Have you noticed that time quickens with age? It starts speeding up, flying by, zipping away? I feel like 20 years ago, a week went by at half the speed it does now. Maybe, as we age, we enter some worm hole with a high-speed sidewalk that makes the days, weeks, months, and years accelerate. It’s like riding the Frecciarossa 1000 when you’re used to traveling coach.
I can’t remember the last time I thought my week had gone by slowly. Every Friday I feel a tiny shock that the work week has already come to an end. It’s a little bit frightening, this speeding up to get to the end. The surprising, but bewildering paradox is that my vacation weeks seem to stretch out ahead of me like Wasaga Beach, sometimes feeling gloriously slow and meandering.
Wasaga Beach reminds me of my childhood vacations of long hours at the beach, listening to Barry Manilow, playing rummy and bonfires in the evening. Definitely a favourite destination!
Scientists have been studying this feeling of time speeding up as you age. One of the theories is that time quickens due to changes and micro damage to the nerves in our brain. Essentially, this means I’m not taking in information as quickly or as much information and I require more time for my brain to process information. If we think of everything that we see as a movie, then there are fewer “frames” in our movie. Since my nervous system is starting to slow down, it is taking me longer to process what I’m seeing. Each “frame” takes more time for me to process, and as a result, I feels like time is moving quicker.
Another theory is that as we age our years are a shorter percentage of time lived. A five year old might feel that their birthday takes forever to come each year, whereas a Gen Xer like me or a Boomer like my sister might feel like our birthdays are piling on top of each other with less and less breathing time in between. In my younger days I would always say I was a year older than I was, and then be shocked to remember that my birthday hadn’t yet come. Now that number is growing so quickly I feel I can hardly keep up.
Life is so busy these days. Always checking the To Do Lists. Marking off what’s been done and adding more to be done so that the list is never ending. Maybe time moves so fast because there’s so little down time. I rarely give myself the time to just relax and walk away from the list for a while. Or maybe time moves faster at my age because the days and weeks and years are passing and I fear that I won’t get everything done before the end.
Which Train are you traveling on these days? Do you have your own theory about why this is happening?
I read another theory on this topic that makes some sense. The older we get, the more routine we fall into and time goes more quickly. In addition, the older we get the fewer new things we learn and fewer new things we experience, and time goes more quickly. This is especially prevalent as we retire.
On the other hand a child has something new every day in school and new life experiences to learn. Everything is always changing. A working adult who is building a career or becoming proficient in a job has to keep up in their trade/profession through learning and experience. The more change and new things to learn, the slower time goes, since there is limited routine.
So when you go on vacation and time slows down, it may be because you have broken your routine.
Nice job on the post!
So because we become absorbed in our routines, and don’t think about what comes next, because it’s the same things and the same sequence, time seems to go more quickly, especially as we get older. Very interesting. Thanks for commenting!
Thank you, Liz! The thing is that in the past 3 or 4 weeks as I’ve been working hard on this blog and learning so much about blogging and I’ve actually noticed that the weeks have seemed to slow down a bit. So very interesting. Cris
Very interesting