Jan 26
Does time really fly?
As a fifteen year old boy I worked at a restaurant. It was very simple: clean the dishes and make sure the mise-en-place (gibberish for “cutting veggies” and making sauces)is ready when the chefs get here. My shift usually started at 3PM, but the hard work didn’t start until 7PM. Those four hours seemed to last forever. I forced myself to stop watching the clock, because every time I looked only 3–5 minutes had passed. But it felt like I just covered three years of my life. Turns out, I was right all along! Relatively speaking obviously, let me explain.
All grandparents tell, at least once, that time flies and that you should enjoy every second of it. I always figured that time was okay on my part and that grandparents had accepted the fact that the grim reaper might visit soon. So every visit was celebrated with sweets as if it was your last day. Grandparents 1, parents 0. Perfect reason to stay with your grandparents every Wednesday afternoon, which I luckily did.
Fast forward 10 and I can’t help but notice that time seems to pass quicker. I can’t shake the feeling that days feel awkwardly shorter than a couple of years ago. Not because of the season or anything, just a subjective observation from my side. However, I had to figure out if it was true. So, like a proper scientist I put it to the test…
It was a Monday and I hate those anyway (who doesn’t?), so I figured: let’s do absolutely nothing. Let me elaborate: back in the days, when I was around cette age of fifteen, I used to sit on a couch the whole day without doing anything useful. I loved it. Days seemed to last forever and you had the feeling that every series was aired twice a day. Thus the best way to check if time goes faster as you age, is to start acting like a fifteen year old again. Which turned out to be utterly crap, because after one hour of being a couch potato my back hurt like hell and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. So I concluded the only thing there was to conclude: I turned into a grandfather.
After recovering from this terrible experiment, I decided to go for the second best option: the internet. Luckily this worked out better than the first experiment.
Time is perceived by humans according to the visual input we gather. The more visual input is processed per time unit, the slower time seems to go. At a younger age the brain still has to develop a lot, which means that neuronal pathways are not that rigid. Thus, it takes less time for any visual input to reach the cortex and be projected accordingly. With aging, the neuronal pathways become more rigid and structured. This helps you tremendously, pathways become structured and layed out with repitition to help you perform everyday tasks with less effort. However, this comes at the cost of less efficiency for other neuronal traffic. The signalling has to avoid the rigid pathways, which takes more time. Resulting in less projections per time unit, which results in the subjective impression that time goes faster. (see link to original article below)
I was stunned. All those years I, deliberately, took advantage of my dear grandparents while they stuffed me with chocolate and all the time they were right about time flying! Not objectively, the amount of time is still the same, but subjectively it seems to pass quicker. I’m interested.. Does objective time even mean that much if subjective time seems to get rarer and rarer as we age? Does this mean we have to live differently, before our (subjective) time runs out? Or are the fundamental principles that time flies eitherway and grandparents are always right?
Original article https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-review/article/why-the-days-seem-shorter-as-we-get-older/2CB8EC9B0B30537230C7442B826E42F1
