Is crazy how fast the time flies by as you get older...

[Bigwombat]

That's great. How old are you? It' so unusual for someone not to feel that way. What do you do in your life? Maybe you have the cure.

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I just turned 39 yesterday. I don't know what I do unfortunately. Thinking back on the last 9 months of covid and lock down is easy to say the time flew by but if I think about it there were definite unique time periods and then you can start filling in gaps about what you did with your time.

In video game terms I could say there was animal crossing, then tlou2, and finally ghost of tsushima. I played them during 3 separate seasons last year and even though most of my time last year was a blur thinking in these terms helps organize my thoughts and realize all the different things I did during the pandemic last year.

I don't know if that helps. Someone in the thread said that as you get older and potentially more stable the days can blend together and kinda blur which I agree with

 

[CreepingFear]

this was mentioned in Season 3 of Cobra Kai right? like I have a feeling that it was. still tho, it's crazy!

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Yes, but they copied it from a meme, kind of like how how Daniel was the real villian lol.

 

[Zulith]

Time just keeps speeding the fuck up, it's depressing. I routinely find shit in my kitchen that I thought might still be good only to see it expired 5 years ago.

The best thing you can do to shake this up is to add new things to your routine. start a new hobby or travel or anything that gets you out of whatever you have settled into. Other than that, just gotta live with it and think about the good ol' days when summers lasted forever.

 

[Kaversmed]

I can't really remember what adult life was like before I had kids and my oldest is only 6. It's just one big blur.

 

[Lulu]

you know what that say, time flies when you're havin cum

 

[Tochtli79]

Yeah and it's awful.

 

[Dalek]

I feel like everything since 2001 has been a blur.

My mom always says that as an adult-the days are long but the years are short.

 

[cinch]

 

[smileyforall220]

Because as you get older your life typically becomes more stable and stability normally means monotony and monotony makes time seem to go by faster.

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Which is why constantly learning new things and switching up your schedule s key to making time matter more by slowing our brain's perception of it down

 

[clearacell]

I feel like corona has made me feel like time is taking a really long time. There is an actual feeling of "before quarantine"...like, there was an entire whole other life that happened before last March, where social norms, mores and whatever was COMPLETELY different. That was only 9 months ago.

 

[Helix]

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this meme has opened the brain I had in my kidneys

 

[BLOODED_hands]

It's because time become less significant the older you get. 2 years when you're 16 is almost 13% of your life and that's a big %. But when you're 45 it's like 4% and significantly less meaningful.

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I was looking this thread's premise up on reddit and posts like yours prop up alot. TIL.

And yeah it's already the second half of January. Damn is it going by fast.

 

[Rocket Schnauzer]

I did read that if you do more 'varied' things day to day you won't get that sense of every day blurring into the previous one. I find when i'm just grinding at work I look back and weeks have passed. I'm making it a thing at the moment to do things I normally wouldn't. Or just break my routine up. Seems to help. 39 here

 

[Deleted member 8118]

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This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen and I'm sitting here at 3am laughing harder than I ever have

 

[Wackamole]

Do you have kids? Because let me tell you, that makes it ten times worse.

 

[MikeProtagonist]

You know the Ecto-1 in Ghostbusters? That was a classic retro Cadillac back then, it was from 1959.

That car was 25 years old in that movie. Ghostbusters is now 37 years old.

 

[wollywinka]

I'm much closer to dying than I am to being born.

 

[GamerJM]

I can't stop thinking about it. The first year after college when I started working things seemed to slow down for a while, but then they sped up again. Everyone says 2020 felt like a lifetime because of quarantine, it completely flew by for me, especially after like May.

 

[SpyGuy]

Wow I never thought of it that way. OP you blew my mind

 

[Brinbe]

Threads like this always terrify me. Goddamn. Even COVID feels like it flew by now considering ppl are getting vaccinated. Ppl were talking about stuff from last summer and that feels like a lifetime ago.

Lol everyone in their early-mid 30s realising the same shit (34 here)

 

[astroturfing]

just accept that you are fragile and can expire any moment and vanish back into the void, and think of every breath as a bonus. enjoy the little things, let your mind be blown by a cloud.

i'm 38 and i almost died when i was 34, really grateful that i can still exist, for now. other people getting sick and dying around me is the harder thing to accept.. just last night got a msg from an old friend who was rushed into the ER and now has a feeding tube up his nose, something wrong with his intestines, docs didn't tell him much else.. i worry.

 

[The Chosen One]

I turn 40 next month.

I had my "time flies" freakout when I was in my early 30s but now I'm over it.

For me as I've gotten older the last 4-5 years seem to go by relatively quick. But beyond that I do feel time passing. I do remember 9/11 vividly like it was yesterday, but when I start thinking about surrounding events, what was going on with my life, music, and etc it does feel like quite awhile ago. So just because I can start remember certain events fairly vividly doesn't mean "time flies". It just means I'm accumulating more experiences and I'm still able to recall the notable ones.

That said, I still think some of those "we're now closer to X event than X event was to Y event" were pretty cool because it does give you some perspective. When I was a kid, the MLK assassination, Civil Rights, Vietnam War, and the Moon Landing seemed like ancient history to me. But now that I'm older, that time difference is equivalent to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War to now. Makes me now understand and appreciate why those events were still so vivid to my parents and society in general.

Just like how my kids think it's obvious to have a Black President or Vice President, even though those are recent breakthroughs. I thought it was obvious that black people should have the right to vote when I was kid even though that was a recent breakthrough as well.

 

[julia crawford]

I don't even remember my life. Was I alive? Who even knows.

 

[Psychotext]

I did a lot of reading on this a few years back. The basic reason is that you're doing less new things as you age, so your mind allocates less memory to the things you're doing.

I don't have all my links to hand, but here's a few:

Why Does Time Seem to Pass at Different Speeds?

Does time really speed up as we get older?

www.psychologytoday.com

Why time appears to speed up with age (idea) by Professor Pi - Everything2.com

In a groundbreaking article, T. L. Freeman discusses the relationship between actual age and effective age1. His conclusion is that the passing of the y...

everything2.com

Study: Awe-Inspiring Experiences Change Our Perception of Time

Awe-inspiring experiences make you feel that time is more plentiful. They also incline you to give of your time more freely. So go get your fill of awesomeness.

www.theatlantic.com

Want to stretch time? Continually do new / interesting stuff!

 

[Musubi]

As you get older, one year is a lower % of your lifespan. When I was 12 years old, something that happened 6 years earlier was half my life ago.

Also, there were a lot more changes to our life when we were younger. I feel like I haven't done anything in the last 10 years of my life other than change jobs. But that says more about my life than about this time goes fast thing.

Click to shrink...

This really. A day, week , year seems way longer when your young because relative to the time you've been alive it's a greater amount of time. You get to be like 35-40 and now you have lived like 13,000 days so a single day seems like nothing to you anymore.

 

[cvxfreak]

Jesus lived closer to us in the modern day than he did to the Pyramids of Giza.

 

[The Real Abed]

I'm 41 and these last 20 years since I left high school feel like they went by so much faster than my first 20 years of my life. As a kid it felt like time was going so slow. Now it feels like 2010 was just last year. 2000 was a couple years ago. Yesterday was 5 minutes ago. Well except 2020. That year was like 5 years long.

 

[Elfgore]

Yeah, it is. My parents kinda warned me that time flies once you get out of high school and boy were they right. Seven years have gone by faster than what felt like ten back then.

 

[Nude_Tayne]

I turn 40 this year.

My parents would always talk about how time flies as you get older, and I definitely started experiencing it years ago. I think it first occurred to me one day when I thought back to 4 years earlier and realized that that period of time didn't at all feel nearly as long as high school did. Now 4 years almost feels like nothin'. It's kind of scary. Adulthood is basically one big rut compared to 13-25 or so anyway, so that doesn't help. I suppose one benefit is with it comes more patience, which you hopefully learn by the time you're an adult anyway. It's easier to put something off for a year when a year doesn't feel like an eternity.

I can't imagine what it will be like in my 60s/70s/80s. How does it not feel like you're just barreling down towards the end?

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

Time travel is the answer.

 

[Deleted member 17210]

You know the Ecto-1 in Ghostbusters? That was a classic retro Cadillac back then, it was from 1959.

That car was 25 years old in that movie. Ghostbusters is now 37 years old.

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Ghostbusters always brings home the difference in time perception for me. I remember when Ghostbusters II came out, it felt like an eternity had gone by since the first movie but it had only been five years.

 

[zeuanimals]

I was just watching a segment on youtube about the earliest sculptures in human history. The oldest sculpture in human history is believed to be up to 200 000 - 700 000 years old. To think that they did art way back then is wild. Remind yourself of your age now. What is that in the great scheme of things?

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You're looking at it all wrong. It's not that I'm small compared to the entirety of human existence, culture and art. It's that all of that stuff led to me. I am the great scheme of things.

 

[deroli]

I was thinking the same thing today, I was listening to some songs from 2011 and thought to myself "Oh, that wasn't that long ago.", it's been 10 fucking years...

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To me, "recent" music is everything released since 2010. Fuck I'm old.

 

[Nude_Tayne]

To me, "recent" music is everything released since 2010. Fuck I'm old.

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Fuck, for me it's the past 15 years. It all just kinda blends together, and whenever I discover random shit that's new to me on Spotify it's usually from the last 10 or 15 years. It's crazy because I think back to the kind of (new) music I was into in high school in 95-99, and what music was like 10 years earlier, and there was a world of difference. Is there even that much of a difference between music in 2021 and music in 2010?

 

[zeuanimals]

Fuck, for me it's the past 15 years. It all just kinda blends together, and whenever I discover random shit that's new to me on Spotify it's usually from the last 10 or 15 years. It's crazy because I think back to the kind of (new) music I was into in high school in 95-99, and what music was like 10 years earlier, and there was a world of difference. Is there even that much of a difference between music in 2021 and music in 2010?

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Not really. Just like there's not that many new movies or games. Ideas keep getting reiterated on, sometimes with refreshing takes. There's been a rise in sub-genres though, or their popularity I guess?

 

[Gunny T Highway]

Time is relative. When you were younger a year of time was a larger percentage of your lifespan. As each year passes that same span of time becomes a smaller percentage. It makes time feel like it is going faster when in reality it is not.

 

[Wag]

Ralph Machio is older than Mr. Miyagi was in the first Karate Kid.

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Ralph Machio is 59 playing a 52yr old Daniel.

 

[bananab]

The other day on here someone referred to final fantasy vii as "boomer" lol.

 

[Acidote]

There's a secret to make your time go slower. Just live a miserable life. Every day will be an eternity.

 

[brinstar]

Yeah I'm 34 and I've been feeling this bad lately, especially with covid completely shutting my way of life down. My memories of my childhood and even teenage years are getting so foggy, like trying to recall a dream.

 

[apocat]

By crazy you mean terrifying, right?

 

[MisterHero]

I want to relive the 20th century from the rise of silent movies to having the internet in your pocket

from soldiers on horses to drones and space stations

Some people did that

 

[RoadDogg]

Having kids speeds up time exponentially as they get older. Once they start school every month is basically a year. The last 8 years are a complete blur for me and the last year has felt like 4-6 weeks.

 

[tmdorsey]

There are actually some studies going on to determine if children actually experience time slower than adults. The thinking is that children's brains are able to process information faster and thus it feels like time is moving slower to them. While an adult's brain processes information slower as it ages, thereby giving the appearance of things going by faster. It's actually pretty interesting stuff.

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I absolutely believe this is true. It really becomes apparent on this very forum when I read completion times of games by members (I'm 44). It's also apparent to me when I watch rewatch movies I use to watch as a kid like the original Star Wars movies or the Back to the Future movies. Watching them today, it seems like the scenes move at a faster pace than I remember when I watched them as I was younger.

I really don't like the feeling or thought of my brain processing things slower. Kinda the reason why I stay into gaming the way I do. Hoping it keeps my brain and processing sharp.

I did read that if you do more 'varied' things day to day you won't get that sense of every day blurring into the previous one. I find when i'm just grinding at work I look back and weeks have passed. I'm making it a thing at the moment to do things I normally wouldn't. Or just break my routine up. Seems to help. 39 here

Click to shrink...

This 100%.

 

[Izzard]

If you are an early 80s baby you were born around 15 years from the MLK Assassination. 9/11 was 20 years ago!

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I was born the year after man first landed on the moon..

 

[Ocean Bones]

So true....

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We are closer now to 2050 than we are to 1990 ..

let that sink in.

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[Skade]

Yeah, it's weirder when you realize that years seemingly go faster and faster as you get older. Like, i remember vividly when i was a kid that years (and days) seemed to be excuriatingly long. But now, every day and year seem to go faster than the last. 2020 went in a heartbeat for me.

I think i've read somewhere that it was a question of our brains registering better "new" experiences. So as a kid, about every thing is new and we gave full attention to it. And our brains registered events and actions more thoroughly. But when we get older, new things to experience tend to be less and less, and we tend to fall in some sort of routine where we do the same things day after day, so our memories "skip" more things, making the days seemingly go faster.

It's something that i often notice when i first listen to a song or watch a movie compared to a second experience. First time always seem to be much longer than afterwards.

And yeah, having spent almost the entire year in my appartment, looking back at it, it went extremely fast.

 

[cairngorm]

I only started really noticing it when the pandemic hit. But if I am occupied, doing something different, or anticipating something it feels slower. I wonder how it is for people 70+, or centenarians. Well this is one reason I have gotten so interested in developments in life extension, life feels much too short and I am still in my twenties.

 

[Deleted member 21411]

We are closer now to 2050 than we are to 1990 ..

let that sink in.

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I don't like this and you need to take it back

 

[Cats]

I blame us spending over half our waking hours at work which I couldn't care less about so all that time just gets thrown away and the rest of life just being RUSH RUSH RUSH as a million responsibilities and such pile up.

I also feel like it's common to have huge swaths of time just be willed away by stress because something in life is genuinely awful, either a breakup or a sick family member, ect. Like it's not uncommon for me to come home, eat dinner, then just go to bed because I want to escape stress through sleep.