Why Time Feels Like It Passes Quicker As You Get Older
Posted: Monday, March 10, 2014 by Tyler Durden in Labels: life , productivity
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PRODUCTIVITY
Why Time Feels Like It Passes Quicker As You Get Older
As you get older, it feels like time tends to move faster. As Dan Ariely explains over at The Wall Street Journal, we tend to fall into familiar routines as we age and that makes time move quickly.
Photo by Fabiola Medeiros
We perceive time something like a stack of memories, so the less new experiences you have, the less likely you are to fill in those memories with interesting things:
Time does go by (or, more accurately, it feels as if time is going by) more quickly the older we get. In the first few years of our lives, anything we sense or do is brand new, and many of our experiences are unique, so they remain firmly in our memories. But as the years go by, we encounter fewer and fewer new experiences — both because we have already accomplished a lot and because we become slaves to our daily routines. For example, try to remember what happened to you every day last week. Chances are that nothing extraordinary happened, so you will be hard-pressed to recall the specific things you did on Monday, Tuesday, etc.What can we do about this? Maybe we need some new app that will encourage us to try out new experiences, point out things we’ve never done, recommend dishes we’ve never tasted and suggest places we’ve never been. Such an app could make our lives more varied, prod us to try new things, slow down the passage of time and increase our happiness. Until such an app arrives, try to do at least one new thing every week.
It’s not too difficult to push yourself to do new things. We’ve talked before about the importance ofbreaking out of your comfort zone , setting up a month long routine structure , and how spending money on experiences tends to result in more satisfaction . Doing so means you get to try new things and make time slow down a bit.
A Trick to Help Outrace Time [The Wall Street Journal]
