Time Dilation, age and WTH is going on ?

[GoodSarmatian]

Do you feel like things are happening faster and faster as you grow older ?
Yes, you do. Every new day is subjectively shorter than any day in your past.
But is it ?
Are we living in a phase of accelerated history ?
Has the world changed more between 1989 and 2019 than between 1959 and 1989 ?
Yes, fall of the USSR and 9/11.

I feel like there wasn't much change between 2010 and 2015, but the past four years were a barrage of (Bad) News.
Can older posters confirm this ?

 

[Kaitzilla]

Yes, time moves faster the older you get.

Eventually, things go so fast that kids become a blurry shape, bingo is fun, and golf and baseball feel exciting.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Yes, time moves faster the older you get.

Eventually, things go so fast that kids become a blurry shape, bingo is fun, and golf and baseball feel exciting.

I should have phrased the OP better.
It's not linear or constant acceleration.
2010-2015 felt much slower than 2000-2005 despite 9/11, the War on Terror and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Everything slowed down, and now everything seems to be moving faster.

 

[Hrothbern]

When you visit your grand children
and while travelling to your kids house, you do not need to rehearse with your wife all their names and how old they already are...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Do you feel like things are happening faster and faster as you grow older ?
Yes, you do. Every new day is subjectively shorter than any day in your past.
But is it ?
Are we living in a phase of accelerated history ?
Has the world changed more between 1989 and 2019 than between 1959 and 1989 ?
Yes, fall of the USSR and 9/11.

I feel like there wasn't much change between 2010 and 2015, but the past four years were a barrage of (Bad) News.
Can older posters confirm this ?

Yes, and yes.

Not that I would know about 1959, as that was before my parents were married (I was born in the early '60s). But there are whole weeks and months that fly by and I realize it's the next month and I should have changed the calendar a week or two ago and just didn't notice. Thank goodness the computer has a clock/calendar on it and the Space Channel shows a different Star Trek series every week day or I'd be totally confused about what day it was, rather than just semi-confused.

BTW, by my own reckoning of the seasons, fall is here in this region of the world. The leaves on the trees across the parking lot from my living room window have started to turn yellow. While I'm aware of how seasons work from an astronomical perspective, the official calendar is over a month out of step with reality. We've had frost warnings here already.

On the issue of history and current events, a huge part of the reason why things seemed slower decades ago is because that was before the time of 24-hour news, round-the-clock TV programming, and definitely before the internet. We're constantly barraged and saturated with information about what's going on around the world, no matter how trivial something might be, or how significant. I don't even watch the news anymore; I read it online, so I can choose the pace at which I take in the information and can choose what I want to know about. That way it doesn't seem so overwhelming.

 

[Dekker]

I use to roll my eyes at my parents and older people saying time goes faster when you get older, but now I'm saying the same darn thing. And I'm not even that old.

 

[Synobun]

Time has felt faster, but I don't think it's because I'm older. It's because I just want more and more things to blend together. If everything feels the same and if I don't want to be present, my recognition of time passing is compromised. The past five years have been a blur but only because I don't want to have lived those five years to begin with. Every day, the same as yesterday, the same as tomorrow. Your mind won't bother appreciating those days.

Regarding history: Valka has a good point with increased exposure. Gone are the days that you have to wait for the news hour or the newspaper. Now you find out about things happening as they happen almost anywhere in the world, real or otherwise. The thing with increased exposure is that it also leads to increased action. You can act immediately now as well. It used to be that weeks would go by between state actions, now you can have drastic decisions broadcast to the world within a few minutes and a couple tweets.

 

[innonimatu]

Do you feel like things are happening faster and faster as you grow older ?
Yes, you do. Every new day is subjectively shorter than any day in your past.
But is it ?
Are we living in a phase of accelerated history ?
Has the world changed more between 1989 and 2019 than between 1959 and 1989 ?
Yes, fall of the USSR and 9/11.

History-wise? No, the "status" of the world has been pretty much stagnant since the early 1990s. All the same trends then continue in force now, the same political alliances. International politics may be changing with the China thing, butt we'll still have to see. National politics in many countries has rot set in but no out yet. Even technology has stagnated. The "communications revolution" that started in the 1990s has burnt itself with little to show for it in terms of human progress, just some convenience. AI remains a pipe dream. Life expectancy at birth stagnated and in some wealthy countries even regressed.

I'd say it has not accelerated. Yet. There are a number of reasons why it feels like we're at the closing stage of an era. More intense international conflicts, political instability in major countries. It at least feels more unstable than usual.
I do wonder if the inversion of the age pyramid made population overall less willing to embark in attempting social changes.

Technology, the other great accelerator of history, probably can't be counted on to provide any soon. Availability of energy could be a big changer, but the "advanced world" is as dependent on fossil fuels as it were were coming out of WW2, and I don't believe any of the optimist predictions that will change soon. Not have the apocalyptic predictions of an end of fuels been realized.

 

[Kyriakos]

I should have phrased the OP better.
It's not linear or constant acceleration.
2010-2015 felt much slower than 2000-2005 despite 9/11, the War on Terror and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Everything slowed down, and now everything seems to be moving faster.

Time passes more slowly when you have to familiarize yourself with something, or when there are dangerous or painful elements. You might recall that (eg) some boring project you had to do as a child took what seemed to be a small eternity; same with being in a one-hour class at school if you haven't done your homework and fear the teacher may examine you.
However, it also happened that playing when a child may seem to last for a vast time, and this seems to be because your mind is more active and focuses on more things concurrently. I think the best of example of that is when you sleep: one can see incredibly complicated dreams that (in the dream) often last whole years: the mind is working far faster than at other times.
I actually did self-examine this back in my first couple of university years, ie specifically would examine how my sense of time (while thinking) could be altered so that I could think more in the same amount of time.

The older most people get (and to a degree, all people) the less they tend to think. Primarily because thinking is tied (for a number of reasons) with problem-solving, and most people tend to reach a point where they just accept some stable kind of existence. Afaik this is also argued (in research) to potentially lead to illnesses like Alzheimer's.

Trivia: Actually, when I was 9 years old, I had the theory (among other theories) that the reason why other people seemed off to me was that they were in another time, and that there was a specific flow of time for all: one only seemed alive and "there" when they were on exactly the same part of time as you
Unfortunately this doesn't seem correct; but I once did write a very small story when someone deliberately allowed the years to go by just so that he would force other people to get old too.

No fear, though; I replaced that theory with a "better" one, having to do with a forced caste humanity, overwatched by some demonic being. See, if you actively expand theories, time passes more slowly

 

[Birdjaguar]

Since time does not exist outside of our own minds, it moves along differently for each of us. And, as we do things at different levels of effort and concentration, it changes for us.

 

[r16]

you feel in your bones that you have less days remaining and you won't be getting younger/hence more energitical . You would easily postpone things , now you can't , because the time is running out .

poster is soon to become 50 .

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Since time does not exist outside of our own minds, it moves along differently for each of us. And, as we do things at different levels of effort and concentration, it changes for us.

Are you suggesting that only humans experience time?

 

[Akka]

I can't tell if "the world" goes faster or slower.
But yes, as we age, time goes faster. It was evaluated that we reach half our subjective life at 25 and three quarters at 40.

Yes, that's depressing.

Good news is : that's an average. If you do things outside your norm, you switch back to "discovery mode" in which time slows down and events imprint themselves more. So if you do a lot of different things, you can lengthen your subjective life ^^

 

[Mouthwash]

Are you suggesting that only humans experience time?

No, that the experience of time passing is subjective to each of us.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

No, that the experience of time passing is subjective to each of us.

Thanks, but I was asking Birdjaguar, because what he says doesn't make sense to me.

 

[BenitoChavez]

In regards to world events, yes things have been generally speeding up. The internet and cell phones allow for better communication and faster spread of ideas. Trains, planes, and automobiles allow people to move around faster than every before. Technological change is accelerating. Moore's law and all that. But all of that is on a very broad scale. If you look in finer detail like from 2010-2015 vs 2015-2019 it gets more difficult to determine and whether one time range is faster than the other is probably subjective.

Whether time accelerates as you age it is purely subjective. I'm fond of the adage "The days are long but the years are short". Funny how that works.

 

[Samson]

I have a theory, backed by no real evidence:

Your internal concept of time is highly related to how much your brain changes over that time. Therefore as you get older your brain changes less, you learn less in any one day, and time seems to go faster. Also when you have a weekend that you sit about in front of the telly or Civ it seems like it lasted no time, but when you go and do something (esp. learning something new) it seems like it lasted longer.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Disparate perception of age is different from time dilation. To my knowledge none of us have traveled at relativistic speeds so the impact of time dilation on us is tiny. It matters, it'll screw up GPS and such if you ignore it when doing the math, but it's not something a person could typically perceive on Earth.

Subjective perception of experience based on how large a % a year is against entire lifetime is more plausible.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Since time does not exist outside of our own minds, it moves along differently for each of us. And, as we do things at different levels of effort and concentration, it changes for us.

Are you suggesting that only humans experience time?

No. Our experience of time is uniquely our own as individuals and as critters too. We have created a pretty universal framework to socialize time and organize our routines, but those do not determine how we actually experience moments. I have no idea how cats experience time.

No, that the experience of time passing is subjective to each of us.

Yes. Thanks.

 

[Kyriakos]

Some people also move (mentally or physically) on a different speed. Of course a different example of that is with other beings on earth, which have a far faster (or slower) bio clock than humans. Eg some insects (faster) and beings like turtles (slower).
While it is internally observable if it has to do with thinking, it also can be observed in external stuff, like with athletes or virtuosi who excel at something they do and you have to watch the video in slow motion to pick up all the moves.