OK, this post of mine doesn’t really fall under the “humor” section, but was unsure where else to put it. Perhaps dark humor ?
Its definitely true that life speeds up as you get older, so if we do gain an extra 20 or 30 years will it only seem like another 5 years?
I wonder if that is related to brain aging.
My experience so far says that this is true.
Good question… lots of different theories it seems:
Our neural processing slows down as we age
Professor Adrian Bejan has a theory based on how neurons process signals. As we age, our neural networks increase in size and complexity, and as a result, process visual information at a slower rate. That slower processing means we create fewer mental images each second than we did when we were younger, thereby making time seem to slow down.
“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth, Bejan shared with Harvard University."It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful; it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”
In other words, processing the same number of mental images we did in our youth takes longer now, somewhat counterintuitively making time seem to pass more quickly. So goes the theory, anyway.
…
One way to do that is to be mindful of your physical existence in this moment. Feel your heart beating. Feel your breath going in and out. Cornell University psychology professor Adam Anderson, Ph.D., conducted a study that found our perception of time may be linked with the length of our heartbeats. (Study participants were fitted with electrocardiograms and asked to listen to a brief audio tone. They perceived the tone as longer after a longer heartbeat and shorter after a shorter one.) He suggests starting a stopwatch, closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing for what you think feels like a minute. Then, check your time to see how accurate your estimation was.
“This can give you a sense of how much your experience of your body is related to your experience of time,” Anderson told WebMD. “It will help teach you to enjoy the pure experience of time.”
You can also use focused breathing to purposely slow down your heart rate, and thus slow down your time perception. “We show that slow heart rates—that is, a longer duration between heartbeats—dilates time, slowing it down," Anderson said.
https://www.upworthy.com/why-time-speeds-up-as-we-age
Some other articles and books on the topic:
Before I took rapamycin, old memories would constantly come to mind and I would get very emotional, the passing of time would constantly bother me, after rapamycin and of course with other longevity supplements, I feel like I only focus on the present moment, that sadness and the idea of time passing has diminished a lot in my mind. It came to mind when I saw this title, I think there is some truth to this title.
This is weird, I have had the same thoughts.
A few thoughts on the topic: When I was very young everything was new and I was filling the time with innumerable memories. When in high school I was busy most of the time with classes and after-school activities. Again, my time was filled with long days of memories. College and graduate school were similar with long days and lots of memories (most of which I have now forgotten). The first few years of a career were similar with new things to learn and remember (required in order to keep the job). Therefore, work days were long and stressful and memorable. Mid-way through the career, though, everything was familiar (and forgettable) and I was making fewer new memories. I was coasting and the time passed a lot faster. Since retirement time has gone like lightning because I’m not making many new memories at all any more. So, the time seems quite short. I’m sure a medical scientist has different arguments, but I’m going on the premise that time seems longer when there are lots of memories to fill the hours and shorter when you’re making fewer memories because you already know everything! LOL!
@Jay There is definitely something to what you are saying. I have always felt that marking time with strong memories was an important way to make life feel full.
When I am traveling in the summer with my family, it seems like the vacations are both very long and short at the same time. There are lots of new places and memories when going to a new city or country. Maybe that’s why travel is so important in retirement?
More theories on this observation…
Source: https://x.com/jack_schroder_/status/2040601569377591647?s=20
Isn’t this a matter of simple mathematics? Time speeds up as you get older, because every subsequent year is a smaller percentage of your life. At 10, a year represents 1 tenth of your life, at 50, the same year represents only one fiftieth of your life, every year you get older represents a smaller and smaller proportion of your life, so it seems as if your life is speeding up the older you grow. Of course, there could be all sorts of fancy reasons one feels this way, as mentioned above, but isn’t simple math at least a very fundamental fact you can’t get around? At 15, getting to 20, so 5 years, well, that’s fully a quarter of your lived experience… feels like forever. At 80, another 5 years is a blink of an eye, as your lived memories are so very much longer. Simple math, no?
This thread reminds me of the old joke about calorie restriction: “if you practice CR diligently, you may not live to be 100, but it will seem like it!”
I am currently doing a form of CR by alternating days on which I fast and days on which I eat on some of which I binge drink. I find drinking tisanes quite good on the fasting days. I also have eating on the non-fasting days to look forward to as well as the drinking days. Hence from a hedonistic perspective it is not bad.
I am a little concerned that my metabolism may have slowed a bit, but at the same time taking into account the cycles of vasodilation etc I have managed to hit my lowest weight since my teens.
I can attest to that. Also, I will have been a forum member for 5 years come November. And it just seems like yesterday that I made my first post.
I agree with most of your thoughts, though one article that I read said we do many more things in a day when we are younger, so it seems like a longer time to us.
I think that’s a part of it, but what I would guess is perhaps more important than how many things we do is how novel they are. If you are an adult and your life is in a routine, most days are pretty bland. However, a kid is having so many new and surprising experiences every day because there is so much in life that he has not experienced yet. That makes time feel slower for the kid.
I imagine that if an adult that lives his life in much of a routine suddenly takes one year off and goes to travel all over the world to gain all kinds of new experiences, that year of traveling will feel much slower than a typical routine year, and it’s not because he experienced more things but because they were more novel and memorable.
