Popular wisdom holds that time goes faster when you’re older. However, a new study (summary here) by William Friedman and?Steve Janssen doesn’t quite support the maxim. They surveyed college students and older adults: “Respondents of all ages reported that time seems to pass quickly. In contrast to widely held beliefs, age differences in reports of the subjective speed of time were very small, except for the question about how fast the last 10?years had passed.” Readers, what do you think? Does time pass faster as you climb the age ladder? If so, what might be the reasons? Let’s hear from older readers in particular. [%comments]
Time Flies?
TAGS: psychology
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Yes – my theory is that time goes by “faster” the older you get, because each absolute unit of time (i.e., one day) is smaller as a percentage of your overall life. One year will go by as fast to a ten year old as five years will go by to a fifty year old
Theory: Our perception of the passage of time as it happens is proportional to our level of “busyness”; our perception of the amount of time in the past is inversely proprtional to our level of “busyness” during that past time.
Sorry, other way round – the busier we are now the quicker time seems to pass whilst the busier we were in the past the more time appears to have passed (so time has gone “slower”).
When I was a child, the two week Christmas vacation seemed very long indeed. Now a month is just a blink. I think it is time in relation to the time you have lived. At one year, a month is a full 1/12th of your life. At 60, I think it is 1/780th of your life. So your perception is altered considerably. Even the Bible says that our lives are just a blink to the eternal God who perceives time on an entirely different scale.
I feel that time does move faster as you age. Primarily because a fixed unit of time represents a smaller percentage of your total existence the older you get.
As an extreme example of this idea: when you are only 5, a period of 5 years is your entire life, so being asked to wait 5 years for something will feel like it will “take forever.” And forget about conceptualizing a period of 10 years at that age. On the other hand, that same 5 year period for a 70-year old is equivalent to a tiny slice of their life, so looking ahead 5 or even 10 years without it feeling interminable is feasible..
I think it just feels like it goes faster because when we are younger we have more milestones we focus on and they seem like they take forever to arrive because we focus on those days. But once we are past those milestones (10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21) we don’t seem to have as many moments as often to look forward to, after we have say graduated every grade or school we go through, then we get married and/ have kids, we just go through our days in almost rhythmic motion with no bigger goals or milestones to keep us looking farther into the future. So time doesn’t necessarily fly by any quicker than before, it just goes by without as much attenimtion or excitement on our part because we get wrapped up in the here and now, before we know it we have been focused on what’s on our plate in our daily lives we haven’t stopped to look up and see what’s happening around us on a wider or broader perspective
Mathematically if you look at the percentage of your entire life that a finite amount of time (day/hour/second) represents it is always decreasing.
Percent of Life that 1 Day Represents over 70 Years
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+1/x,+x%3D1..24920,+y%3D0..0.0005
Eventually though the change becomes very small and the perceived length would probably remain about the same.
I agree with Tony. It is all about percentages. A five year old needs to wait a fifth of his life for another birthday (or a sixth depending on how you are counting). Whereas a 30 year old only has to wait 1/30th of their life for another birthday, no matter how much they may hope for things to slow down.
The other side of this is the saying that “The years go fast, but the days go slow.” The percentages explain the fast years and that is because we are really bad at understanding a year. It is a relatively large unit of time so we compare it to other large units of time, like our entire lifetimes. Days on the other hand we have a better grasp on and so we compare the days to each other. As we get out of childhood and into adolescence and then young adulthood the days do in fact get longer as we take fewer naps, stay up later, wake up earlier. There is probably a max somewhere in your 40s or 50s and then the days start getting shorter again as retirees start going to bed earlier, taking naps and waking up later.
-Peter