And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

January 1, 2016 9:47 AM

Wow -- New Year's Day again already? Didn't we just do this? Why does time seem to speed up as we get older? Brian Resnick at Vox provides some food for thought.
posted by Fuzzypumper (22 comments total)

What researchers have found out is that while time estimation and time awareness don't change much as we age, time perspective does.

It's called "losing patience."
posted by mudpuppie at 10:08 AM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I've been inclined to favor the incremental relativity theory. Every minute is a smaller fraction of my life than the one preceding it. Upon reflection, I can see that thinking about the events of a decade takes less time than it took to actually experience it. 70 years, in one gulp.

But there were those years between 1965 and 1975 that exist only as a theory. Don't know what happened there, but I guess time must have actually passed.
posted by mule98J at 10:10 AM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I also liked his piece "Hey dude, have you ever looked at your hand really close? No, dude, like REALLY REALLY close."
posted by briank at 10:17 AM on January 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

Each new minute represents a smaller fraction of our lives. One day as a 10 year old represents about .027 percent of the kid's life. A day for a 60 year old? .0045 percent.

Exactly. This is how I've always explained it. Summers last forever when you are a kid because there is less in your whole life to compare it too. As the years go by, that time slips away so much faster.
posted by Roger Dodger at 10:23 AM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Or in other words, the interval of your life-span (as perceived) is constant, so each new year sub-divides that constant length a bit more, and its arrival comes a little earlier each year.
posted by Rash at 10:53 AM on January 1, 2016

Yes, agreeing with you Mule, Roger and Rash, it's the perception of relative time based on one's own life span. At ten years of age one year is a tenth of one's entire live. At my current age one year is about 1.5% of my life. Mule, I think that should be close to your age too.
posted by X4ster at 11:02 AM on January 1, 2016

Researchers have too much time on their hands.
posted by BWA at 11:21 AM on January 1, 2016

"Too Much Time On My Hands" : today :: "Personality" : 1981
posted by Fuzzypumper at 11:33 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have a tendency to mentally divide chunks of my life according to the particulars of my daily life: what classes I went to, where I worked, where I lived. When I was younger, those changed pretty regularly, first with every year of school, and then with a series of short-lived jobs. As I've gotten older, those major changes have come less often, so college semesters and four-month temp assignments take up as much space in my mental timeline as the three years in my current job. I know, logically, that they weren't all the same length, but my memory measures by the experiences rather than their durations.
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:41 AM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I am adding "chronobiologist" to my business cards and resume.
.....if I can find the time to do it.
posted by pjsky at 11:49 AM on January 1, 2016

This is basically what I wrote here on this subject six months ago.

The one mentioned possible factor in this that is new to me is the clarity/recency effect, which makes a whole lot of sense and dovetails nicely with the novelty theory.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:53 AM on January 1, 2016

Way back when I had a blog... was it 19... no, it was 1790. Anyway I wrote a thing where I likened my ever aging self to sliding down a huge slide. Always accelerating. Out of control, until death. Then I realized that there were bumps on the slide. Some soft, some rocky and jagged. These bumps appeared and disappeared at random. At any moment a bump could be right in front of you and, WHAM, out into the blackness. Ride over.

Kinda made me want the slide to continue.
posted by Splunge at 12:13 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Time does indeed rush by so fast. Just yesterday it seemed like the day before today
posted by Postroad at 12:28 PM on January 1, 2016

The seasons and years are whipping past quickly. Strange though, that some things slow it down immensely. A weeklong trip to Spain feels like a year in my memory. A month in 2015 spent caring for an ailing loved one was possibly a decade in actuality. The daily hour-long walks with the dogs often brings time to a near standstill. The sun cannot move from its position until the ferocious beasts have failed once again to catch the bunny.
posted by honestcoyote at 12:54 PM on January 1, 2016

I've always found the extreme time dilation of the psychedelic experience fascinating. Moments can feel like hours, and under some conditions the sense of time passing ceases altogether even though one is aware of events. Yet the memory of these impressions is different again. And I guess everyone has the sense of time slowing down when bored or consciencely waiting for something - or when a life threatening event is unfolding; conversely, time flies when you're having fun. And the degree to which a film or book changes time perception is a good proxy for its quality, one I suspect also changes with age.

If these factors could be willed, I wonder how the conscience expenence would change in flavour.
posted by Devonian at 12:57 PM on January 1, 2016

I feel the same as Metroid Baby. When things don't change much for a while, time passes much more quickly (in my retroactive memory) than when they do. So while school life had its regular changes (grades, classes, etc) adult life for me has had long periods of stability punctured by periods of rapid change. Times when I've had new jobs, new relationships, ending relationships, moving, big vacations, etc all felt very different than when I had months of "go to work, come home, do similar random fun things when time permits".
posted by thefoxgod at 1:39 PM on January 1, 2016

Weirdly, time is slowing down for me as I age.

It has taken me ninety subjective years to write this comment.

please help
posted by kyrademon at 1:40 PM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I also liked his piece "Hey dude, have you ever looked at your hand really close? No, dude, like REALLY REALLY close."

What if, like, our New Year's is just one minute in some giant being's calendar?
posted by rhizome at 2:37 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I've never been older than I am right now.
posted by VTX at 3:22 PM on January 1, 2016

Decades later, the first couple of minutes of a traumatic event can still seem like days, over shadowing the following year.
posted by ridgerunner at 4:35 PM on January 1, 2016

"Older than I used to be, younger than I'm gonna be; Fewer things puzzle me than when I was young". Rainmakers, The.
posted by buzzman at 6:46 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

2) Time flies when we're busy or distracted — and adults are busier than children

Another possibility is that being busy can somehow trick our memory into feeling like time is going by faster. "Tasks that demand considerable attentional resources are perceived as briefer than tasks that are undemanding," Friedman and Janssen explain. As we age, these tasks — career-related tasks, raising children, etc. — increase.

It's also possible that as adults, we feel like we never have enough time to do things — which our brain then interprets as time speeding up. "[F]inding that there is insufficient time to get things done may be reinterpreted as the feeling that time is passing quickly," they write. Deadlines always come sooner than we'd like.

Emphasis mine.

This right here has it folks. I've got a chronic pain condition and the previous two winters left me mostly bed bound. There is some interplay between winter and an increase in chronic pain, and it's not just pain.

Anyway, winter was excruciatingly slow. It from October to March, I thought I was going to die waiting for spring to arrive. When things warmed up and I felt a little better and there for was able to do more, things sped up considerably. My summers were gone in a blink. When they finally figured out at least one cause of my pain and were able to provide moderate relief for 6 weeks, that time went by like no ones business. I blinked and it was gone. Part of that I'm sure was the perception that I had such a backlog of life things to catch up on, that there really never was enough time. I'm determined to keep the pain from getting the drop on me, and am trying my damnedest to catch up on that backlog of stuff. Time has slowed down a bit more, but still is blazing by compared to before.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:01 PM on January 1, 2016