As people get older, “they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are,” says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.
This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.
No one is sure where this feeling comes from.
Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.
The answer is very simple. When you are two years old, your life can be divided into two equal halves. When you are ten years old, your life can be divided into ten equal parts. When you are 30 years old, your life can now be divided into 30 equal parts. And so on. You see the principle.
Each year you’re alive becomes a smaller fraction of your life. Pink Floyd was right: every year is getting shorter.
We’re all on a greased sliding board. The closer you get to the end, the faster you go.
Put another way.. When a child is five years old, and he’s told he has to wait a year for something, that is 1/5 of his lifetime, altho he’s not aware, it seems a VERY long time.. However, when a 60 year old person has to wait one year, its 1/60 of his lifetime, a seemingly very short time… Thus it seems to fly by..
That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
Grandmother (age 72) in SC.. Watching life fly by…………
Dave W and Grandmother – your points are good – our concept of time expands as we experience more of it, but I thought a bit about this when I was younger.
I remember how frustrated I got if my grandfather told me to wait 5 minutes before we could do something. I watched the clock, the seconds ticked by oh so slowly, and my brain raced: why did we have to wait? why didn’t he just get on with it? Why was he so slow?
The conclusion I came to when I was older and looked back on this was that I at age eight had an accelerated view of time – I fitted a lot more into 5 minutes, perhaps as much as my grandfather did in half an hour. He was slower, and used his time more slowly. I was a lot more active and I was running on a faster time. I had an accelerated metabolism compared to him, I thought and acted faster than him, so for me time was telescoped.
Now, five minutes slips by without me noticing, I am slower when I do things, I do not race and run about and if someone asks me to wait half an hour, I don’t mind, it slips by quickly without my noticing, I only fit a few things into that time…perhaps the same number of things I used to fit into 5 minutes when I was eight.
I think the accelerated pace of change in the 20th/21st centuries might have something to do with it. Internet and television for sure.
When I was a wee lad, I remember my grandmother telling me that time seem to go by faster as she got older. Remember thinking, baloney, I’ll never be 18. Well, as I pass thru my dotage, gram seems to have been right on.
Today sure didn’t fly past. I thought 5:00 would NEVER come.
Yes, time does flash by as I sit here at the nursing home watching the action packed “Animal Planet” on the big TV. Nodding off occasionally tends to speed things up.