We all feel it, whether we’re 30 or 60 or 90: Time feels like it’s speeding up each year. As the Grateful Dead sing in “The Music Never Stopped” … “Lord the band kept us so busy. We forgot about the time.”
Yes, time flies when we’re having fun. Perhaps ironically, the fun times in hindsight can feel like they lasted forever because the days — and nights — were so full. Alan Burdick, author of Why Time Flies, said the sense that time is accelerating isn’t limited to older people. “Everybody at all ages says time is speeding up. You would think that more older people would say it than younger people, but actually everybody at every age says it in just about the same proportion,” he said. “Two-thirds to 80 percent of people say that time is speeding up, whatever age they are. So we’re all experiencing something.”
When I travel, the first two days feel like two weeks. Yet after two weeks, it seems the trip has flown by. But it recollection a week of travel feels like a month, whereas an ordinary month can feel like a week. “This is often referred to as the vacation paradox,” said Dean Buonomano, author of Your Brain Is a Time Machine. “When you’re on vacation, prospectively, as it’s happening, it seems to fly by. But once you’re back home, if the vacation was filled with a lot of new events, then you have a lot of items in memory, and that will give it the subjective feeling of being a long time.”
Author and academic Steve Taylor recalled moving to eastern Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he was in his early 20s. “Everything seemed exhilaratingly different and strange,” he wrote in Time Expansion Experiences. “My life changed radically. Besides the hyper-reality of a new environment, I was living with a partner for the first time. I joined a new band and started to give English lessons to augment my income. … After eight months, I came back to the U.K. on holiday and felt like I had been away for more like eight years. … I was genuinely shocked that the same people were working in the same shops, and that my friends were doing the same jobs. I felt that I had been away for so long that major changes should have occurred in people’s lives.”
To read the full story, click here.
