From late 2020 to mid-2022, as the Covid pandemic dragged on, I had some version of this conversation with numerous friends: “2019 feels like it was just a few months ago.” “Yeah, I know it was a year or two ago, but it’s like time compressed.” Did you experience this, too? Each day seemed long and often boring, but through the rearview mirror, the pandemic years feel oddly compressed?
I can attest to the years feeling as if they move faster as I advance through them! Beginning my 6th decade, I've started to actively look for and work toward more novelty and opportunities to learn. Subjectively, I'd say it could be causing time to feel more spacious but it's certainly more interesting!
The less active I become, and the more I am home, the more it seems like time is speeding up. For example, I have been out of grad school going on 8 years, and it feels like yesterday. The time in between then and now has been, outside of a few weeks, in the exact same setting. (Which isn't all bad, I like solitude.)
There's a (popular) book, "Making Time", Steve Taylor, with a lot of discussion on various theories of how time perception changes with age. He argues (IIRC) for novelty, absorption, and mindfulness as the primary factors: novelty and mindfulness slow down the perception of time, absorption speeds it up.
Great topic Stephanie! Loved the 5/70 vs 5/20. Kind of a restatement of Recency Bias perhaps? It is probably why last summer there were MANY people sure that Barbie and Oppenheimer were the greatest movies ever. Maybe this why people largely forget the snake they saw 50 years ago but are obsessed by reports of mountain lions in the neighborhood on the evening local news. On the other hand if you got bit by the snake, you probably still need Ambien for a good night sleep in the woods.
I found this part of your thinking very intriguing - "Part of it is that five years out of seventy is 5/70 = 1/14 (7%) of your life, whereas five years out of twenty is 5/20 = 1/4 (25%) of your life."
I can attest to the years feeling as if they move faster as I advance through them! Beginning my 6th decade, I've started to actively look for and work toward more novelty and opportunities to learn. Subjectively, I'd say it could be causing time to feel more spacious but it's certainly more interesting!
The less active I become, and the more I am home, the more it seems like time is speeding up. For example, I have been out of grad school going on 8 years, and it feels like yesterday. The time in between then and now has been, outside of a few weeks, in the exact same setting. (Which isn't all bad, I like solitude.)
There's a (popular) book, "Making Time", Steve Taylor, with a lot of discussion on various theories of how time perception changes with age. He argues (IIRC) for novelty, absorption, and mindfulness as the primary factors: novelty and mindfulness slow down the perception of time, absorption speeds it up.
Great topic Stephanie! Loved the 5/70 vs 5/20. Kind of a restatement of Recency Bias perhaps? It is probably why last summer there were MANY people sure that Barbie and Oppenheimer were the greatest movies ever. Maybe this why people largely forget the snake they saw 50 years ago but are obsessed by reports of mountain lions in the neighborhood on the evening local news. On the other hand if you got bit by the snake, you probably still need Ambien for a good night sleep in the woods.
I found this part of your thinking very intriguing - "Part of it is that five years out of seventy is 5/70 = 1/14 (7%) of your life, whereas five years out of twenty is 5/20 = 1/4 (25%) of your life."