Childhood (at least mine), particularly the summers between school, seemed to last forever, lolling sweetly and lazily from sundrenched day to day, as if the time I was spending alive on the earth would never end. The hours that filled the days when I first recall even being aware of my own existence, around age 4 (although I may have been able to recall earlier times decades ago), from my first hesitant steps in elementary school, growing older and experiencing everything, becoming more of an individual in junior high (what we now call middle school), and through the endless trauma and constant bombardment of emotion and reflection in high school, all took up an eternity, it seemed.
And College was the longest cocktail party of all time. I think I may have done some schoolwork, but I sure can’t remember it. What I do remember is that it lasted forever.
When the Beach Boys put out a Greatest Hits double album in the 70’s called Endless Summer, I knew exactly what they meant.
Now as someone in the uncertain stages of what we commonly refer to as “Middle Age,” I get up earlier, go to bed later, and with kids I seem to fill more minutia into a single day that I fairly think I would astound my childhood self with the extent and variety my activity. Why then, does every year seem shorter than the last? Why is it that summer comes and goes now in the wink of an eye, that the time to pay my taxes seems to come around so fast that I haven’t even put last year’s returns away yet? Why do I look at 2020, 2030 as being “just around the corner” when my younger self would have peceived it as an eternity away?
In short, why has my time “speeded up” as I’ve gotten older? Is it a function of mood? Is it just Gore Vidal’s famous quote, when his longtime love, Austen, asked him, dying:
Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”
“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.”
It seems Scientific American has an answer. James Broadway is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Science at UC Santa Barbara:
“Where did the time go?” middle-aged and older adults often remark. Many of us feel that time passes more quickly as we age, a perception that can lead to regrets. According to psychologist and BBC columnist Claudia Hammond, “the sensation that time speeds up as you get older is one of the biggest mysteries of the experience of time.” Fortunately, our attempts to unravel this mystery have yielded some intriguing findings.
Researchers Mark Wittman and Sandra Lenhoff, of the Ludwig Maximilan University of Munich, conducted research into the perception of time as experienced by people in various age groups. It confirmed that as people get older they perceive time to be passing much more quickly than they did as kids.
For longer durations, such as a decade, a pattern emerged: older people tended to perceive time as moving faster. When asked to reflect on their lives, the participants older than 40 felt that time elapsed slowly in their childhood but then accelerated steadily through their teenage years into early adulthood.
William James actually bemoaned this phenomenon in his 1890 “Principles of Psychology”:
Psychologist William James, in his 1890 text Principles of Psychology, wrote that as we age, time seems to speed up because adulthood is accompanied by fewer and fewer memorable events. When the passage of time is measured by “firsts” (first kiss, first day of school, first family vacation), the lack of new experiences in adulthood, James morosely argues, causes “the days and weeks [to] smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
Even prior to James, the researcher Janet posited what is known as the “ratio theory:”
For a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their entire life. For a 50-year-old, however, one year is only 2% of their life. This “ratio theory,” proposed by Janet in 1877, suggests that we are constantly comparing time intervals with the total amount of time we’ve already lived.
One reason time appears to pass quickly is stress, or the experience of “time pressure,” i.e, not being able to get enough done in the time allotted. Experiencing this type of time-stress pressure on a constant basis can make it seem like entire decades have “flown by”, because it creates a constant sensation of not “having enough time.”
Friedman, Janssen, and Makiko Naka (Hokaido University in Japan) found that among those individuals who felt that they were currently experiencing significant time pressure, time was passing quickly on short time intervals (i.e. weeks, months). Those who felt time pressure over the past decade, on the other hand, felt that the previous ten years had passed in a flash.
But the primary reason, according to the article, has to do with the vantage point from which we are “looking” or “gauging” time—it can be prospective (while a specific, time-period event is occurring) or retrospective (after the time-period event has occurred). For “new” or “novel” events experienced in the present, time seems to pass quickly, while looking back at the same event makes it seem to have taken longer. This is called the “holiday paradox” because vacation holidays offer a good example where people enjoy “new” experiences.”
Our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.
This seems to offer the most logical reason why we perceive time to be “flying by” as we get older:
From childhood to early adulthood, we have many fresh experiences and learn countless new skills. As adults, though, our lives become more routine, and we experience fewer unfamiliar moments. As a result, our early years tend to be relatively overrepresented in our autobiographical memory and, on reflection, seem to have lasted longer.
So there you have it—time really isn’t going by any faster. As the article points out, the good news is that we can “slow down” our perception of time by engaging in as many new and novel experiences as possible, exploring new vistas, developing new ideas, and thereby creating “new” memories.