Why time really speeds up as you get older
…and how to slow it back down again
After I graduated from college my girlfriend at the time and I got a working holiday visa for a year in Australia.
We left in the January of 2015 and were home by Christmas.
All of the amazing things that we did, saw and experienced compounded as each day was filled with novelties and the glittering prospect of adventure.
The inevitable trials, tribulations and escapades of what often felt (at the time) like life or death situations became sandwiched between the more sedate moments of relaxation, creating this tapestry of rich vignettes.
As the months rolled on and the memories began to stockpile I imagined returning to my family, wisened with wrinkles and barely recognisable after all that had happened to us, like Odysseus himself.
It was perplexing, therefore to arrive at Heathrow airport 12 months later, on a day as grey and overcast as the one we left, to discover that
everything was exactly as we left it
“Were you really gone for a whole year?” friends and family would often say as they brought me up to date on some mundane incident that had happened the previous week at work — the near velocity of the event in question seemingly more critical than how their life had twisted and turned since we last met.
Memory is not linear
Routine, it turns out, is a great catalyst for unconsciousness.
Discipline, habits, repetition and perseverance are of course important qualities that help us to live our lives in a structured and productive way.
The compounding and potentially exponential benefits of which are often lauded here on Medium and in the digital sphere of personal development more broadly.
Improving our memory for numbers, languages, facts and dates has also been systematised by self-improvement exercises like mnemomics and memory palaces.
And yet the more we distill our lives into measurable metrics of success, happiness and productivity, the faster life seems to pass us by.
When I lived in London friends it would be all too common to pencil in a friend for ‘catch up’ in 6–10 weeks time- as if busyness was a sign of personal or professional success rather than an accelerated march towards the end of the best years of your life.
When I would finally pin them down, we’d reminisce about the times when we were both less chaotically busy, looking for abstract incidences as time stamps, signifiers of shared experiences, as if hazily recalling the plot of a film rather than the golden years of our own lives.
Ask anyone with over the age of forty and they’ll tell you the problem only gets worse with age.
But why?
Theorist Robert Lemlich wrote a paper in 1975 called The Subjective Acceleration of Time with Ageing. In it he states that “Our perceived duration of time decreases as a mathematical proportion to how long we’ve been alive.”
This tallies.
A ten year old considers one year to be an eternity because it is 10% of all they have ever known.
A sixty year old on the other hand has probably seen at least a couple of five year recessions, a string of four-year presidencies and the rebuilding and prospering of once war-torn countries.
To them, one year is just a flash in the pan.
Despite the best efforts of tech billionaires to reverse biological ageing through AI sponsored blood transfusions MOST people are still only getting older.
To quote another theorist, and coincidentally turn-of-the-millennium, one-hit wonder :
The years start coming and they don’t stop coming, fed to the rules and I hit the ground running
So perhaps there is no solution?
Making life memorable is a worthy endeavour
The recently deceased pop philosopher Steve Harwell went on to snarl:
Didn’t make sense not to live for fun — Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb
Conventional wisdom tells us that life can’t always be fun — that at some point we have to grow up, take responsibility, commit to work and settle down.
Unfortunately this advice is more often than not taken to extreme measures. Predictability becomes a stand-in for maturity as risk runs counter to responsibility.
Fun too becomes risk-assessed, with 28 days vacation a year (if you’re lucky) becoming the parameters with which you can enjoy yourself.
“Oh that was year we went to [insert x country here]!” becomes a common response to the collective amnesia and scratching of heads when recalling key facets of their existence.
Were it not for that long anticipated vacation to punctuate the monotony of our working lives, we might well have erased the full calendar year from our existence entirely!
In his TED talk, Neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman explains why:
As you get older you’ve figured out the rules of the world…but things aren’t that novel to you any more, you’ve seen all the patterns before and as a result when you get to the end of an adult summer and you look back…there’s just not as much footage to draw from and so the whole things seems to move more quickly.
His solution?
Novelty
We may not be able to take indefinite leave from work to accrue all of our bucket list experiences whilst still putting food on the table but we can pursue novelty in our daily lives to stretch out the days, weeks and months for maximum value.
Novelty of course is a matter of perspective and can be found in anything and everything should we grace it with our patience.
Blake saw the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower and the Bodhisattva used Vipassana meditation to reach nirvana and both turned an hour into an eternity.
But neither the Romantics nor the monks had bills to pay or retirement accounts to contribute to.
So how do we schedule novelty to make life more memorable?
Take the brain off auto-pilot and go (a little bit) rogue
Let’s start small:
Laura Vanderkam is neither a philosophical theorist, nor a neuroscientist.
She’s a writer and speaker who speaks in front of fortune 500 companies.
She’s a pragmatist.
On a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson she advocated seek exercising your right to a micro-adventure every week.
In fact she advocates two — one big one (of 2–4 hours) and one little one (an hour of a lunch break or so)
This might be as simple as a lunchtime stroll in a new neighbourhood, a new after-work activity with friends or a day-trip at the weekend somewhere that you’ve never visited before.
The novelty of the activity is key- what have you never done before that you could easily do without much financial investment?
These recommendations are not ground-breaking of course but in the hustle of daily life they fall by the way-side as unimportant or even trivial.
Making the conscious decision to punctuate a week with an unfamiliar experience might be the difference between being able to recall that specific week in your life in fifty years time or losing it forever.
Now let’s think bigger
Because the other-worldly travel experiences and adventures that we do get to enjoy in our lives are far fewer the weeks we spend at work it means that we anticipate them with more joy and excitement.
Protracting this sense of joy in the run-up to the holiday itself is often cited as having been more enjoyable than the trip itself.
Planning more things further into the future extends the value that these experiences offer over time.
We get disappointed if we plan things that don’t come to pass and so it is natural to mitigate potential disappointment by not planning our lives to far in advance just in case they don’t ever come to be.
This self-preservation mechanism however comes at the cost of your ability to slow time and savour the potential for new memories in the future.
A plan, however loose for 2025, 2026 or 2027 acts as a safeguard and a reminder for the pursuit of memories going forwards.
And lastly…
Eagleman contends that the stronger the emotional impact the greater the memory.
It’s most insidious form this manifests itself as trauma — an experience that happened maybe just once but one that sticks with you for a lifetime.
What if the opposite were also true?
The pursuit of awe-inspiring experiences, collective euphoria, flow states and ecstatic sensation have the potential to not only sear their impression onto our brains forever but to give life a very powerful sense of meaning in itself.
The things that we fear doing in our lives are often those that we would get immense benefit from.
Decisions in our life that we postpone because of money, reputation, the expectation of others, to preserve the golden cage of comfortable living and the illusion of stability are the last frontier against forging a powerful story for your own life complete with enough memories to last a lifetime.
The ball is in your court.
Freddie Kift — I write about finding our own unique sense of purpose and meaning in life through skill acquisition, flow states, travel, communication, and navigating the lived experience
