Time Perception with age

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Time seems to be speeding up as I get older. Little by little. As a very young child, 3-4 years old, a day was like an eternity. As a kid, a year felt very comfortably like a "lived" length of time. It wasn't just speeding by like months or weeks. This acceleration of time has occurred with everyone I know, without exception. People in their 50s-60s have said years feel like weeks. And I've even heard when you get very old, your whole life will feel like only a few weeks have passed.

Even though it's an apparently universal trait, it creeps me out. I want to be able to experience years like I did in mid-childhood. Years feeling like years, the concept of summer being so far away in the middle of winter. I could live with this and feel relaxed and happier about life. Time is a measurement, a human invention. I wonder what it would be like to live without that constant hovering measurement defining everything, if memory and perception would even out again.

I think the same. My life goes faster the older I get. I wonder what it is like just before death, maybe you see all of time.

A person usually becomes more patient as they get older which affects how they perceive the passage of time.

My grandmother once told me, "Wait 'til you get to be my age, when ten years feels like month."

It happens to everyone. It's a simple matter of mathematical perception. When you're a year old, a year is your entire life. At ten, it's ten percent. At twenty, it's five percent. At forty, 2.5 percent. The perception changes naturally as you grow older. Half as long for every doubling of age.

By the time you reach fifty, a hundred years doesn't seem very long anymore, and history itself doesn't seem all that long ago. Even the stuff that happened before you were born.

If you think about it, you could concievably know someone who knew someone who remembered the U.S. Civil War. I was only a year old a hundred years after it started. My father was 24 in 1961. He could easily have known someone who actually fought in it. He's still alive.

Think about this. I'm 51. The next fifty years that go by will seem as fast as the last 25 years, if I live that long. Pretty scary, huh?

Get why they say, "Life is short. Don't waste it!" ?

Every single old person back then was obviously born in the 1800s. Pretty weird right?

How old was your grandmother at the time?



I understand it. It just seems like a cruel mental perception that cannot be altered on a large scale. Waiting for an hour in a line can feel like forever.

I wonder how someone with amnesia experiences time.

That's interesting. I'd say our feel for time comes from a storage of non-verbal memory, i.e. long term memory. That's how the experienced is stored.
It's an intuition or feel based on that experience. If someone lost this type of memory, you'd live in the here and now, thus unaware but conscious. There is nothing prior to gauge the new experience to. I think of Alzheimer's.

I don't think it's just logarithmic memory. I think there's a biological imperative going on, strongly related to nerves and muscles. Also once you've processed an environment it compresses and you don't have to relearn it, but that's a very autistic way of seeing things and the phenomenon is universal, so maybe not.

I've been bothered by the feeling that my perception of time has been changing. I have a way of dealing with this. I will every so often have myself recall a situation earlier during the day, week, month, or year, and review how much has occurred between those times and the present. Since I've been doing this I noticed my perception of time has actually changed (sometimes dramatically) since I continue reaffirming how much has happened to me. It's interesting.

As we get older there are less and less events per year that are new and significant in our lives. Hence we disregard bigger and bigger chunks of these years, shortening our perception of time.

Would be interesting to find if there is an autistic difference here, just because of how we process information.

While time seems to speed up, I always have a very accurate mental clock...think that's an aspergian difference?

As to time speeding up with age, I agree with the algorithm set forward earlier.

Psychologically I think it happens if something is done for a long period of time without change, because there's nothing new to process during sleep.

Another theory I have is that as we age, we begin to become more sure of who we think we are. The extra time may be spent in youth establishing an identity.