Unraveling the Mystery: Why Time Speeds Up With Age & How to Make Life Feel Longer

The perception that time accelerates as we age is a common, often unsettling, human experience. A Hacker News user struggling with this feeling—that life is becoming compressed into brief moments rather than a long chronology, despite efforts to create 'memory markers' with unique activities—sparked a thoughtful discussion. Commenters shared various theories and potential strategies to counteract this phenomenon and make life feel subjectively longer.

Why Does Time Seem to Accelerate?

Several compelling explanations were proposed:

• The Proportionality Theory: As articulated by an 80-year-old commenter, a year represents a significantly smaller fraction of your total lived experience as you age. For a 10-year-old, a year is 10% of their life; for an 80-year-old, it's just over 1%. This shifting ratio can make periods of time feel shorter in retrospect.
• Decreased Novelty: Childhood is filled with firsts, making experiences distinct and memorable. As adults, routines set in, and fewer experiences are truly novel. The brain may not encode these routine periods with the same richness, leading to a sense of compressed time. One commenter shared an article on the 'novelty effect' supporting this.
• Brain's Information Compression: As we accumulate experiences, our brains become more efficient at processing and storing information. Similar or routine events might be 'compressed' or indexed against previous, similar memories, rather than being stored as entirely new, detailed experiences. This is likened to building a 'dictionary' of experiences.
• Neurobiological Factors: Some theories point to physiological changes. These include shifts in dopaminergic and cholinergic systems or changes in base neuron firing rates. One commenter linked to research on the dopaminergic system's role in time perception and aging.
• Relative Experience & Processing Speed: Similar to how a child perceives minor pain as significant due to limited experience, early life moments might feel larger because there are fewer of them. Conversely, another commenter suggested it's not time speeding up, but rather our own cognitive and physical processes slowing down, making the world seem to move faster by comparison, much like an elderly person struggling with the speed of a computer user.

How Can One Make Life Feel Longer?

The discussion offered several actionable insights:

• Cultivate Presence and Mindfulness: The most frequently echoed advice was to pay more attention in the moment. Instead of letting routine experiences pass by unremarked or dwelling on anxieties, consciously engage with the present. This involves noticing everyday details and appreciating them. One experienced commenter suggested a personal, experimental approach to being more open and aware, rather than rigidly adhering to formal mindfulness trends.
• Embrace Novelty: Actively seek out new and different experiences. This could range from small daily changes to more significant undertakings. The original poster's intuition about creating 'markers' aligns with this, though the execution might need refinement to ensure genuine novelty.
• 'Reset' Your Experiential Dictionary: Building on the 'brain compression' theory, one user mused whether significant life changes—like learning a new language or moving to a different country every 5-10 years—could force the brain to build a new 'dictionary,' thus making experiences feel richer and time slower.
• Stay Mentally and Physically Active: Keeping the brain engaged with learning and challenges, and maintaining physical health, was also suggested as a way to combat the feeling of slowing down relative to the world, thereby influencing time perception.

Ultimately, the discussion highlights that while the subjective speeding up of time is a widely shared aspect of aging, conscious effort in how we engage with our experiences and structure our lives can potentially mitigate this feeling, making life feel richer and more expansive.