There is actually some science behind this. People’s perception of time literally speeds up as they age. Our youth feels like forever, our young adult years still feel long and at that point it all feels like it will be forever, and then you blink and you’re 56 wondering where the time went. It’s a really well known phenomenon.
I think a lot of that comes down to our ability to make personal comparisons. When you’re 10 years old, a year is 10% of your entire lived experience. When you’re 50 years old, a year is just 2% of your life. Life feels like it goes faster as we age, because we have so much more to compare it to as we grow older.
It’s one of the main reasons I started photography. I noticed, especially as someone with ADHD that I would forget about things I did even if they were very important to me.
Is this an ADHD thing? I was diagnosed not long ago and I have this happen with some things. A friend who also has it is basically the opposite, remembering specifics about things like video games we both played at the same time that I simply do not recall.
It is but it can vary by individual a lot. I think the way a lot of people describe it is they feel like they don’t have control over what they remember. Like I forget things that I do all the time, but will remember a middle school friend’s middle name, or a small obscure fact I learned years ago that I haven’t used since.
Essentially yeah, it’s heavily linked to novelty. For instance the drive to somewhere new or unusual is always longer than the drive home because we’ve already seen it so our neurons just dump all the information that’s familiar aka not novel. If someone does the same thing in the same place for years then time flashes by but if they are having many novel experiences then it feels like a lot more time has passed.
So in short the longer we live the more we have seen, the more we have seen the more is familiar aka auto dumped information by our neurons before it even touches the level of our conscious mind.
I’ve even noticed it with the speed of looping gifs. It appears slowest the first time I see it, speeds up if I zone out, and slows down or speeds up depending on how I focus on details in it.
There is actually some science behind this. People’s perception of time literally speeds up as they age. Our youth feels like forever, our young adult years still feel long and at that point it all feels like it will be forever, and then you blink and you’re 56 wondering where the time went. It’s a really well known phenomenon.
I think a lot of that comes down to our ability to make personal comparisons. When you’re 10 years old, a year is 10% of your entire lived experience. When you’re 50 years old, a year is just 2% of your life. Life feels like it goes faster as we age, because we have so much more to compare it to as we grow older.
I think you just inspired me to take more pictures. It’d be nice to look back at my camera gallery every year to see what I had going on.
It’s one of the main reasons I started photography. I noticed, especially as someone with ADHD that I would forget about things I did even if they were very important to me.
Is this an ADHD thing? I was diagnosed not long ago and I have this happen with some things. A friend who also has it is basically the opposite, remembering specifics about things like video games we both played at the same time that I simply do not recall.
It is but it can vary by individual a lot. I think the way a lot of people describe it is they feel like they don’t have control over what they remember. Like I forget things that I do all the time, but will remember a middle school friend’s middle name, or a small obscure fact I learned years ago that I haven’t used since.
It’s memory related imo, we forget so many things daily and over the years we just cant remember it all and so it doesnt feel like it was all lived.
Essentially yeah, it’s heavily linked to novelty. For instance the drive to somewhere new or unusual is always longer than the drive home because we’ve already seen it so our neurons just dump all the information that’s familiar aka not novel. If someone does the same thing in the same place for years then time flashes by but if they are having many novel experiences then it feels like a lot more time has passed.
So in short the longer we live the more we have seen, the more we have seen the more is familiar aka auto dumped information by our neurons before it even touches the level of our conscious mind.
I’ve even noticed it with the speed of looping gifs. It appears slowest the first time I see it, speeds up if I zone out, and slows down or speeds up depending on how I focus on details in it.
You might like the movie Cashback. You kinda just reminded me of it in that comment.