Today I noticed that we are already well into the third month of 2017. I mean I knew it was March but I really noticed it just today. It seemed like just yesterday when I was celebrating the new year. How time flies!
How many times do we all say those words, “How time flies!”. As we grow older we seem to say that a lot. We reminisce about the old days and get a feeling that everything in life happened so fast and is just speeding up more and more. Each year seems to go by faster than before as we grow older.
So, why does it happen? We all know that each year takes the same amount of time and the years are not actually passing by faster and yet, this is something that we have all felt. So how’s it possible?
Today I am going to discuss some theories as to why that might happen and it’s all about perceptions.
1. The Proportional Theory
This is a popular theory that tries to explain the phenomenon of speeding time. According to this theory, as we age, each additional year forms a smaller and smaller fraction of your entire life.
When you were just 1 year old and when you turned 2 after 1 year, that second year of your life was half your entire life. But when you turned 20, that year was just 1/20th of your life.
So, as you grow older and older, the past year just forms a smaller and smaller portion of your life. Therefore each year seems to go by faster. This is a reasonable sounding theory but not many people are convinced by it as they believe that is not how we perceive the passage of time.
This brings us to the second theory.
2. Two Vantage Points of Perception
Have you ever noticed that when you are on a vacation, even for like a week, the whole week seems to go by in a jiffy and then later on when you recall that vacation, it seem to have have lasted longer in hindsight.
Experts say that this is how we actually perceive time. We not only perceive time in the present but also in retrospect essentially forming two vantage points. That is why the vacation might seem to pass by real fast when we are having fun and are in that moment. But when we look at it in retrospect, we feel that it lasted longer as the brain formed a lot of new memories and the more memories it formed, the longer the vacation would seem.
This is the reason you feel like your childhood lasted much longer because as children we learn a lot of new things and our brain is subjected to a lot of new information. And as we get older, our lives become more routine and not many memories are formed due to that.
Therefore, as we grow older, time seems to get faster.
3. Technological Influence
Some psychologists think that our modern day technology is the reason for this phenomenon that we all experience. Basically, what they theorise is that today, thanks to technology, we are processing a lot more information than we have ever done in our human history.
Thanks to the computers, smartphones and internet, we can have any information, anytime we like it and thus we call the 21st century, ‘the age of information.’ This has resulted in us interacting more and more with these technologies and our brains have simply become more efficient in processing the magnitude of data we are all exposed to all the time.
Due to this, we are perceiving reality as passing faster than it really is because our brains are processing all the information collected via all our sensory organs much more efficiently.
To back this claim up, psychologists conducted a study involving two groups of people - one who were constant users of technology and one who rarely used it. They found that the group who were always online, always overestimated the amount of time that had passed compared to the other group.
In any case, time speeding up as we get older is something we all feel regardless of the fact that it doesn’t actually happen. In the end, whatever the reason, I think our perception of time is the reason for it in some way or the other.
I would like to end this article by what Einstein said once, “Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it will feel like an hour but sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it will feel like a minute."