Sunday, February 11, 2018

Time And Perception


I'm obsessed with time. In fact, I've been obsessed with time for a very long time.

I'm obsessed with every aspect of time, particularly it's ontology, and whether the future is real (exists) and I've written plenty about that on this blog. But there's another aspect of time I haven't written about so much, and that's the perception of time.

They say that as you get older time seems to pass by faster and faster, and it's definitely true. I'm now in my 30s and I can no doubt experience time flying by in a way that simply didn't happen when I was a kid. Ten years ago was 2008, and I can remember 2008 like it wasn't that long ago. However, back in 2008 ten years before that was 1998, and 1998 seemed like ages ago to me when it was 2008, even though they're the exact same amount of time.

I'm currently a bit obsessed with this kind of perception of the passage of time. Five years when you're a teenager seems like a lifetime, but in your 30s it goes by like nothing. When I was a teen in the late 1990s, the 1980s seems like eons ago, and the music, fashion, and culture seemed so foreign. Now ten years perspective doesn't seem that different. Sure there are no doubt cultural changes from the past 10 years. But someone from 10 years ago if transported to today would not look so out of place. It didn't seem that way in the 90s when compared to the 80s.

Time seems to pass by faster as you get older because when you're older you have less new experiences and your life becomes more monotonous. When you're a kid growing up everything is new. You're constantly learning and having new experiences and your brain is filing these new experiences away in memory at a much faster rate than it does when you're older and have less new experiences. When your brain commits more experiences to memory time seems to move slower. It's just like how before accidents people say they experience time slowing down. This is due to the brain committing more experiences to memory.

So is it inevitable that time will seem to continue moving by faster and faster the older we get? Well not exactly. There are ways we can mitigate this. Having frequent new experiences can make time seem like it's passing slower again. Getting out of the daily lifestyle routines and making changes can help as well. Basically, you want to avoid falling into monotonous routines, which plagues many of us as we get older. Learn something new, go on a trip, discover and explore new things. It will not only make time pass by slower, but it will make life worth living.

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