The Speed of Life: Why Time Seems to Speed Up and How to Slow it Down

[icymist]

<snip>
We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.’ We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks’ holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we’re on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.1

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping’: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we’re often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it’s already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.
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It seems like it was just yesterday when I learned how to use a computer!

[conscious evolution]

1. Its our perception of time

that makes it seem to be speeding up.
The best way I have seen to explain it is with fractions
When you are 5 years old 1 year is 1/4 of your life.
When you are 50 years old 1 year is 1/50 of your life.
Which is the smaller number?

[icymist]

2. Yup, that's one of the theories in the article.

Another is just being aware of what you are doing at the moment.