I will never forget the shocked look on my friend’s face the moment I told her that 2018 was not three years ago, but rather eight. COVID-19 was not two years ago, but actually six. As we begin to age, our perception of time slowly becomes more and more warped, and we begin to lose track of the valuable moments in our lives, thus prompting the question: Why is time passing by so quickly?
Across multiple studies, scientists have noticed that younger children perceive time differently–to them, time is slower and much more vivid. However, when older people were studied, such as teenagers and adults, they claimed that time had been passing faster after each passing year.
According to psychologists, time feels like it’s speeding up because, as a person ages, their brain processes fewer new experiences and begins to fall into a routine. Therefore, we create fewer distinct memories, and our internal clock does not process each second of our lives.
A younger person, particularly a toddler or a child, perceives time differently. To them, every thirty minutes is a grueling and extremely long period of time. Scientifically, this is because children carefully analyze everything around them, and these very details and events later go on to become either permanent memories they will keep forever, or they will be discarded regarding their worth.
Younger children have lived far less than we have, experienced far less than we have. What they have learned and memorized so far is only a fraction of what our brains have stored. The more memories a person has, the less they analyze their surroundings and cherish every given moment. One year also makes up a larger portion of a child’s life than, say, a twenty-year-old, meaning that one year is more significant in a child’s life than that of an older individual.
That one year, although it seems small, is crucial to a young child’s development and the way they perceive the world. However, one year is only a small portion of an older person’s life; therefore, one year has less of an impact, and it is less likely to be noticed until later.
Mr. Hartz, one of our science teachers on campus added, “I think time is passing by more quickly as you get older, older, and older because the things that occur have already occurred in the past so you kind of see them more vividly versus something I’ve never seen before and think about it and ponder about why it may have happened. We experience fewer things that are more surprising as we get older. Physically, our minds and memories get older and weaker, so time doesn’t click well with our minds.”
Time has not only taken a toll on our mental states and observation skills, but it also plays a huge role in the desire to age and look more mature. Twenty to thirty years ago, teenagers looked a lot different than how they look now. Whether the reason is personal desire to look older or to just act more mature, it is a well-known fact that teenagers are beginning to look a lot older than they used to.
This is because, as fashion trends begin to pop out and new eras of models come, teens’ views on fashion and beauty drastically change as they forget their age and fixate on beauty.
When a teenager fixates on their beauty and compares themselves to famous actors and models, they lose their own creativity and individuality. While there is no problem with looking up to people, losing oneself and spending every waking second comparing oneself to others only leads to damage to one’s mental health and a waste of time.
When a child is young, all they can think about is growing up, becoming a teenager, living the high school life, and reaching an age where they are both young to their elders and old to the youngsters. Children only dream about growing up, but once they do, all they want to do is to turn back time and travel back into the past–to the times when homework was only reading for twenty minutes a day and maybe five math questions.
Nostalgia is commonly confused with the concept of time, and while the two go hand-in-hand together, they are not necessarily the same thing. Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past, to turn back the clock and start anew. However, time is merely a scientific concept used to dictate the passage of days. Time holds no sentimental value, no wistful affection for the past.
It is only a tool used to dictate a long, measurable period.
An individual who requested to be anonymous also added, “I feel like time passes faster the older we get. I honestly don’t really know the reason behind it but I feel like when we get older, we have already experienced most things in life already so it just feels like time is flying by.”
In order to restore one’s perspective of time, psychologists recommend focusing on the little things in life–to look at all the little details, stare at clocks, interact with others, and not stress. Stress plays a big factor in why we have begun to think that time is passing by even faster than ever before.
When a person is stressed, they feel day turn into night, then night to day, and the cycle repeats over and over again, making that person believe they are running out of time, as if their responsibility is to complete the task. Whether it is a school assignment or part of a task at a job, as that person works to complete their given assignment, they lose track of the valuable minutes as the seemingly small and insignificant seconds begin to slip by.
Rather than thinking about why time feels like it is racing right past our eyes, we should think about how we can appreciate the little things in life, look at little details closer than ever, and be in the moment rather than look back on it. We should not have to look back on old memories too much; we should look forward to the future and live in the present rather than dwell on the past and worry about not finishing our stuff in time. Time and age have a close relationship, determining our lives’ longevity, our happiness, and how we perceive the passage of time itself.
But to answer the question from above, unfortunately, the cold, hard truth is not that time is physically passing by faster; we are just getting older.