After 2020 it seems many of us experienced time differently than expected. What is this phenomenon called?
Being depressed.
Seriously tho for most people the older you get the faster time seems to pass. The relationship to age is not really causal tho afaik. Age just correlates with people leading less interesting lives, being less social and learning less new stuff. Being bored and intellectually stagnant makes subjective time go faster.
Veritasium did a video about the relationship between subjective time perception (chronoception) and age.
The relationship to age is not really causal tho afaik.
It is.
It’s not just our bodies that want to be lazy, our brains do too.
The longer you live, the less novel situations you are in. When you’re doing something you’ve done a thousands time, your brain doesn’t really pay attention anymore, it figures this has been done lots of times and doesn’t need a high level of attention.
Most people are familiar with it on a short timeline with “highway hypnosis” where if you’ve been driving on a boring straight highway/interstate for hours, an hour can go by without you even realizing.
Your brains been driving so long without anything crazy happening, so it just stops worrying about driving.
People think of our brain as a single entity, but different parts handle different things, stuff that’s not novel gets tossed to the “autopilot” more and more as we age because we’re likely doing the same shit as last time.
I started noticing this as a kid. Sometimes the TV station would play the same commercial twice in a row. The first time I watched it it seemed to take longer than a normal commercial, but then immediately after it would repeat and it would have all the same clips and information, but seemed like it took half the time.
Did anyone else’s summer only last 4 weeks? Felt like mine did. Next year will probably go even quicker.
I think it also has to do with scale in time vs years lived. For example, if you are 9 years old, 3 years is a third of your entire life; while for a 30 year old, it’s a tenth. So time feels faster for the latter.
Yeah. There’s also “processing speed” slowling down. And literally information traveling along our neurons happening slower due to plaque buildup.
It’s not just one thing, it’s a bunch of things.
What you are describing is correlation not causality. Its not a biological change that comes with age which causes this. Its the environment that older people are in that causes it. If you were to keep taking in new information and experiences at the same rate as when you were a child, the effect would not manifest. Thats basically impossible tho, which is why this is such a universal experience.
We are not on autopilot because we are old, but because there is no reason to change our behaviour anymore. If you take someone out of that autopilotable stagnat environment (moving abroad, vacation, getting kids, etc), then the effect will go away, until they have adjusted enough to be on autopilot again.
I feel like we are psychologically old because we are on autopilot and not because we are physically old.
New experiences would make time move slower, but the vast majority of what we do is routine
You might eat a new thing for lunch, but you’re still eating lunch like you always have.
You might walk to a new place, but you’re still walking.
Having a kid is different than not, but have you ever talked to a parent about how repetitive things get? Things change as the kid ages but it changes incrementally, no big overnight changes. It may seem like that, but that’s because the parents went on autopilot and didn’t notice the small incremental changes till something happens where they notice the change. And then quickly get used to it, putting them back on autopilot.
Like, you’ve never heard a single parent say “it feels like yesterday I was changing your diaper!” to a kid in their 20s?
While you can cram a bunch of novel things in to try and help, it doesn’t change the past before you did so. So those years dont have as many milestones and doesn’t feel like much happened, meaning looking back time went fast.
You can try to always be doing new things constantly you’re entire life, but that takes a shit ton of money. And good luck earning that in a way that doesn’t become monotonous and allows you all that time off work to do the novel stuff.
I get what you’re trying to say, but it’s not correct.
Journaling and mindfulness meditation help with this and are free (except the cost of a journal if you get a physical one).
And if that’s too much effort you can always try microdosing.
If your brain is experiencing the same world in a new way it will seem to go slower.
It happened after Harambe got shot, we ended up in the bad timeline.
Harambe should be sainted.
I have gone commando since, in tribute. My dick will always be out, in spirit.
Do you mean that people have had more difficulty keeping track of time and timelines since the pandemic? I’ve certainly had lots of conversations where someone said, “That was 2 years ago already? What is time anymore?” They’re not talking about getting older, but that the pandemic created this blank space where we didn’t have our usual traditions or seasonal events. If there isn’t a term for this specific phenomenon, we could make one. Pandemic time elasticity?
Yep, that’s what I meant :)
Old people have been saying this since I was a kid, and I’m old now. Our perception of time appears to be weighted inversely with how much we’ve experienced, so summer feels like forever for a preteen, but two years is a blink of an eye to someone in their 50s. Couple that with no significant events or milestones for months or years, and your perception of time is further distorted. And now all those old people, like me, can talk to a million people online about it, so it appears more prevalent than it was before, when old people couldn’t or weren’t communicating with strangers half a world away on a daily basis.
It’s likely going to turn out that Covid has fucked our brains in ways we don’t understand yet. The before and after difference is too extreme to be caused by a collective trauma from 4 years ago. If that was really the problem, we would be over it by now and back to normal.
But that’s not what this is. Time is going to work every day, going to church or hiking or playing frisbee on the weekends, playing DND every two weeks, having a big test every few months…that goes away, you don’t have time anymore.
Are there any remote populations on the planet untouched by Covid? If so, a scientific study could possibly be carried out.
Well, there’s Sentinel Island, but we keep people away from there for many, many good reasons
Do you mean that time seems to speed up? I believe that is just a consequence of growing up. The older you get the more time you have lived to compare to the last week, month or years.
That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.
But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?
This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.
Infinite life when you are born.
By the time you’re born, you’ve been aware of the passage of time for, I’m guessing, at least six months, probably more. And the whole infinity problem dissolves when you consider that time awareness probably doesn’t just appear in one go, not to mention how that intermingles with consciousness and other levels of awareness.
Post-covid daze. When I say “3 years ago” I might mean 2021 or 2019, who knows!
Depression. ADHD.
Sounds like a collective depression to me
Huh?
It’s normal for time to seem to pass faster as we age, that always happens to everyone.
But Covid lockdowns also made time seem to move slowly during it, but looking back years flew by.
I think that’s what you meant by “time bending” at least.
I miss the 90s. Like, it was only a few years ago, right?
tachypsychia? bradypsychia?
“Altered perception”
I remember that March - June was the fastest 4 months of my life. I"m not sure what it’s called, but I would say that it was due to the fact that everyday was exactly the same.
Getting old
Employment? At least, the period between 9 & 5 feels like eternity to me.
