Age and time

I was once told by a former principle that the older we grow the faster time moves.

I don't know what he meant when he said it but the same idea has been riveting my mind for the past few months maybe longer.

I took me awhile to identify with it and comes to terms but I think I understand now.

As I age the things that used to bother me, the things that broke me, left me sleeping all day, that took all my friends and family to make me forgot still over cast a shadow on my life.

I was, pressured by those around me to "feel good" to shudder true emotions and save such thoughts for only myself because no one wants to deal with someone who is sad all the time.

All this I have known for quite sometime and have been working to resolve and find what lies beneath but tonight it occurred to me that the longer I let this sit, the longer I let my past steal my lungs first kisses of morning, the longer I let this sunken feeling that haunts me around the clock remain in my gut, the stronger and more embedded it will grow.

These feelings of time moving by quicker, it is not age that has done this but rather my mind trying cover up more and more of what it can not deal with.

I sit here and I don't know where to start.

I'm sure people have dealt with things like this before, a little advise/suggestions on activities to uncover what "it" is would be welcomed or a thread link. Thanks.

I too have thought about this from time to time...
I guess the best explanation I have is that it would take way more time for an adult to do a whole-life-memory-search for relevant information, compared to a young child... In needing to search for much more information in about the same amount of time, things move quicker.
As these searches are a big part of thinking about anything, perception of time changes too...
I guess, reflecting on this, you sort of need to work faster to keep up. Your success in reaching your desired perception state depends upon that. Your happiness on that success...

If I had any advice, I guess it would be, don't try to slow time down for too long. Try and keep up, but don't worry too much if you don't reach your true destination every time. As long as you maintain your sense of care about your life, you're still on the right track. And if you ever get off track, you can always get back on track... You've been there before, and know where that track is...

Hope that helps... If not, perhaps a more specific instruction of what you need help with would be helpful for future advice...

I've certainly felt that time moves faster as I age.

And I have talked to allot of people my age and over about this phenomenon, and they too agree. In fact, its been almost a year since I saw one of those people I was talking about this with, and it feels like it was only yesterday. This proves to me that as I get older time flys by so fast and I often wonder where all my days went.

When I was younger it took AGES for xmas to come. I used to count down the days and they dragged on so so slow. Now xmas and other landmarks of time come and go so fast its all I can do to hold onto them before they are gone again.

I have no idea why this happens. But I don't think you are on the right track Zach. I can see what you mean and I know that when you're unhappy time does go slow. But emotional pain is not exclusive to young people. Nor is it likely that most people will come to the conclusion you did, to let their pain out. And yet they will still find time going faster as they age.

The only thing I can come up with is in line with Blackgold's ideas about it being perception and learning based.

I think that when you are really young the world seems so massive. It has so much for you to take in, it is full of new things and the learning processes inside us need to work so hard to get through our days.

But as we get older, our minds get used to processing that information and its not new and so doesn't grab our attention so much. Our brains can process it easy, so we just pass through our days without every day being a massive learning curve.

Kind of like when you first learn to add and subtract. When you first try to add 2 plus 2 you have to expend so much effort and concentration on it. You even use your fingers and you check and double check. Now when you have to add 2 plus 2 you just KNOW its 4.

So fast.

So think of your mind on that level of first adding 2 plus 2, when it goes though life as a young person, and how major things will seem to it.

Then think of how easy your mind goes through 2 plus 2 now.

This is what I think is the reason time goes by very slow at first and then very fast as we get older.

I agree with many of the responses, but I think that it's a simple thing to decipher. Time only appears to go faster because of our usual monotonous robotic routinized lives. We become so preoccupied with work and paying bills and trying to make ends meet that 24 hours is just not sufficient time for us to execute our plans.

As a child we were free to the world. Our main preoccupation was to enjoy ourselves and be as jovial and nonchalant to the treacherous harms that lie beyond. They are new to things and their concept of time has not yet been established. Agreed?

Maybe.

But think about the saying: Time flys when you're having fun.

Then think of the way you describe adult life.

Wouldn't time go slower for adults and faster for children if our perception of it was fun based?

If you could somehow fit a million experiences into the span of 5 minutes, I imagine it would feel like a much larger amount of time - maybe a month? a year?

Here's what I think. Over time people become jaded with their monotonous, routine lives and subconsciously decide to live less consciously. They basically sleep through life. I would rather sleep and dream myself if life was just a block of reruns.

The more you live, the more life you have, the more life you've been through - the longer it feels because you were there.

The passage of time is a variable quality of the category of thought and perception, as proposed by Kant. Time as we experience it is a function of the psyche and not a physical property of the external world. The human psyche determines the "speed" of that experience, and the speed of time may be different for different people, and different for the same person under different psychological (and physiological) conditions, and possibly different for different beings all the time.