Why does time feel longer when we are younger?
Ever feel like your classes as a kid used to be longer than a day now? Ever feel like the next tuesday is just around the corner, even when it is just thursday today. Ever feel like your days are getting shorter as you age? If you are on the same page as me, then you are a well-functioning adult with slight time management issues.
So, why does this happen in the first place? It has to with how much of your life you have spent. If you are 20 years old, the last year (pretend it was normal!) was only 5 per cent of your entire lifetime. However, if you are 2 years old (congrats if you are just 2 and can read this much), the last year was a whole half of your life spent.
We, as humans, learn stuff all the time. It's part of the social experience and we learn from watching others, observing ourselves, learning what others have taught us and figuring things out on our own. And learning takes time when done right.
The key is how much we immerse into the learning process. As kids, we learn new things all the time. We make new memories and we learn brand new stuff on the regular. Not much so as we grow up to be adults. When was the last time you learned a new skill? And when was the last time as a kid that you didn’t?
Learning takes time. And as we learn new things and spend more time perfecting new things, we spend more time on these things. More time spent is more time experienced and more time experienced is more time remembered. And as we spend less time learning, we spend less time experiencing new things. Less time experienced, more speedy time.
Simply put, doing new things feel like we spend more time on the said things. This also leads to the phenomenon of time feeling longer in your 7th-grade science class than in your college class. Of course, college students aren’t then keen on studying so, yeah!
This, in essence, an ode to our present selves to learn more things so the next tuesday doesn’t seem so close. This is an ode to keep exploring the vastness of the universe and the excitement it brings with it. This is an ode to the human nature of curiosity.
So whenever you feel like you have some time to kill, go read something. Even if you don’t learn anything new, there is a sure possibility that you will remember it 10 years from now as a memory of a past gone by.
