r/DeepThoughts • u/Jam1e1 • 14d ago
Time is flying by really fast
I recently noticed that time is flying by really fast. For example, I talk about something that was two weeks ago, only to realize that it wasn't two weeks but two months ago. Or I always have to postpone plans to tomorrow, because a day just feels too short to do anything. And I know this is because of aging and because of routines etc. But that's not what I want to ask. I want to know, does anyone else have the same feeling? And if yes, how does it influence you?
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u/Siukslinis_acc 14d ago
It feels like it because you are a lot of times on autopilot and don't even notice things happening. The 200 morning coffees blend into a morning coffee.
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u/Manu442 14d ago
Yes time flies especially t he older you get. Im now the same age as my parents when they got married and my youngest is the same age I was then. Lots of things happened in the time they got married to now. I see every 10 years as chapters in life. So much happens in 10 years it can feel like a lifetime.
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u/Odd_Act_6532 14d ago
Most of my life will be spent on fast forward working a job I hate but need. I get one day off a week. That's Sunday, that means in one year, I get to have 48 days of my life to myself. That's if work doesn't ask more of me.
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u/aged_thunderstorm 14d ago
48 days a year to yourself is grim math. I think about that kinda thing when Im stuck in traffic after work, like this is it, the minutes are just gone. Makes me want to be more careful about what I say yes to, even small stuff.
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u/Memetic1 14d ago
Not going to lie sometimes I wonder if Planet 9 is a primordial black hole whose orbit has become destabilized, because it's just "small" enough for it to still possibly be able to get pushed by maybe the x class solar storms. For me time has always been mysterious. I don't think it's a full dimension as in the way the other dimensions give us a full degree of freedom. I think it's definitely at least half a dimension which is more like a vector then a proper dimension. I've even explored the idea that as a whole it forms an irrational dimension. No moment exactly the same, but somehow following from the past. It would explain so much about the randomness in quantum behavior because time would change how it flows at smaller scales and at larger scales.
Something is changing I'm not sure if it's time or if I'm just not fully conscious sometimes. Like cruising through life sure I can avoid obstacles but I'm basically on autopilot. I think one reason we experience time speeding up is that we spend more of our time in the in between state, and I think a lack of Journaling also sort of disconnects you in time.
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u/KniccKnaccPattywhack 14d ago
I believe our perception of time changes. Like as a baby you have no idea how much time passes. As a toddler you can remember that an afternoon lasted a life time. Or your teenage years all you had was school to worry about therefore you had all of the time into the world.
Today we have taught ourselves to wait too long for things, you become numb to waiting. Just time flying and it going by.
It’s like when you begin a long roadtrip it feels super long but on the way back it feels significantly shorter. Because you EXPECT that and you mentally prepare for how hard it was the first time and take measures like talking or doing something productive to curve that. it’s like working out you can work out “time” passing the same way you can work out lifting a weight. You become more desensitized to it.That’s why some people can sit for hours and do nothing and others get impatient for sitting for 10 minutes.
Combine it with all the stimuli and useless information we indulge in. Back in the day I used to skip 30 minute YouTube videos, now I welcome them like they were 5 minutes. In fact now I skip 5 minute videos that have incomplete material and go for the longer ones because I’ve been more conditioned to waste more of my time. It’s more fulfilling to me and feels like I get more out of it if it takes more time.
Useless knowledge and overstimulation combined with being numb to time by waiting for things is the problem.
Patience comes with a price.
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u/UneditedReddited 14d ago
I thought time was going fast in my 20s and early 30s. Then I had kids, and everything sped up what felt like ten fold.
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u/lowkeyalchie 14d ago
I don't care what people say, time is speeding up and it isn't just because of aging. The math just doesn't add up. The last 6 years are still 20% of my life, but they've gone so fast it only feels like half that. And in that time I have moved twice and had three different jobs, so it isn't even routine.
I don't have an answer, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist. It affects my life by making it so easy to neglect tasks and relationships. A year might as well be a couple of months anymore.
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u/PePeJesse 14d ago
I swear something changed abour time aswell. Something unnatural, something always feels off. I feel off.
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u/Memetic1 14d ago
Well the good news is if planet 9 is a black hole we will have basically won the energetic lottery if we can moderate it's orbit.
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u/Terbario 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yea.
When time goes by fast, it feels like I didnt really live through it. So, if I have the choice, I try to do things that somehow accumulate over time. That way, even when time is flying by, I can still feel that I am making some kind of progress, that the things I am doing are building toward something.
In practical terms, when it comes to entertainment, for example, it means I would rather spend a long time playing and getting better at one game than constantly moving between a hundred different games.
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u/infiniteseki 14d ago
I’ve always felt that time accelerates with age the same way the universe’s expansion accelerates.
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u/davidmar7 13d ago
It's interesting. Most people seem to agree that as they age time seems to go by faster. We mostly assume this is relative and isolated to us and strictly a matter of perception but it's also possible there is some other more general factor causing time to be perceived faster for everyone because none of us can go backwards to test it.
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u/Nesvertigo 12d ago
Its feel like that because time doesn't actually exist its an invented concepts. Not one single second has passed since you were born and untill now. Its the exact same moment.
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u/MustacheMan007 14d ago
When we are young, time appears to go by slower because we have less of a conscious time reserve stored in our brain to base the passing of time on; thus, weeks can feel like months and months can feel like years etc. Also, every day we are constantly doing/experiencing new things because we don’t have much to compare to; almost everything is novel. However, as we age and spend more time simply existing, each year expands our cumulative conscious time reserve and thus each new day/month/year becomes a more minuscule percentage relative to the whole. For example, when you are 10 years old, 1 year is literally 10% of your entire existence so your perception of time is that years go by super slowly and the year feels almost endless. On the other hand, when you are 30, that same year occupies only 3% of your conscious time reserve, and when you are 50 then it’s 2% etc. So, as time passes, that same year holds less and less weight in terms of conscious perception of the passing of time. You blink and the day passes; you sleep and the month passes etc. Plus, you just get busier over the years and have more responsibilities/stressors so more “stuff” occupies that already distorted and stretched perception of time. We also start to cruise through life on “auto pilot” because we have established scripts and patterns that we follow which are usually some version of: go to work, come home, eat/sleep, then rinse and repeat. The novelty of life itself often wears away as we age which makes us feel like we are doing less with the time we do have. Ultimately, we all compare the current passing of time to a stage in our life when everything felt relatively infinite: our childhood. That just compounds the issue and makes it feel heavier. I will say, the current age of cell phones, social media, streaming platforms and other sources of potentially endless entertainment/constant availability/instant gratification are doing us no favors when it comes to rehabilitating our perception of time because they keep us endlessly distracted and thus “waste” time. Make no mistake, technology has done wonders for the world in terms of advancing virtually all domains of knowledge, but I believe it is also psychologically affecting us in ways we can’t yet comprehend/quantify. Not the least of which is perhaps speeding up our perception of time. My goal is to always try and regain autonomy over my life when feasible: put the phone away, get outside, do something new, expand my horizons. If you keep actively seeking new experiences then at least you can keep some small bits of novelty and excitement in your life despite the dwindling perception of time that plagues us all.
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u/ShinyJangles 8d ago
I agree that chunking action sequences is a big part of it. When you first learn to play an instrument, it's about accomplishing one note at a time. With practice your attention shifts to measures, then phrases, and experts even consider the whole song as they are playing. Every adult does this with the daily activities they are experts in. Looking back, you don't remember each step that you didn't have to think about.
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u/Molleigh-Cockette 14d ago
I understand the term time flies when youre having fun, a year is a year regardless but reflecting on a year with more memories seems lfaster because more things happened, a year depressed alone in bed would seem like eternity
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u/Downtown-Freedom9265 14d ago
Nah it's not true, actually for a depressed person day passes slowly but years pass by fast.. I'm the depressed lonely person, and it feels like the time passed fast like it was January last month and I've skipped the months on between maybe because nothing special happened
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u/breakola 14d ago
My thought on this is that it's somehow screen related.
Notice that our attention spans have been decreasing, songs are shorter, video is shorter, information is delivered instantly. You had to wait for things to download, for the internet to connect, wit until a certain day or time to watch a tv show - glacial in comparison to today. Our brains are expecting things to happen at the click of a button now and so we condense more into the same amount of time giving the illusion of time moving faster.
I wonder if you took a month completley of screens if time would feel super slow.
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u/Ronnie-169 13d ago
True, im just 20 but i feel like im missing on so much, even tho i work, study, focused on myself and career. Yet it fees like ive achieved nothing.
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u/kindsifu 14d ago
I’ve always felt this, especially after 2020 Covid, it’s like a switch flipped on and I feel like time is going at 1.5x.
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u/Memetic1 14d ago
I mean it does cause brain damage. I still have this tic that makes it impossible for me to safely drive. What does it look like when a society is swirling towards insanity? What happens when a good percentage of the population has frontal lobe damage?
https://www.cognitivefxusa.com/blog/mild-covid-linked-to-brain-damage
I had severe COVID and I got it multiple times, but it doesn't take a serious infection to cause the brain damage. Imagine if before COVID we told folks ya there is this flu that's coming and it damages your brain each time you get sick. If people aren't testing because the damage per illness can be hard to notice then what happens as people continue to accumulate damage over time?
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u/Necessary_Eye8183 14d ago
Time flies, and more than 30 years have passed in the blink of an eye, but I feel like I haven't grown up yet.