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When you are 10 years old, a year isn’t simply a year, it is also 10% of your entire life. In terms of your ability to retain memories, it is even significantly more than that. A year for a 50-year-old is only 2% of that person’s life.
We experience time not only as a fixed measurement, but as a relative measurement of our experience. Thus a 2% measurement is going to seem ‘less’ than a 10% measurement.
If we lived to be 1,000 years, days to us would seem like hours as we aged to our upper years (compared to how a 100-year old would experience a day).
Seems simple enough.
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I thought this was kind of an interesting topic, non-partisan and a nice diversion from our daily slugfest. And I totally swiped it from over there at volokh.com.
Time appears to fly by because our focus is drawn away from the present moment by memories of the past and concerns about the future. Children think of their future in vague and fanciful ways because they have little real experience with the adult world of negative reenforcement and endless responsibilities and obligations. Nothing much there to draw the child's attention away from the present. Adults on the other hand, having been kicked in the teeth by life on multiple occasions, live in the neurotic realm of whatifery. Additionally, children have less of a past to fill their heads with memories that relate to present events. As a result, they aren't often drawn away by the past memories. They live in the now. Adults progressively live in the past or future and fail to fully experience the now because their heads are elsewhere.
A person of any age fully experiencing the here and now couldn't care less about the passage of time in any context. For example, top fuel drag racers are so involved with the present moment that they experience time compression. The few seconds they are actually accelerating down the track seems much longer from their perspective.
This also logically brings us to the experience of people who are given a month or two to live and discover the lives they've been too busy to experience.
Other time doesn't have relevance if we are fully engaged in the present.
Well, all math aside, when you are very, very young, you are always in "waiting for Santa Claus" mode. Time crawls.
When you are very young, you are in "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" mode. You never seem to get where you are going to do the things you like, fast enough.
When you are a teen, you are in "lying about your age so you can do adult things" mode. You can't wait to graduate, get out of the house, get away from rules and start living on your own. You think by pretending to be an adult, you'll actually be one. Time is still just plodding along for you.
When you are in your 20s and starting out with your career, you are in "why am I not making more money or at the top of my profession yet" mode. You still don't understand why success isn't coming at you faster. Don't they know how great you are? Time is still not moving as fast as you want.
Then one day you are in the supermarket doing your grocery shopping, just rolling through the checkout line, when IT HAPPENS. The cashier calls you ma'am or sir. OMIGOD! From there it's all downhill. The grey hairs, the lost hair, the "listening to music from some previous decade," going to bed earlier, the first wrinkle, the realization you are your mother/father, impatient "kids" are your co-workers, regrets about not saving more money for retirement. The d*m* AARP is sending you literature when you are only 50. You keep hitting the brakes but the car isn't stopping. Time is moving too quickly. You never got to do all those things you planned to do before life happened and got in the way.
So, then you retire and time flies. You need a day clock to tell you what day it is because every day is the weekend and holidays aren't the big deal they were when you were in the workforce. You own your schedule. It doesn't revolve around the job. But, TV doesn't care about you. advertisers don't care about you and according to Presidential advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, you're a non-productive member of society and not worth the expenditure of resources when the government decides they are scarce. You want to be an active member of society but all of a sudden you're the scapegoat for all of society's ills. The President makes a speech and suggests your life isn't worth more than a pain pill. No surgery for you to keep you active. All of a sudden, your generation is "the problem" weighing down society. Just die already and stop costing us so much money. Meanwhile, if you are in good health, you are having the time of your life and want time to move a little slower so you can enjoy more...and, oh yeah, scr** them!
So, then you retire and time flies. You need a day clock to tell you what day it is because every day is the weekend and holidays aren't the big deal they were when you were in the workforce. You own your schedule. It doesn't revolve around the job. But, TV doesn't care about you. advertisers don't care about you and according to Presidential advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, you're a non-productive member of society and not worth the expenditure of resources when the government decides they are scarce. You want to be an active member of society but all of a sudden you're the scapegoat for all of society's ills. The President makes a speech and suggests your life isn't worth more than a pain pill. No surgery for you to keep you active. All of a sudden, your generation is "the problem" weighing down society. Just die already and stop costing us so much money. Meanwhile, if you are in good health, you are having the time of your life and want time to move a little slower so you can enjoy more...and, oh yeah, scr** them!
Yep. Take good care of your bod and you can dance through those final years thumbing your nose at anyone who thinks it's time for you to die and get out of the way.
Your preception is measured by your metabolic rate. The faster your metabolic rate, the faster your mind is able to process information. The faster your mind is processing information, the slower the surrounding world seems to be. This is why for children - who have a higher metabolic rate than adults - things in the future seem to take FOREVER to arrive (and summer vacation seems like such a long time), and why for old folks - who have a very slow metabolic rate - time seems to fly by. This is also why folks who have an adrenaline in situations like an auto accident, seem to percieve the event almost in slow motion. That brief instant seems to take a long to unfold because their minds are in a hyper-processing mode where it's processing information at a much faster rate - thus making everything else seem to be in slower rate. Passage of time is all relative to your perception.
When you are 10 years old, a year isn’t simply a year, it is also 10% of your entire life. In terms of your ability to retain memories, it is even significantly more than that. A year for a 50-year-old is only 2% of that person’s life.
We experience time not only as a fixed measurement, but as a relative measurement of our experience. Thus a 2% measurement is going to seem ‘less’ than a 10% measurement.
If we lived to be 1,000 years, days to us would seem like hours as we aged to our upper years (compared to how a 100-year old would experience a day).
Seems simple enough.
**************
I thought this was kind of an interesting topic, non-partisan and a nice diversion from our daily slugfest. And I totally swiped it from over there at volokh.com.
I never noticed it flying by, wasn't it 1955 about a year ago?
Well, all math aside, when you are very, very young, you are always in "waiting for Santa Claus" mode. Time crawls.
When you are very young, you are in "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" mode. You never seem to get where you are going to do the things you like, fast enough.
When you are a teen, you are in "lying about your age so you can do adult things" mode. You can't wait to graduate, get out of the house, get away from rules and start living on your own. You think by pretending to be an adult, you'll actually be one. Time is still just plodding along for you.
When you are in your 20s and starting out with your career, you are in "why am I not making more money or at the top of my profession yet" mode. You still don't understand why success isn't coming at you faster. Don't they know how great you are? Time is still not moving as fast as you want.
Then one day you are in the supermarket doing your grocery shopping, just rolling through the checkout line, when IT HAPPENS. The cashier calls you ma'am or sir. OMIGOD! From there it's all downhill. The grey hairs, the lost hair, the "listening to music from some previous decade," going to bed earlier, the first wrinkle, the realization you are your mother/father, impatient "kids" are your co-workers, regrets about not saving more money for retirement. The d*m* AARP is sending you literature when you are only 50. You keep hitting the brakes but the car isn't stopping. Time is moving too quickly. You never got to do all those things you planned to do before life happened and got in the way.
So, then you retire and time flies. You need a day clock to tell you what day it is because every day is the weekend and holidays aren't the big deal they were when you were in the workforce. You own your schedule. It doesn't revolve around the job. But, TV doesn't care about you. advertisers don't care about you and according to Presidential advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, you're a non-productive member of society and not worth the expenditure of resources when the government decides they are scarce. You want to be an active member of society but all of a sudden you're the scapegoat for all of society's ills. The President makes a speech and suggests your life isn't worth more than a pain pill. No surgery for you to keep you active. All of a sudden, your generation is "the problem" weighing down society. Just die already and stop costing us so much money. Meanwhile, if you are in good health, you are having the time of your life and want time to move a little slower so you can enjoy more...and, oh yeah, scr** them!
You makes some good points except I would say kids get bored easily during long car rides specifically because they live in the moment. Adults will be preoccupied with what they will do when they get there and worrying they forgot to pack something. They will even do this while driving. How often do adults miss their exit because they were daydreaming? Kids, by contrast, have to amuse themselves with games like "I Spy". Life only gets in the way of us enjoying the moment if we allow it.
It's easier to slide down hill once you've reached the peak!
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