Why Time Goes Faster As You Get Older

close your eyes remember yourself as a child playing with your friends stressing out about spelling test at school coming home to snack on the table and asking for help with your homework what do you feel maybe you're suspended in a time when things felt new fun and exciting now think of similar activities as an adult getting ready for bed reading a book having dinner with friends these moments don't seem as interesting or exciting as they did when you were a child when we think back on our childhood it feels like it lasted a lifetime but now it's like we're passengers in our own life with time merely passing Us by Time Flies and unfortunately for us humans Evolution never gave us Wings this feeling where time seems to go faster when we're experiencing it but feels much longer when we remember it is called the holiday Paradox coined by psychology writer Claudia Hammond the holiday Paradox refers to the idea that when we go on vacation a week or even two weeks seem to go by so quickly we can barely believe that we had a vacation at all yet when the vacation is over and we looked back on it it feels like it was much longer than just 1 week scientists believe that one of the reasons for this is that when we're on vacation we have lots of new experiences in a short period you go scuba diving for the first time you see art you eat interesting food these events are outside your daily routine then you return to your ordinary life marked by routine work days and weekends the stimulation of that vacation seems long gone and when you look back on it it feels like so much happened it feels like so much time went by and even though when you were there it felt incredibly short our experience of time changes depending on what we're doing and how we feel about those experiences that's why you hear things like time flies when you're having fun I'm sure you've experienced it before too your favorite musician's concert is over in the blink f eye and at the end of a great first date you realize you've been talking for hours yet the conversation still feels incredibly short this happens because when we're immersed in an activity we're not checking our watch to see the minutes ticking by so we lose track of time making it seem like time is going much faster than normal immersion is the key word here because time doesn't only go faster when we're doing something exciting or something we'd love to do how many times have you told yourself you'd only spend 10 minutes on Tik Tok to look up from your phone 3 hours later and see that the Sun has gone down exactly it's because of how immersive the app experience is and it keeps you busy and makes you forget about time these differences in perception make the holiday Paradox both relatable and confusing to help us understand the phenomenon better we need to look at how people think about their childhood in a 2005 survey 499 participants between the ages of 14 to 94 were asked about the pace at which they felt their lives were moving when asked about shorter durations like weeks and months all the way up to a year the participants perception of time didn't appear to increase with age however when asked about longer durations the older people were the faster they felt like their lives were moving people over 40 in particular felt like time went by slowly in childhood then accelerated through their teenage years and into early adulthood and then after that time just flew by but why why do we feel time goes faster the older we get our brain has a limited storage capacity and so to keep things running smoothly our brain encodes new experiences into memory it tends to skip over the more repetitive events in our lives the more memories we have the more things we can look back on when we're thinking retrospectively and the more things we can remember about a period of time the longer we feel that time period was think about your time in college or in high school you remember most of that period of your life because you were absorbing so much information that your brain was forced to slow down to take it all in creating new memories learning new Concepts your brain had to store a lot of new information and so when you think back there's a lot of things to remember which makes that period last longer in your memory this is why scientists always encourage you to learn new skills no matter how old you are because by learning new things you're giving your brain a reason to absorb and store new information which in turn makes that moment last so much longer if you're interested in learning new skills like programming math or computer science then I recommend you check out the sponsor of today's video brilliant.org the best place to learn stem subjects interactively if you've been a fan of this channel for any length of time then you definitely know how much I love brilliant the reason I've been using them for so long is because unlike most courses out there brilliant makes learning fun each course is designed to be interactive with Hands-On problem solving sections that allow you to see how the subject you're learning works in the real world the courses are created by a team of award-winning teachers researchers and professionals so you know you're getting the most accurate and up-to-date information each lesson is made to be really short and thanks to their mobile app you can learn wherever you are and no matter how short of a time you have after cat gpt's massive rise in popularity and Google's recently released Gemini I've been fascinated by how large language models work and taking brilliant course of the same title taught me pretty much everything I needed to know to try this course and any other course brilliant offers for free for 30 days go to brilliant.org aure or click the link at the top of the description which also gives you a 20% discount on an annual premium subscription back to our story new experiences don't always have to be good or fun to make time slow down if you've ever felt fear chances are your life seemed to move in slow motion if you're in a car crash a bike accident or even feel physically endangered by another person your cognitive reality shifts what might only be a few seconds of fear feels like minutes or even hours in her book Claudia Hammond talked about a study in which people with Arachnophobia were asked to look at spiders for 45 seconds when they were asked afterward every participant thought they were looking for a much much longer period of time they may not have been in imminent danger but their fear was triggered their world slowed down desperate to get out of the situation they found themselves in over the years there have been many theories about why time seems to speed up as we age you can see that our world in general has sped up this has caused all of us to feel like life is moving more quickly but if you talk to a 5-year-old chances are they don't feel the same life passing by them effect there's also the proportionality Theory which says a year feels faster at 40 than at 10 because 1 year constitutes much less of your life when you're 10 1 year is 10% of your life but when you're 40 it's just 2 and 1/2% this though only works when you're thinking about life in its entirety and not in the specific periods when time slows down or speeds up like when you're dancing on your wedding night or doing a plank the holiday Paradox tells us that our perception of time is everything and that perception is deeply affected by our age and memory if you graduated college four years ago you likely remember walking across that stage like yesterday but if you think about your first day of high school it might seem like decades have passed even though it's only been 12 years time impacts our memory but memory also creates and shapes our experience of time we're most likely to remember the timing of an event if it's distinctive and Vivid some people might Coast through their 50s not creating many new memories then that decade might seem lost to time but if you ask someone who went through a divorce or lost a loved one one in their 50s those years might feel incredibly like the slowest decade of their lives Hond writes that time perception matters because it's the experience of time that Roots us in our mental reality the mental reality of an adult stuck in their routine unable to take vacations or learn new skills is much duller than that of a child experiencing the world for the first time that adult's Bank of new memories is simply running low we learned new skills from childhood to early adulthood and find ourselves in a lot of Novel situations and because of this our early years tend to be over represented in memory making them feel like they lasted longer than our later years the 50-year-old divorce C finds herself in a period where time seems to slow down because she's making new memories having new experiences and feeling new emotions in some ways these midlife shifts that many of us have For Better or For Worse actually tap into the kind of mental experience we went through as kids when you're a child every sports game good grade or fight with a friend feels like the most important thing in the world but as we get older that feeling is much less frequent we find ourselves waiting for significant life moments like a marriage or promotion to get the same rush we got as a kid to feel that same experience of novelty and memory making and the rest of the time we're just going through the motions letting time pass without giving it too much thought until we wake up one day and can't figure out where it went as it turns out Children might actually perceive time more slowly than adults there's evidence that from a kids's perspective time as they're experiencing it is slower that's because memory attention and executive function the cognitive control of our Behavior are all under development when we're children kids neurotransmissions are physically slower than those of adults affecting how they perceive the passage of time by the time we grow up our circuits are wired to figure this out researchers conducted a study where participants listened to a series of tones and compared their duration the youngest participants about 5 years old had the least accuracy in perceiving how long a tone lasts they often heard short tones lasting much longer than they really did this could explain why when we're young things feel like they take so much time even the most basic things like eating breakfast or getting dressed when we're adults those same tasks feel like they go by in a Flash often we don't even remember we did them somehow you got dressed this morning but do you actually remember it happening picking out your pants and putting on your shoes every day might be so routine it's not creating any new memories for you the moments that we live in but in which we don't form any new memories are those bits of time that escape us while time might move slowly at 5 years old our experiences between the ages of 15 and 25 stick with us the most this is the era of nostalgia for most of us we remember scenes from our lives the books we read and the movies we saw during that time can you think of your favorite movie quotes or funny moments cuz chances are they're from a film that came out when you were in your late teens or early 20s this is when we have more new experiences than most other times in our lives we have our first job solo traveling experience relationships it's often our first time living away from home and the first time we feel we have a choice in how we spend our days while it's happening this period feels like it's on overdrive but looking back at it it feels like that part of our Lives lasted forever that's because we created so many memories met so many new people and saw the world in many new ways we feel nostalgic for that time because it felt so complete that is the holiday Paradox if you're living in that time enjoy it savor it if you made it to your late 20s you probably know the phenomenon of having a sudden longing for your younger self your younger life you've settled into a routine where stressful responsibilities often replace endless fun moments so how do we slow down our lives again the truth is of course that we can't slow time down but we can do more things to create memories of the time that we have look for novel experiences that engage your brain you don't need a vacation to feel excited or refreshed about your life in the world new things are waiting around the corner if you just open your eyes and look for them constantly challenge yourself to learn new skills like maybe learning a new Cuisine or building a bench for your backyard maybe you just want to get better at meeting people go to a neighborhood event or sit alone at a bar and talk to a stranger whether big or small let something exciting take over your brain and let you feel like a kid again another hack is to try to remember your day as vividly as possible routine can feel good but it also doesn't allow for new memories to get imprinted on our brains spending time reflecting on your day makes you more likely to ingrain the memories even the bad ones naturally our memory is shortlived it's easy to go to bed every night and not think about what happened to us during the day but what if you stopped and spent a few minutes to relive it would mundane Things become important or exciting would you remember someone or something you saw on the street that was new or strange suddenly your day might feel a bit slower whether you just think about it or want to write it down try to make the moments of your life last and take up real estate in your head that's what we're doing when we're on vacation we're banking all sorts of new interesting memories memories we might look back on when we want to ress about how full our days felt our own minds actively create the way we experience time while we may not always have control over our time as the demands of Life mount in front of us we can control how we remember things and therefore control our perception of the time we have time as we're told is immovable it's totally defined a second is a second a year is a year and as much as we might want to change it we're told that's the reality but if you do think back to your childhood a time hopefully filled with joy and Novelty a year feels so much longer if you've been in danger the minutes you weren't sure you'd be safe surely couldn't have been just minutes so yes maybe time is immovable but it's comforting to know that we do have some control of over how we experience it we can warp it to make it shorter or stretch it to make it feel longer and while we might never learn how to travel in time at least we know we have some small control over it hey if you like the videos we make and would want to support us to make bigger and better projects we've recently just updated the patreon we have 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Channel: Aperture

Views: 63,241

Keywords: aperture, philosophy tube, big think, psychology, philosophy, universe, human experience, video essays, big ideas, ted talk, stoicism, holiday paradox, age, feeling old, the holiday paradox, Claudia Hammond, vacation, holidays, time goes fast, times goes faster holiday, psychology facts

Id: Mt8Epdu_ZRY

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024