day is 1/7th of my entire existence. At 60 one day would be 1/22000th of my life.
I also feel it in terms of time left. When you have $1000 in your wallet, splurging on a $50 meal might seem fine. When you've got $75 in your wallet you're unlikely to blow $50 of it on a meal (unless you've got a supply elsewhere). In the same way, when I've have got 20yrs left in my life, some of them probably not in the best of health, then committing 10 of them to move to a foreign country to immerse myself in a new language feels very different than when I've got 60 years left (20yrs old). Seeing your life left clock go down 1/60th (1yr at 20yrs old) feels slower than seeing it go down 1/20th (1yr at 60yrs old). that's 3x faster.
My situation is different. I lost the love of my life and felt lost and alone. Even with the support of good friends and family.
But that said, there’s alot of philosophy and other things to help. Aeschylus said “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” Another relevant quote is that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best is today.
You won’t get what you wanted, but live in the present and enjoy what you can have. I’d give anything to get my wife back, but that’s not reality. The next best thing to live today and find joy.
sorry for your loss and thanks for sharing. At times I think I don't have the strength to go on after something like this happens to me. But so happy that you are able to still find joy.
Almost 51 here. I moved countries partly because it refreshes my mental clock. So much to learn and experience and try new things. I've lived more in the past year than the previous 5, and filled up the photo book so much.
I'm truly sorry about all the bad memories. I do know what that is like, many what-ifs. If you're receptive to any thoughts: Mourn them, but try not to waste the present being angry about the past, or you'll regret missing out on this time too. Give yourself another shot, try again. There will be a time where you don't get any more chances, but it's not yet. I know post-70 year olds that have cycled up mountains in France. One that just stopped being a climber after two replaced hips. I'm sorry about the kids. Maybe travel and meeting someone is still an option. Take care.
The past is the past, no sense in regretting it since you cannot change it.
I'm not quite as old you but close, and I already feel what you're feeling about the time left. That there isn't a lot of it, or that it will be gone quickly. Everyone has things they will not get a chance to try or experience. No lifetime offers everything, and every path taken means many, many others will be never explored.
Like money, you can't take memories with you. So try not to dwell on things you didn't do or that didn't work out the way you imagined. Half or more of people who get married end up divorced. Probably many more are less than happy. Kids can be a joy but they can also be a heartache. Every criminal is somebody's kid. Nothing comes with any guarantees.
Make life interesting today, as today is the only thing you really experience.
Sorry to hear that things did not turn out as expected for such a long time.
If I may provide a suggestion... search for a serious website that is about dating (not tinder or something the like) in your area and connect to people and try to date (meet in person for at least an hour or so) at least one person once a week. Don't spend too much effort in people who just want to stick to online conversations or fooling around, just move on. If at the meetup there's no click, you have a good evening or at least you built up experience in dating.
You will need to get probably seriously out of your comfort zone but it becomes easier each time! Practice makes perfect!
I'm sorry to hear this has been difficult. I want you to know that I feel this way often as well. If you ever want to chat, my email is at the link in my post (GP to this comment). I'd be a very lucky man to hear your experiences and learn from you.
> then committing 10 of them to move to a foreign country to immerse myself in a new language feels very different than when I've got 60 years left
Could you elaborate on that?
As someone who is younger I have noticed that many (but by no means all) people over 60 often do not want to commit to these kind of 'life-changing' escapades, despite now having the time (kids out of the house and/or retired).
I assumed it was more around lack of (youthful) energy/health and the fact that you're so used to how you've lived for decades that change is far more difficult or feels more daunting.
You're saying that having a relatively shorter amount of 'time left' makes such a move different, wouldn't that fact make it easier? (YOLO and so on...)
It's kind of an investment. It's a chore to begin with, that hopefully pays off in the long run.
Moving to a foreign country with an unfamiliar culture and language, and establishing a new life there, is a chore. Probably even more so if you don't have a spouse or something who's familiar there:
Learn the language, the culture, establish or reestablish your daily habits, find new friends and ways to socialise, perhaps new hobbies if the old ones aren't available. Find out where and what to shop and how to cook, when the stuff you know is gone. Turn your house into a comfortable home, etc.
If you're older you might not feel that you'll get to see much of the payoff.
I also imagine it gets harder to find people who are open to new friendships, as you get older.
> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich.
This doesn't sound right at all. For me, and I suspect for most people, it has the opposite effect. It makes life feel short, fleeting and mundane. Looking back to 2014, I can't believe how quickly the past 10 years has gone. Heck just looking back 4 years, the pandemic years seems to have flown by. It's like a distant memory now.
> but for me the perception of the shortness of life is best fought by reminding yourself that it is not short
So it isn't journaling at all. You are just rationalizing.
Life is precious because it is short and fleeting. And it's why people keep a journal. To keep track of precious time. It's also why parents keep a scrapbook of their kids. Because in a blink of an eye, the kids grow up and leave the nest.
If you truly thought life wasn't short, you wouldn't keep a journal. You'd just live and not keep track of time.
I read somewhere else that time speeds up when we repeat a few boring/not-so-stressful things each day.
> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich
I want to agree with it. The more I take on and do, however imperfectly and which involves a bit more stress, it starts to slow down time. At least in the sense that you look back at the previous year and think "wow that was a lot and it seems like so long ago" when it actually wasn't that long ago.
> It makes life feel short, fleeting and mundane
In fact, the key might be to journal more of the mundane things. Like how many times I had to get on a call with the background verification company to speed up my move to the new company.
and from OP article,
> Surprising information comes in droves every single day, so the brain simply paid a lot of attention
how come all the new/surprising info from shorts/reels/tiktok not have a effect of slowing down time haha?
> Heck just looking back 4 years, the pandemic years seems to have flown by. It's like a distant memory now.
I'm confused, does it feel recent or very long ago? This seems to contradict your previous sentence. If 10 years has gone past quickly, how could the pandemic feel like a distant memory? In that case it should feel like yesterday
> Life is precious because it is short and fleeting.
Here's another viewpoint. Life is not precious at all because it is short and fleeting. Muslim here. We believe only the parts of this life which pertain to afterlife are precious, as afterlife is eternal instead of temporary. This life is merely an end to a means. It doesn't need to be a goal in and of itself because there's another life after it.
Maybe 10% snarky and 90% insightful for those that don't know what Houri is and can mean by different interpretations.
My point is that if I believed in a religion [and a specific interpretation of God's written word] that said I could get to heaven with 72 Houri by committing murder then [actual] life would not be precious at all.
Please note, I'm not suggesting YOUR beliefs or interpretation of the text, but it cannot be debated that a sizable amount [in nominal terms] believe this.
both wanted to prolong their lives. I don't think anyone would characterize the emperor of china nor steve jobs as 'procrasturbators'.
You make it sound like active people ( who don't waste their time ) feel that life is long when it's precisely the opposite. It's those who don't waste their time who want to live longer because they have so much more to do.
Then again, 'wasting time' is a concern for many precisely because life is short.
Disagree. Set realistic goals, achieve them, and finish your life satisfied that you've done what you set out to do. Constantly demanding more is a recipe for being unsatisfiable.
If I died today, I'd do so happy that I checked off the most important things on my list. I gain nothing by adding another 100 things to the list just so I can say that life is too short. It's long enough for what I want to do; anything more is a bonus.
I am trying journaling as well but most days I don't know what to write...most days I'm not really doing special things, I have no special feelings.
These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked <some meal> and played <some game> with <one of my kids>, in the evening <watched some movie / read some book>"...
Most of the time it's "I have to do this" or "I wish I had time to do this" or "Hey here's a random idea I had" or "My kids did this cute thing" or "We fought about this, here's what I think" or "oh here's my 3 favorite links from HN and what I thought about them or what they made me think about."
It took time to realize that was worth writing down.
Honestly I look back 10 years and see things like you describe. "I went to the gym for an hour, worked on this or that, blah blah", and I really love seeing that too. That's life man. Those memories fill your brain up with experiences and a sense of time if you let it. Just remembering how fit I used to be makes me happy and makes me want to do that again.
Slightly different angle: I’ve been digitizing my grandparents’ journals. Something I’ve appreciated is the mundane.
“Had a headache. Went to bed early” seeing how often my grandpa was sick was very eye opening to me.
“Got the X repaired/replaced. Cost me $Y and it took Z days to finish”
“I sat and just visited with $Child. What a good kid. He’s just a teen. He told me about his friends and school”
Etc. I don’t know. I guess reading a normal life makes me feel better. Growing up I thought they were perfect. Seeing they were people just like me with very similar struggles is actually fun.
I have the opposite problem. I could write a page of literary prose about every day. Bulleting feels like it would be doing an injustice. So I do nothing.
> Bulleting feels like it would be doing an injustice. So I do nothing.
I usually suffer from the same. Some periods I do bother bulleting, as reminders for thoughts to expand on later in the day. But I never do, and then only the bullets remain - as a kind of headstone for unwritten thoughts. Still, they are better than nothing.
3 bullets on „what I‘ve learned today“, followed by 3 bullets on „what I will do next“.
This makes sense to me because a) content-wise I consider learning / making sense of what I experience in my life to be both intellectually and emotionally interesting and b) text-length-wise 6 bullets force you to really boil things down to the core
It’s amazing how quick we forget things we thought at the moment were so important. Not in the same vein as journaling, but I’d been keeping a list of Notion entries on things I found important enough to keep notes on at work for the past 2-3 years.
It’s different from my JIRA work log or Todoist list of completed tasks in that these are not everything I did, but just the important items. The things where I ran the risk of getting stuck
Come appraisal process, I’ll have forgotten most things I worked on in the year. My imposter syndrome creeps in, but this Notion page keeps me sane!
With this proof in hand, I’ve started journaling. I use the Apple Journal app. And it’s doing a good job of prompting me!
> reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich.
I don't disagree. But I think the flavor of the richness depends on the quality of the days. It is my experience that decades can also be built from days that ought not be preserved.
Or at least not without strong curation and editorial treatments.
I have semi-regular journal notes going back over a decade, and my experience was opposite to GP - instead of discovering how many things happened in that time, I discovered my mind has been spinning in circles, trying to find solutions to the same problems, and despite feeling otherwise day-to-day, no actual progress has been made. It was an important discovery for me, though not much came of it anyway.
Ugh. I hadn't considered that. I had kids, a biz and a disabled wife. I had to achieve. Even then, some days I wasn't much capable. Other days I forced out results but at a high cost.
Sorry to hear that; I hope you're all doing well now!
I suppose I had too much time to dwell, not enough external pressure to keep my shit together. I have kids now too, but the end result is that I rarely journal anymore - there's always something else I need or want to do, and then suddenly I'm dead tired; rinse, repeat.
Adderall reshuffled the deck for me and I started being dealt better hands. Most importantly, I could finally turn realizations into persistent changes.
The changes still took years but having effort pay off was a new thing.
Great to see it helped. I'm having mixed success with Ritalin - it initially fixed some major problems arguably permanently, and restored some of my lacking self-confidence, but now it's a mixed blessing - it feeds bad habits just as well as it feeds good ones. An indiscriminate booster, that is.
I do something similar, but with photos. I have a 4k display on the wall with a rpi/python script that picks photos from today +/- 15 days for all years, then makes collages to display, 1 per minute. So the photos are from the same time of year, but for years past, and every day new photos cycle in and out. Another neat way to stir up memories of old, if you have a pile of photos around.
Same. Journaling adds another dimension to my memories that makes them even richer and more enjoyable. It also prevents me from forgetting memories, which I'm very prone to doing!
I started journaling back in 2012 (or 1999 depending on whether you count a Pokemon notebook that I barely wrote in!). I used to handwrite my journal entries. I refused to type them because they didn't feel personal enough.
How foolish of me that was.
I discovered Daylio while looking for a mood journal back in 2021. It's easily one of the best apps I've ever purchased. I've journaled daily since getting it, and it (with therapy) helped me understand and better control my introversion and mood swings.
I eventually moved all of those entries over to Day One two months ago. Day One is even better. You can add recordings! From your Apple Watch! And everything syncs nicely via iCloud! No more talking into the ether!
I don’t have the motivation to journal, but I do get a fair bit of this kind of feeling scrolling back through my camera roll. I just take quick photos of all sorts of random stuff that happens or places I go, and it’s amazing the rush of memories that come back looking over them.
This! For all my lack of journaling consistency, my habit of taking these kind of quick photos of anything noteworthy has given me lots of joy when looking back - although I do feel it can be slightly neurotic “in the moment”.
that's really cool. I use to always have a small notebook with my at work to jot down notes and sketches. I had boxes and boxes of those notebooks saved over the years and would flip through old ones from time to time to see what i was up to back then. In a move I was very tired of carrying boxes so threw them all out instead of loading them up and transferring them to the next attic.. i really _really_ wish i hadn't.
I journal ~daily since having kids. I feel the same way - it gives me peace knowing I can look back in time later and relive just a little what I was feeling today.
Thank you very much for this helpful comment and sharing your experience. It is really encouraging me to resume journaling, as I've made several efforts over the years but always fade away after a few months.
I'm sorry you've received negative comments in reply, it is weird that people feel the need to be so negative to someone trying to help. I just sometimes have a hard time understanding their mindset.
I just lower the barrier enough that it's trivial. I'm at my terminal all day, and one bash command spits out X years ago +/- 3 days.
Right now, I'm really curious to see why I took a trip 10 years ago to my hometown - all I see in my journal is my packing list, so someday the journal entry for that trip will pop up.
I've been using OneDrive for more than ten years for much the same purpose. Journal folders by year filled with weekly files since 2010, and accessible from any computer, tablet, phone, whatever. And in a folder I can download easily with TXT content.
I'm at the point where everything is a dumb terminal again.
I'd like to recommend giving Daylio [1] a try if you want to start journaling. Someone on HN recommended this two years ago and I decided to try it because all past attempts at journaling had failed miserably after few weeks. I'm now on a 700+ day streak and I'm really happy that I started doing this 2 years ago. So much has happened and it's all documented. It takes so little effort to add an entry for the day and reading past entries is fun because what actually happened past year is not just a blur but a detailed record of activities, words and photos.
Just wanted to post a quick comment - I really appreciate your simple and elegant journalling solution. I think I want to implement something similar. Thanks!
One thing I love about the speedup of time is that picking a compounding habit (say, doing something for 10 minutes each day) feels like having an almost instant pay-off.
"Oh wow 3 years already passed" -> "Oh wow I got pretty good at this thing I picked up just yesterday"
I picked up biking during the pandemic, and 3 years later I have legs of steel, 10k miles under my belt, and people know me as "the bike guy", when I think of myself as "ok this biking thing is kind of fun".
It kinda sucks that you learn much slower when you’re older though. I’ve been practicing piano an hour or two a day for 7 months and I don’t really feel like I’ve improved at all. I was intermediate when I started and I am taking professional lessons. Mid 30s here.
I don't know, I think standards are just higher as an adult. When I was a teenager, I thought I learned things quickly, but in reality I was still a novice. Now that I'm older I don't feel like I pick things up more slowly, but I definitely am more aware of how much work it takes to be good at pretty much anything.
I don't pick things up nearly as fast now (early 40s) as I was when I was younger (pre-tten, teen, 20s, and 30s). However, I also pick things up in a very different way that in some ways, are more effective than when I was young.
For example, it takes me longer to gain the intuition of something, but on the other hand, when I do, it plugs into a vaster web of knowledge. I am certainly more disciplined in both mind and body compared to when I was younger. I'm capable of clearer visualization and simulations now than before. I've got a lot more math under my belt.
I learned piano as a kid, picked it up pretty fast, and forgot a lot of it. I am not practiced in sight reading any more. On the other hand, when I poked around learning again, it's tapping much deeper into music theory, composition. For example, I learned Petzold's Minute in G Major (formerly attributed to Bach) as a kid and as an adult. I still can't quite get both hands working together as an adult ... but I was cracking up as I kept seeing how beautiful the chords are composed together in a way I never noticed as a kid.
The other day, I heard about this lady that started playing the piano in her 60s when we she retired. Fast forward to 20(?) years later and she's giving professional concerts and everyone just assumes she's been playing the piano all her life.
In other words: Keep it up, you'll the reap the fruit of your labor eventually!
> In other words: Keep it up, you'll the reap the fruit of your labor eventually!
No, you won't necessarily reap the fruit of your labor. You will certainly improve, but most of us will face a hard upper limit with diminishing returns as an adult.
I've played trumpet and guitar since age 13. I started learning piano ~10 years ago, age 40. But even after a decade with thousands of hours of practice, I still can't "natively" read bass clef. I still mis-read G as E, e.g., if I'm not actively paying close attention. Where I could sight-read treble clef basically perfectly since I was a kid, I'm still clumsy on bass clef after 10 years of learning as an adult.
Defeat yourself and you won't need time to do it for you. Maybe there is a hard limit, maybe you've hit a false peak, a local maxima. If you've hit a plateau, try something else, you probably only hit the limit of your current methods.
I am improving it's just really, really slow. My teacher is working on my weaknesses as well. It just seems like I have to increase my effort 3 fold to have a chance at reaching advanced any time in the near future.
I'm not sure how it applies to learning, but for any activity based on consistency and quantity, I find it wild how quickly time seems to shrink and "writing 500 words a day" seems to overnight turn into "I wrote 100k words in the last 3 years". My goal at this point in life (42) is not really to get better at stuff, but just focus on doing what I like and want to be doing, while leading a stable life.
The interesting thing with that is the only way people really master things is when they just like what they're doing enough to put up with the difficulty of getting to that level.
You probably improved alot. Is there an objective test. If that test can be rescaled by a function to linear based on average person’s time even better.
This guy has a lot of really great videos on how to practice smarter and has a lot of answers to dumb questions that you don't really wanna ask. I hope it helps.
I quite disagree. Started to learn extremely young (3 years old) and I guess my relationship with the instrument became second nature.
I feel there is a kind of threshold that you cross at some point and then, the skill becomes part of you, forever engraved. You know you're there when you can play the piano without a piano, just in your head and in the tingle of your muscles. When you do not need a rational stage like a score or even a piece to play. You just play what you feel.
I don't play that often now, maybe 30 mins to an hour once every two or three days.
My technique is not as good as it used to be. But my understanding of music, harmony and emotion is deeper. My music is better now than when I was at my peak as a technician, because as a human being, I matured.
Similar with me and trumpet. I started in 6th grade and was very serious about it through high school. Put the trumpet down for probably 25 years. Then I got the bug in me again and started practicing and getting my chops back. In almost no time, I was once again an "advanced trumpet player" -- solid tone, good range, etc. My fingers are a bit less nimble and out of shape, but the core tone is there. That instrument is --as you say-- part of me, forever engraved.
That's very much not been my experience. I learned to play when I was in grade school, took most of a decade off during college and early 20s, then picked it back up.
I also had an enforced multi-year hiatus when I broke my arm at age 35.
I might need to do some extra drills and practice to get back to where I had been, but the fundamentals never left. Like riding a bike - might be out of shape, but I still know how everything works.
That's not been my experience with the piano. I definitely forgot a lot. Maybe I never got the fundamentals set enough. It wasn't my lifelong passion either.
You don't forget how to ride a bike because the bike is doing most of the work. Because of physics, a bike stays better balanced when it is moving.
Compare that to say, pro racers, mountain bikers, trick riders, etc. there are significantly more skill involved in those than casually riding around.
People who are saying "Guitar" or "Piano" don't play insturments.
The cello:
1. You're literally sitting when you play, whereas many violinists, violists, and bass players have to stand.
2. Big enough strings to not cause a player to develop callouses, no pain/bleeding.
3. Almost always only play one string at a time - no knowledge needed of chords.
4. Until you get ultra good, you will only need to learn 1 clef, and only a handful of key signatures
I think guitar and piano are among the harder of instruments to learn. Bowed string instruments are among the easiest.
A friend learns Piano and she has tried some instruments. She told me cello and violin are one of the most difficult to even begin. But I will explore this.
Piano or guitar are probably the best instruments for fastest path to gratification i.e. you can play something vaguely nice sounding pretty quickly, on the other of a couple months.
With string instruments you sound like a crying baboon for 2 years, and with brass instruments you sound like an underwater crow for 2 years.
I could recommend taiko (Japanese) drums as an adult hobby. You very quickly get off the ground in terms of making wonderful music together with a group.
sorry, in fact i think its hard to play any instrument, but my experience is with piano only. i studied hard for 18 months in my mid 30s and could play many pieces of Erik Satie and some other musicians.
Piano requires adaptation in the corpus callosum of your brain to coordinate two-handed playing - it takes time to develop. Competent players have usually been playing for years to a decade before they're at a level of public performance.
My anecdotal experience is that someone who starts at 25 and plays until 35 will be a shadow of a 15yo who started at 5. Are there concert pianists who started late, say post-puberty? I think maybe jazz, but the standards are pretty different.
Most children who start to learn instruments at some point just stop doing it. Kids who actually turn into concert pianists undergo rigorous training that is effectively a full time job. How many adults at age 25 have even attempted that? Just in financial terms, how many adults have spent the resources on themselves that the parents of highly competitive kids do?
Most adults who pick up skills just don't do it in a deliberate way. When I moved to Japan for work I thought as an adult it'd take me years to acquire a new language. But the company I worked for got me professional training and I hunkered down about 2 hours per day and in ~14 months I did much better than I thought was possible.
One aspect of it is that the 5-15 kid has a ton more spare time. And when practicing is able to be more immersed, not bugged down by real life chores and problems like the 25-35.
Personal history: I started playing guitar around 18 and at ~25 I was way ahead most of my 18-20 year old peers who had started way younger. And I was a jazz snob since like 20.
I did learn the basics of piano and reading music when I was around 7 but never played actively, but it might've helped that I didn't start from scratch at 18. But I was immersed once I started - music was literally all I did in my spare time aside from doing drugs. :D
I'm now in my 40s and have been learning piano for the past 2 or so years. I think I've been progressing quite fast, but it's easy since I already know what to do, it's just another instrument (the challenge is mainly the hand coordination).
Not my experience at all… I learn faster at 40 than I did when I was younger. I don’t feel like anything is slower, plus I have the decision-making ability to actually do things efficiently as unappealing as that initially is.
how old are you know? I've continued to pursue biking quite aggressively and now at 50 find the speed of progression and the ability to recover much slower. Right when I have more time and money than ever before :(
I’m 42. I don’t care too much about progress, and Covid has nuked my lungs. I was lucky to be born with great endurance genetics. I mostly care about riding long and discovering new parts in nature on my gravel bike.
It stems from a few things, and novelty is only one factor. (Also, it is not only that the world begins (to us) as full of novelty, but also most people gradually transition from exploration to exploitation.)
In addition to remembering previous events, there is also how fast we process information (e.g. reaction times). It seems that as we are getting longer, we get fewer clock ticks per second. (On an interesting take on that, read a short story "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang.)
The ticks per second thing is very interesting because of a something weird i encountered the other day - i suddenly realised seconds are WAY faster than they used to be.
I play music so have a pretty good feel for rhythm and i distinctly remember the clock in a family members house ticking each second being way, way slower as a kid. Slept there the other day and it was fast as hell. So incredibly weird. I'm sure my memory of the BPM is much slower than the feeling from today.
Sitting looking at the digital clock right now two seconds seem close to one as a kid.
Extrapolating from my own case time seems to have doubled in speed from 5 to in my 30's, if that doubles when im 70, then when im 100 it's 8 times as fast, wow.
I wonder what that would mean for life extension, imagine this exponential - then you'll get very little effect from living past 200 years:
Yes, and one thing you can do is doing something/everything different everyday, but the downside of this is that you'll get fatigue out of keeping your brain on alert all the time.
I observed this with people traveling, I used to call travel cognitive impairment, as usually functional human beings (like my close relatives) suddenly get very lost and helpless during travel (specially at airports).
I then realized that this was because this was a unusual experience for them (once every year) and this would overload them with things out of their routing (even if they traveled before). That didnt happen to me (yet) because I was traveling a lot for work, so this was a routine for my brain.
I am travelling right now, freeform exploration of another country is full of novelty. It feels like I have been here for a month but it has only been two weeks.
The downside is I am exhausted. I also couldn't imagine doing any of my work while travelling even if I had a computer with me. There is downtime enough to do some, but I don't think I'd have the capacity to engage with it. I think advanced abstract thinking relies on a bit of cognitive room being created by routine. Perhaps that is at the consequence of the routine moments disappearing into a void of compressed time.
My anecdata is that my late-twenties felt way slower than my early-twenties, mostly because I switched from a 9-5 office job to a remote job that allowed me to slow travel. I spent a month in Rome and I remember most days and definitely remember all weekends, but I would have to really dig deep for a memory from 2019.
I’ve learned that the passage of time is extremely relative. My college years were extremely full of new experiences and they feel like ages. Once I started working, my life was very rote and consisted mainly of driving from home to work and back again. I worked a lot of hours and vacations and weekend trips were infrequent. Time flew by.
Then I ditched settled life and started traveling year round with a couple of bases i spend more time in between traveling. I’ve learned that the change in environment keeps putting the mind back into a more neuroplastic state where we are more open to the experiences around us, can change our habits more easily and just generally turn off autopilot for awhile.
I’ve been doing this for about 9 years. It’s been like a century. I feel like a very different person then when I started. I have some friends who still live in the same city at the same job that I left originally and it absolutely blows my mind that they stood still while it feels like I went to Mars and back.
Certainly many people on this website could if it were their priority. Some money is required, but not very much. I’m sure I make less money than many here because I take jobs that prioritize remote work and flexibility.
So what’s really the blocker for many is a choice of priorities. I won’t have children. I don’t have a strong need to play homemaker or gardener. My lifestyle is pretty similar to a lot of retirees who have second homes and travel between them. I talk to quite a few in one of my home bases and we have a lot of the same travel plans as well as it’s common for them to try to spend a month or two a year traveling to new places.
Definitely. My brother works in a trade, works for a year or two then quits and travels for 6+ months at a time. He also has very few possessions and no liabilities or commitments. I prefer a slightly different balance with a few more possessions but still travel for about a month a year. Like you say, it's all about priorities. We all work way longer/harder than we need to for basic sustenance.
working and travelling on occasion -- "on an average net salary" implies not actually quitting your job -- is not what the GP described.
The GP described quitting their job and going traveling for an entire decade, which is an incredible luxury over an enormous timespan that only the luckiest will ever be able to enjoy. The fact that the GP then chooses to treat this gift as though it makes him better than his colleagues who had to stay and work for that decade is.. frankly just gross. "They stood still" no bud, they had a life experience that 99% of the world population has no choice but to experience. Maybe instead of being pretentious about your experiences, try gratefulness?
I say this as a "privileged" tech worker, with "only" a six figure salary. I could quit my job and go traveling, maybe for a year, and then be broke and set far back on my retirement goals, and my hopes of ever retiring. And I could only do that if I was tremendously selfish, like you: choosing to have no kids, choosing to allow the elders in my family to face poverty instead of proper end of life care, etc.
If you have the ability to not work and travel for a DECADE of your life, I suggest you have an immense gratitude towards everyone else keeping society running while you luxuriate, instead of pretending as though the fact that you've had this opportunity somehow makes you superior to those who had to work
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together;)
I did make a choice, and it didn’t involve all that much luck beyond what everyone here has, a lucky break in a good career and a high income birth country. Actually there was bad luck, my partner and I were laid off at the same time. Sometimes the good comes from the bad.
I don’t think I am better or worse, but I do push myself always to experience new things. It’s hard to imagine my life any other way, but then lots of people are deeply passionate about things that I’m not going to understand and vice versa.
I think it’s interesting that you call not having children a selfish act. Having biological children always struck me as very egocentric. For me I have no choice. I am gay and our families live in places where one day in the not too distant future LGBTQ couples could have their children taken away. Maybe that would have been a good road to walk down, but it was not my road to take.
It’s also interesting what you project onto me around elder care. What I see is that most people I know live far from their parents and families. They spend their whole professional lives in major cities and visit home maybe 2 weeks a year. That pattern of life doesn’t make sense to me. I love my family and want the flexibility to see them often. If they needed money or needed care, I would give it to them, but they have no need. Besides spending some of the year near them, I know that I inspired them to travel more and take bigger risks in their retirement. I know I have helped enrich their lives. We will go on a few trips together this year and I never have to decline an invite because of not enough PTO.
If there’s something about your life you feel trapped in and unhappy with, try to change it!
I guess I have a different perspective since having children naturally is not in my cards. Needing the child to be genetically related to me through IVF vs. adopting always seemed a bit self centered.
> The GP described quitting their job and going traveling for an entire decade
You replied to the person who wrote the GP. I don't see anything in their post that confirms not working - they just work remotely, as the post you are replying to confirms.
> And I could only do that if I was tremendously selfish, like you: choosing to have no kids, choosing to allow the elders in my family to face poverty instead of proper end of life care, etc.
This is deeply unfair. Choosing not to have kids is not selfish at all. By some metrics it's even laudable, but you don't have to go that far to simply not condemn people who make that choice. And you have no idea how much they make or whether their parents are "facing poverty". Perhaps their parents died younger. Perhaps they have excellent retirement savings. Perhaps OP is one of seven children who contribute equally to their parents' care. You don't know.
I'm in full agreement with you that traveling like this is a privilege of the wealthy. But I think the way you condemn it falls pretty flat.
You’ve already been called out but I feel like confessing that I thought the “no kids” decision was selfish until I had kids.
For various reasons I won’t bore people with, I now go out of my way to tell young people that they should feel absolutely no obligation to do have kids. Yes, as animals it’s our collective responsibility to bring up the next generation of our species, but that doesn’t mean every individual should, and it’s awful to feel forced into doing so if you aren’t comfortable with the very real risks. And the risks are worse than I ever thought. And I don’t even have it the worst.
Sorry to hear that. My mom and two of my sisters and my brother in law all work in childhood disability social work. When I was young I went on a lot of home visits or visited my mom’s workplace. The bundle of joy narrative broke down for me at a pretty early age as I witnessed a lot of heartbreak and impossible struggles. Funny how those stories never seem to show up on social media or only the ones with happy endings.
Yup. I felt like some kind of massive failure or something for the first 4 years because I didn’t even know what was wrong and I basically didn’t know any other parents had struggles this bad. Now I still feel terrible because everything sucks, but I know it’s not all my fault or normal.
It's not as unreasonable as you think - even in lower income / high tax burden countries like Austria an avg. net salary is enough to keep on travelling to all kinds of places.
I know people who work for the state government who keep appearing in India, Thailand, Brazil etc. when we're in meetings - usually they're billed as external consultants to avoid tax liability issues.
The true crux is that most people don't actually want the digital nomad lifestyle, humans naturally seek out some form of stability.
Exactly this. But I disagree that settled is natural. Humans evolved in nomadic tribes that followed the herds. Stability is a social technology that was developed alongside agriculture. Stability feels unnatural to me and I get the itch after too many months in one place. My two bases are near family and I have developed friendships with other traveling people. I’ll meet up this weekend in Miami with a Swede that I met in Portugal and last saw in New York.
For me, it's been throwing myself into a complex hobby - music.
like, as much as I like where I work, and as much as work throws new and weird challenges at me, but .. it's just computer maintenance. Entire years are kinda the same rote of work-shopping-sleep-work. I don't even have many memories of these years, honestly.
Now that I've left my comfort zone with my instruments, do stuff with the instruments, go to a lot more concerts... life is kinda revolving around concerts and every day has some thing to approach with the instruments I'm not happy with. Suddenly that week is when I picked up TES BOS to make the bass sound better, that week was with a few friends, that week was a frozen crown concert, that week was when I got a really cool intro in a riff challenge, that week my teeth confused the fuck out of my dentist and their tool tray ended up as a diorama of a medieval battlefield, ...
I think they just wonder when the uneasiness that throws him constantly around the world subsides and he'll settle down comfortably in his own skin and mind and start living instead of constantly trying to escape from life into the world.
Life of comfort? Of not feeling the need? Life of being able to just sit on your butt and be happy?
I'm not quite sure.
As from what you might be escaping from... Admission that your experiences are irrelevant? That you have no obligation to yourself or anybody to live a specific way? That no way of living is better or worse (given that you have money and ability to decide about yourself). All means of distracting yourself until you die are equally valid.
Meaning of life is a weird thing. It changes as you age and experience. It's different for everybody despite the trends. I'm not gonna argue any point about it.
They are probably thinking that life starts to pass by fast and wondering where the last 10 years went.
I had some friends living interesting lives when I was settled. Sailing the globe, doing seasonal work in the arctic and backcountry skiing mountains with no name. Doing field work in the African bush. I kept thinking about them and wondering how I could be them, like the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it.
I think the intellectually honest counterpoint is more about relationships. As someone who has been a digital nomad, it's hard to form deeper relationships when people are always leaving.
It's also hard to have hobbies that rely on the same group of people meeting in person over a long period of time.
I don’t think there’s any one size fits all way to digital nomad. I go back to the same places year after year. My friends and family are in those places. They are not in New York and San Francisco, I have no family there.
My partner and I enjoy our hobbies with groups of people when we are there. It’s not that different than being a snowbird. The main difference is that in addition to home base time, we also spend 4 months a year traveling, sometimes on our own, sometimes with our people.
Completely non scientific theory, although inspired by McGilchrist's "The Divided Brain" I'd wager that as we age the left hemisphere takes more and more of our awareness as we map the world internally and we tend to live more and more from "what is already known" as opposed to present experience.
I too have hundreds of hours of meditation and I remember the feeling of time was very much affected. One night I remember out of sheer stubborness I sat for 5+ hours and I always remember the next week felt like it was a month.
It doesn't have to do with having "new" experiences, or new memories, or doing anything "interesting". It has to do with how we attend to the world.
And as Gilchrist pointed out this is being worsened as the devices we use day to day like smartphones, which aren't inherently bad, tend to stimulate mostly the left hemisphere unless you just listen to music. All the time you're going after buttons, notifications, looking at the icons, you're just continually sucked back into the world of the left hemisphere : icons, words, symbols, "things" to do or that could be done, things that could happen, emails, posts, likes, whatnot.
Actually I think it was already shown through EEGs that long time meditators, buddhist monks, had some areas of the brain more developed.. which would seem to support my theory likely those areas are related to the right hemisphere (and hence the right hemisphere's qualities such as ability for compasssion, seeing the whole, seeing things in context, ... and therefore seeing one's life in context as well instead of an old tape repeating in your mind everyday).
edit: also if you think logically, then it makes sense that the common intuition that having new experiences, or adding more variety in your life would make time feel like it goes by slower, but it is not because of "new" experiences, but as in my theory above, because those new experiences stimulate the right hemisphere, as you become more focused and attentive to what is happening NOW. In fact by definition any new experience will stimulate the right hemisphere. So if you dont have the $$$ to go out and enjoy the world, or take a vacation the good news is you'll probably enjoy the benefits of right hemisphere activation by doing... NOTHING! (ie. meditation, focused attention on the breath or any one of many techniques all revolving around developing concentration and attention) :)
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.
I've meditated quite a lot, and I am now often able to "live in the moment" so much so, that I only experience the most recent bite that I'm taking out of a Snickers bar. It gives me the strange feeling that I might as well not have eaten the entire bar, just the last bit.
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?
It even distorts logical processing, things like what is true and what is possible are also according to what (is known to the individual observer, or the culture they're embedded in) currently exists.
The older you get the less you learn and the less new things you learn. Days are becoming repetitive. Looking back at last year contains the same information as 1 week when you were young.
That the mind compresses oft-repeated experiences makes more sense than this math-as-psychology nonsense.
Notice how when you have to wait for an hour, you’re bored, time seems to pass slowly, yet for those last ten minutes time passes more quickly because there’s only 1/6 hours le— yeah exactly, no, that doesn’t happen. The whole hour passes slowly because that whole fraction theory is bunk.
I try to balance my life between new and exciting experiences and more routine and mundane experiences. The routine and mundane are important. They are how I maintain my important relationships and pay the bills. But when it all becomes routine, time will fly by regardless of age (at least for adults). But my sense of time reliably slows to a crawl if I have enough new stimulus. And the older I have gotten (40's currently) the more I have gone out of my way to purposefully generate experiences that slows things down.
I lived abroad for 2 months a few years back and it felt like 6 months. I moved states not long after and once again, massive slowdown. That first year in a new city felt like three. New relationships can do the same thing. As can new jobs or, even more so, a career change. And let's not forget drugs.
But those are all things a person can completely avoid if they don't make a conscious effort not to. My default for many years was to sit snuggly at a boring job, travel only intermittently and otherwise immerse myself in repetitive media. I refer to those as the lost years (mid-to-late 20's).
I always thought of it as each unit of time being relatively shorter in relation to your life on earth. A year is 20% of the time a 5-year old is aware of, but only 2% of a 50-year olds life. But the boredom argument is pretty strong. I remember vividly the time when I moved to another country and those first three months still feel like they lasted longer than the last three years.
One very simple explanation I’ve read is that time perception (as time itself) is relative. Time goes slower when you are a child because your perception of time is relative to the totality of time you’ve experienced.
So for instance, when you go from 1 to 2yrs old, it’s double the amount of your entire life, but from 80 to 81 it’s just a small fraction.
Not sure if this has been proven or is even possible to prove.
I thought I watched a Vsauce video that debunked this idea. Instead they suggested it was the fact that adults have fewer novel experiences than children. In other words, have lots of new experiences and time seems to extend. Something about the brain storing "same" in some kind of compressed time memory slot.
On top of this, the totality of your experience also grows with time. To a four year old, many day-to-day experiences are fresh and new. By the time they’re thirty, there are far fewer such events on any given day.
I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated.
I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. All I can tell you is "they are sponges" is a common description. It blows me away they can learn how to recognise faces, walk, speak a language in the space of a few years.
As a kid I recall getting bored very easily. I needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed my brain.
As a young adult I recall a friend asking me to look up a telephone book to find the a persons address. I got back to the car and told them the address. "Oh", they said "I must have the spelling wrong, try ...". No problem, I remembered every name and address on the page I've just seen.
But as I grew older, remembering stuff came less easily. Now at over 60, if I put in a situation where I'm forced to remember a while pile of new stuff I feel distinctly uncomfortable, whereas before I was better at it than most.
And during all that time, the passage of time has sped up. Ergo, my theory is I gauge the amount of time that has passed between events X and Y by the number of memories accumulated in the period.
> I have a simpler theory. The apparent speed of the passage of time is inversely proportion the number of memories being accumulated.
I had this same realization. In other words, our internal clock is not like a mechanical, or a quartz watch, with seconds flowing at a constant rate. It's more like a hourglass or a clepsydra, but instead of sand/water, the flow is of bits of information from the world into the brain. As in a hourglass, near the end the flow is weaker (learning is much slower as an adult than as a child), and the same amount of physical time corresponds to much less sand (subjective time).
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows calls it 'Zenosyne' [0], or the sense that time keeps going faster. I quite like it and have found myself coming back to rewatch it every couple years.
According to this book: https://valsec.barnesandnoble.com/w/slow-down-time-the-power... , it basically happens because the number of snapshots you encode per second goes down. Snapshots are visual cues that we encode. The best example is that if we are watching a fan start, after a certain speed, we cannot tell how many wings are there on the fan. We are not snapshotting fast enough. Younger people can probably tell the number of wings on a faster fan :). Various things slow down this snapshotting in our brain, and the best antidote is to get in the zone and do things with immense attention.
Nice 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.
100% this. The older you get, the shorter a minute or an hour seems to be. When I was 12, an hour was an interminably long amount of time to spend in a classroom. Now that I’m 42, it’s barely long enough to take a decent nap.
Life is cruel that way. Can hardly wait for how quickly it passes when I’m in my 70s or 80s…
I'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.”
You learn to live with the instability. You come to terms with how short and limited life and life's experiences can be. It can be a lonely life, but it by far can be the most rewarding.
I look back from having diverged from a world where I never escaped my home-town gravity well and I'm glad I took the leap. It made me a deeper, richer, and more interesting individual.
At the moment I got a visa that allows me to stay for 15 months, which provides a good deal of stability. I think a few years is probably the sweet spot before moving on.
I have been able to avoid this by just immediately switching to something else when I feel things are getting too comfy. Doing things that are not comfortable seem to stretch time for me. It works so well that for me (at 50) time is moving incredibly slowly and I like it that way.
I also do the same. Spent a bunch of time scaling a B2B company, and now I'm doing a consumer app intentionally for an intentionally different challenge.
The explanation is probably simple in the end: children are mentally more present and mindful, and thus bored, and as adults we become increasingly distracted by higher order thoughts and projections and plans so we're considerably less mindful of the present.
I had some very long periods of intense suffering over the last decade. After... a lot, I'm in a much better place now.
I made some minor lifestyle changes to make things a bit easier on myself, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of my days are largely the same.
However, life moves much more slowly now. When I get to the end of a week, Monday seems quite a long time ago.
I'm not sure about the predictability thesis. The way I think about it is that I have no expectations from life anymore; I take what I can get, give what I can, and focus on one day at a time. I think this more than anything has contributed to a feeling of my life slowing way down.
Actually we do have very little time, its just that the upswing and downswing have different feels to it. You might have noticed this even when you are driving for a vacation. Drive to the picnic spot feels like an eternity, drive back home feels quick.
There are ~52 weeks a year. Which makes a week 2% of a year. That's already a fast enough tick. Weeks do go by fast. An year is like 10% of a decade. Once you are past the age of 40. You indeed have little time left.
Human life is short if you are doing remotely well in life. It can be a suffering if you are not doing great.
This sounds highly rational and also comes across to me as completely wrong.
I have maintained a fairly tight circle of friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. One of the patterns that stands out very strongly is the high variability in the perception of time. Those who have settled into a routine such as a relationship that endures and work that remains highly similar even if the company and title change tend to experience this time flying by effect strongly. Others who have had major complications to deal with like relationships coming and going, medical problems, big changes to location, fundamental changes in work situation and so on end to have a critical time slowing effect. Coming to grips with big changes and getting settled again requires a lot of attention and work and does not allow for a relaxed grip on life events. Try getting mugged, dumped, fired, sick, and then moving somewhere unfamiliar and you might find this time passing faster effect disappears, if only until adjustments are made.
This implies the whole effect may be about how humans must focus when pushed but then tend to zoom out and ease up when ongoing attempts to steady themselves are successful. Reminds me of the book Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/tempo/).
Watching my children, they appear to have more time. I expect it is not so much that time seems to pass faster, but that as you age you move into loftier goals that take longer.
Yesterday I watched a video that described a two-dimensional grid where the x and y axes were “skill” and “challenge” respectively. A range surrounding y=x was the flow state. Below it was boredom (skills exceed demands) and above it was anxiety (demands exceed skills). Flow arises when our skills align to what we must do; not something easy, not something hard. The presenter also noted that amount of time in flow correlated with life satisfaction, and that it’s also when people do their best work, and time moves the fastest.
That’s the sweet spot to be. Where life is challenging, so you aren’t bored, but not so challenging to where you are overwhelmed. It seems the author urges people to flip from the boredom side of the flow state to the anxiety side because both of those are where time feels like an eternity (which anyone who has been in either of those states can attest to). I think a better idea is to question if what the author is proposing, trying to make time feel slower, is a good idea. Personally, I think the exact opposite is the case; all the best moments I’ve had are ones that went by “too quick”, and we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Time going by slowly is likely a canary in the coal mine for something being wrong.
I feel that as children your experience is lot more variable... Every year of school or even university is slightly different, but once you get to work life many years can mostly be same or at least weeks and months...
On other hand I am sure there is some difference with perception of time when you get older and you will handle boredom better or can take something nap like just easier...
I don't agree that it does. Something I've noticed as I've gotten older is that it feels like time is passing more slowly. My late 30s is when time felt like it passed the fastest.
On the other hand, if you're talking about "that happened two years ago, but it feels like it was yesterday" I agree. I don't think that's what the post is talking about.
When my kid was young, it felt like time was evaporating. Days would fly by without any possibility of doing the things I needed to do, much less do the things I wanted to do. My life was defined by my time shortages. That's no longer the case. Not that I'm less busy (this is the busiest I've ever been) but I seem to have things better under control. So I think it's more about being better at time management.
I think that the older you get, the less new milestones/events you have (that impress you and remember in detail). This results in having less moments to refer to when looking back in time, (skipping uneventful timespans). This makes things seem closer to the current time than they really are as everything in between is empty noise.
it might be because schools are just more interesting than adult existence. Everyone comes from all walks of life and all you seem to think is to have fun (and other wholesome things)
1. Time is, literally, relative. We have nothing to compare things to when we are young, so everything takes for-ev-eeeeer.
2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar.
Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.
That’s just some made up math-as-psychology that makes sense to nerds for some reason. Just conflating two completely different concepts.
Any explanation that doesn’t say anything about the mind is just baloney. Time here is an experiential phenomenon. It’s not fractions. Insert your pet theory in a context where adults have the same mindset as children and retain memories perfectly and have no reason to discard/compress memories them—you see that it’s totally irrelevant whether your life is 2/3 or 1/8 over. It has everything to do with how the mind works, not how numbers work.
Bonus points for the “unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect”… which is very self-aware-useless.
This is the part I found most interesting about the first few episodes of "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" anime. The main character is an elf. In this world elves are rare so she hasn't see another in 100s of years. Time for her passes differently than humans. She's got 1000s of years so for her, spending 10yrs in some library researching a hobby topic is not a big commitment. For her human friends it would be a large portion of their life. She commits to multi-year projects easily (10 years of a 5000 year life is 1/500th of your life vs a human where it's more like 1/8th). And, she watches her human friends pass away. Societies form and collapse. Etc...
yes awesome site! I remember this from when it was first published, very clearly explains why the passage of time changes during your lifetime, and also explains why some people search for new thrills around their midlife to try and get those extended experiences again, always trying something new, because just doing the things you were doing before is now perceived as boring.
This is one of those things that seems true, but is it? They’ve presented no evidence whatsoever. Even the question itself carries with it an assumption. Does time seem to pass faster as we age? I bet you could find some people for whom it does not.
What are you arguing against? This is an experiential thing. Or phenomenological. Evidence? This is just something that people often report. No one cares if there are counter-examples. That doesn’t make it less true for those that experience it.
I definitely feel it. I'm sure some people do not, and they are lucky. My recent perception has been distorted by the pandemic years and resulting working-from-home. WFH created a monotony I never realized was possible. Time had sped up, in general, though some days (especially Mondays) drag on forever...
This post is extremely speculative and the author stretches the CS analogies way, way too far, but the gist is reasonably accurate. Time does pass faster on average as you get older because our brain doesn't bother to record repeated experiences.
But guess what? That means that all you have to do to make time pass more slowly is bring more novelty into your life. I can say from personal experience that the year I spent living abroad seemed to go on forever. Every single day was filled with new experiences. There was a huge amount of continuous novelty and learning and growth. It was really nice. I need to move to a new country again.
This sounds like a reasonable argument, but I don't think it is. A day for a 4 year old still takes the same 24 hours as a day for a 40 year old.
The argument presupposes that you experience the length of an event relative to the sum length of all experiences you've lived through. That seems pretty much related to the premise of the article we are discussing. So it's not much simpler.
The idea of high correlation between predictability and time flying is interesting.
I'm working on patenting an idea and have filed the provisional. This gives me exactly 1 year to file the full application. There's so many unknowns between now and then which has me very aware of time and actively wanting to slow it down.
I'm not certain it always applies though. I've definitely had periods of high unpredictability where I enjoyed what I was doing and it didn't seem to go by slow at all.
In my early and mid 30s, as a result of visionary experiences, my experience of "lived time" changed. In general, moments lasts a lot longer.
This doesn't really have to do with the brain becoming a better prediction machine so much as how mindful and present you are in the moment. While it is true that doing the same things over and over creates habits (ruts) of the mind, the practice of mindfulness reverses this.
These days (in my early 40s), when I spar with swords, time stretches out by a lot. Especially during tournaments.
I was always told it's because as you age a year becomes a smaller portion of your life. When you are 35 a year is 1/35th of your life, compared to 1/5th as a 5 year old.
> Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth).
I think with these things it helps to reflect. If you reflect you can either glean the truth about it or make up some intuition that is instrumentally useful. I think a lot of use manage to reach some wisdom milestones completely independently by just reflecting.
And if you are concerned about this feeling of time going by faster: being less of a tunnel-visioned adult who is mostly focused on the extrinsic can maybe counteract this feeling.
This touches the personal topic of life choices and I find many posts here inspiring.
I'm striving for not causing harm to others, avoiding things that lead to ill mental states like compulsion or anger, seeking things that lead to healthy mental states like calmness and focus.
This seems to be a boring life from the outside, but doesn't feel like that to me. Maybe because I've got enough challenges. Time perception is not important to me.
Does it? Not if you switch away from the 9-5 routine. Daily work makes life feel fast, as do routines of all kinds, family kids etc. Switching to on-demand employment leaves a ton of opportunities for our attention to drift away and travel.
It s true that novelty is rewarding. When mice are placed in a novel environment, their neurons become more excitable, but that doesn't necessarily correlate with subjective perception of time
My way to slow down time is using git to write a diary with every day is a commit.
I try to be careful not fall on the fallacy that "I get it" and draw assumptions about things.
If not, after your pass your 50s time turns into blurring mashup of deja-vu's and the feeling that you are Fred Flinstone rolling in my Flintmobile while the background scenery, the houses, the palm trees and buildings repeat every 3 seconds.
"Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years."
Intense pain makes time feel longer, but it is the same for all intense experiences. And I am not even sure about that, endorphines can make time fly.
And when I consider memories, pleasurable events tend to take more time in my mind, pain tend to get erased more than pleasure. For example, I don't remember much about sick days, though obviously uncomfortable, they don't take much subjective time, thankfully.
Memories that are recorded have an initial depth and upon retrieving the memory, the depth gets deeper. Trivial events, with little reason to recall, are forgotten.
This explains how trauma and ptsd can create terrible feedback loops.
Having lived through a somewhat damaging childhood I have chosen to not recall the unpleasant memories and have forgotten them.
It would be interesting to know when the subjective midpoint of your life is. I mean, if you lived to 80, and time seemed to speed up as you get older, is the subjective middle of your lifespan more like age 35, or more like age 25? I recognize it's impossible to answer this question from inside a life, but I have wondered it many times.
Dopamine also plays a role in the perception of time. Basically, high dopamine gives more processing power it means you get higher frame rates so time feels slower.
similarly, low dopamine leads to time flying quickly. Moreover, the speed at which we blink eyes also affects the perception of time.
Seems like time goes the same for me. I don’t ever do the same thing each day, I don’t keep a routine or show up consistently and sort of follow my interests and they change constantly. This makes me utterly incompatible with most people but I kind of like this more, I want to enjoy life as it comes. I am in no rush.
I wonder if people who daily reflect on their day and write in a journal experience time passing more slowly?
I’ve heard that time seems to pass faster because it is such a smaller percentage of our life. For a 2 year old, 1 year is 50% of their life. For a 100 year old, 1 year is 1% of their life.
I think long periods of time are experienced logarithmically, with a base of around 2. So the period from, say, 10 to 20 years is comparable to the period from 20 to 40 years, and then 40 to 80 years. The seasons really start to zoom by at my age. (I'm in my late 50's.)
My thought has always been that the ratio of lifetime to any given sublifetime unit of time is always increasing, leading to a change in relative experience. But if you focus on the fact that a second is constant, you always have the same amount of time right now.
I always thought it was because it's a ratio of how long we've been here, at 10 a year is an eternity, it's 10% of your life - you could do so much during the 6 weeks of summer holiday.
At 48 a year is just over 2% of your life, it's so fast almost supersonic.
This is a lot of speculation about the brain and how memories are recorded, by someone with no apparent training on the subject, and with no sources cited.
Maybe they're right. But I'd prefer more reliable sources, which other commenters here have provided.
Let T be the life span and t be the age. Let s = T - t.
Remark 1:
dt / s is small when t is small.
Remark 2:
Perception of s (call it p) is in reality a function of t. For small t, p(t) is perceived to be near infinity. For t > 40, p(t) rapidly decays to a small number.
Modern society and work makes people have less free time to form memories. Certainly, people felt time is running fast even in older times but I doubt if time ran faster at the same rate for people from say 50s as much as it is for us today?
It's also the reason going back feels much faster despite the fact you're exhausted and probably walking/biking slower. You know the route so you switch to automatic more often and remember less.
"My grandfather used to say: 'Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride.'"
My dad (who is in his late seventies) told me that while years seems to pass faster and faster with age, the future is still as far away, as it has always been.
> It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time,[2] kairos signifies a good or proper time for action. In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[3]
No mention of energy? I think energy plays a big role because your movement and energy literally becomes less and less each year. At 80 you don't have much energy, forget about any other thing
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: