Time Going Quickly

[RAM]

Have you noticed time going by more quickly as you age? Or how about as you become more busy?

For the past few months I have begun to experience a very strange phenomenon: time is flying by. I started noticing this when hours at a time would simply fly by while I was working during the day. 1 PM would turn into 8 PM in what felt like a flash. Almost a month (or two?) has gone by and I still have this feeling of my time almost slipping out from under me.

The strangest part is the benefits this apparently yields; more than ever, I feel like I am truly living in each individual moment I have. I do not think much about the past or future, as the past seems so distant and the future comes so rapidly. Also the harder parts of my life, such as hard days at work or being in pain or 3-hour classes, seem to fly by as well.

Now whenever I am trapped in a negative situation, I just tell myself it will be over soon enough and before I know it, it's done. While this sounds like detaching myself, I almost feel like I can be more in the moment when I know the difficulty will feel like it's ending soon.

The downside is that sometimes it feels like I am losing time... I have not posted on the Nexus in almost like a month, which surprises me. I have tried abstaining from marijuana and psychedelics as well as indulging, but this feeling remains.

How fast does your time go? Why do you think that is? Does this sound like a good or bad thing?

 

[tseuq]

How can anything "go quickly" which is just a cultural shared artificial concept, existing only in our minds? There is no movement in time, it is always now, how ever you experience yourself passing by. It is us, who are passing by, dying since we are born, all the way and forever now.

What we call "time" in our everyday language is our subjective interpretation of a retrospective observation of our own (what am I? - My cells? The speed of my blood stream? The neurons of my brain?...) vanishing. In my opinion, how much I commit (accept and be here) to a certain situation makes a difference in how I experience any (maybe exhausting) situation. Why am I participating in this exhausting situation? Why do I choose to live on? Life is pure struggle.

The concept of time provides a illusory frame in our physical paradigm which we set up for measuring. Nowadays It allows me to know when to take the cake out of the oven without standing next to it and checking for the right moment. :thumb_up:

Now whenever I am trapped in a negative situation, I just tell myself it will be over soon enough and before I know it, it's done.

The vision of duality creates the illusion of negativity, but what is this particular negativity in this particular situation and why do I reject what I experience? What do I reject (projection) from myself? What do I want to avoid because I "maybe" fear?

Instead of reproducing and focusing on a vision of rejection ("I don't want X and to avoid it, I do W." ) --> [What to I consciously create here? I don't know.. no focus, no conscious creation.], I focus an empower myself (f.e. "I am here and do Y because I want Z." ). (Thread "a matter of focus". )

It is all us, we create the show what we subjectively and collectively experience in every moment.

When rejecting what is, we are trying to swim against the current. While we create the illusion of separation, we want to take a step out and put ourselves in a bubble (in which we might feel safe but there we are not able to operate) but are never able to leave the river.
More over, there is no control/processing/evolution possible, when I avoid confronting with what is. Only fear (of the possible consequences/ a lacking coping strategy) tries to push us out of the now (like the coping strategy: "dissociation" ).

....when I know the difficulty will feel like it's ending soon.

No worries, our lives are over before we have maybe realized that we are really free (especially of our self - fear/desire/.. conditioning) and alive in every now.

Love yourself, go out and do the things you like, think for yourself and set your own goals and go for them, treat yourself and others with respect and keep us healthy and happy (thinking longterm), meet with people who talk with open hearts, live the life you are dreaming of. In the now there is only space for one, happiness, sadness, worries, trust, thus, BE whatever you like to share with us. We are creating/providing in every moment.

In my opinion, everything else is just senseless and a "waste" of our beauty.

All the best to us, love, tseuq

 

[RAM]

Instead of reproducing and focusing on a vision of rejection ("I don't want X and to avoid it, I do W." ) --> [What to I consciously create here? I don't know.. no focus, no conscious creation.], I focus an empower myself (f.e. "I am here and do Y because I want Z." ). (Thread "a matter of focus". )

More over, there is no control/processing/evolution possible, when I avoid confronting with what is. Only fear (of the possible consequences/ a lacking coping strategy) tries to push us out of the now (like the coping strategy: "dissociation" ).

Thank you very much for your reply tseuq. It was not the answer I was expecting, but it sounds like the answer I need.

I agree that it is useful to frame our actions in a positive context when moving forward. Instead of "I don't want to be homeless and to avoid that I work," life is much richer and happier when we frame it as "I work so I can have money to positively influence the world" or something of the sort.

I also see what you mean about fear of negativity pushing us out of the present moment by forcing us to live in a distant past or the future to escape it.

It's quite interesting how people nowadays are rarely raised to respect the beauty in each moment. I think our neoliberal system, at least in the US, benefits from instilling preferences and favorites within us. Sentences like "I like this place but not that place," "I like this food but not that food," "I like these clothes but not those clothes" provide fuel for the fire of consumerism, as we can keep making choices and having opinions that create demand in our markets until we die. For most, it seems difficult to take a step back from this and see beauty in everything.

Maybe I have fallen victim to this thinking with regard to how I spend my time. My preference for certain moments over others has maybe caused me to dissociate from my worse moments, providing an illusion of losing time/life. I will see what I can do about quashing dissociation, reframing things in more positive contexts, and further realizing the subjectivity of time.

 

[arcologist]

As conscious entities we perceive duration of time according to how long we have experienced time. To a baby, 1 year seems like a lifetime because that is the limit of it's experience. To an old man, a year goes by in a flash because it's such a small duration compared to his total experience. We perceive the world logarithmically in almost every sense because it is the most useful way - absolute sensory values are unimportant, only relative comparison between sensory observations matters. Thus, perception of time is also based on comparison to our current level of experience, and could be measured in decibels. I too have noticed that time seems to go by more quickly as I age, it's a bit alarming.

This may be of interest.

 

[Asher7]

Perception is everything.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

As conscious entities we perceive duration of time according to how long we have experienced time. To a baby, 1 year seems like a lifetime because that is the limit of it's experience. To an old man, a year goes by in a flash because it's such a small duration compared to his total experience. We perceive the world logarithmically in almost every sense because it is the most useful way - absolute sensory values are unimportant, only relative comparison between sensory observations matters. Thus, perception of time is also based on comparison to our current level of experience, and could be measured in decibels. I too have noticed that time seems to go by more quickly as I age, it's a bit alarming.

[...]

You beat me to it! As we age, every minute (or other measured unit of time) becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the entirety of our experience, at least in normal states of consciousness. Does this also apply to the ageing of the universe itself? Is time really getting faster?

Scientifically, time is measured in terms of cycles of photon vibration of a specific energy transition of a specific kind of atom under carefully controlled conditions. But, change the gravitational field - won't that all go to pot?

Another useful(?) exercise is to consider the wavelength of a vibration with a period of the age of the universe. Compare this value with the diameter of the known universe. Are they the same? Should they be the same? Why might they differ?

Then, using the Planck equation, calculate the energy of a photon with that extreme wavelength. How does this value compare to the other fundamental physical constants?


Enjoy your day!

 

[tseuq]

offtopic:

..reframing things in more positive contexts, and further realizing the subjectivity of time.

It is not about reframing something as subjectively "positive", f.e. to avoid unpleasent feelings, but to direct attention to a concrete "vision/goal". To build a pyramid, I have to think of its form and architecture before, otherwise I am just randomly stacking up stone cubes. And to say: "I don't want to build a castle." still leaves to many odds, that what I create is becoming something else than a pyramid.

And when I say, "I want to look down from a pyramid", I include all effort it will take, also the unpleasent one, maybe to build one.

Maybe I have fallen victim to this thinking with regard to how I spend my time. My preference for certain moments over others has maybe caused me to dissociate from my worse moments, providing an illusion of losing time/life.

On our road to nowhere, let's keep (integrate) our past and start now, everytime a new decision how to "go on".

tseuq

 

[RAM]

This may be of interest.

Thanks for the link; I was aware of this and theorized that it could be the culprit behind this sensation.

The link does propose something I never thought of, which is the limit on how much life expansion would really make our lives seem longer. By the time a human gets so old, their time would be flying by at such a rapid rate that a few extra years or decades would not seem like that much. And this person might run out of space for memories and begin to lose their oldest ones.

That thought it is a bit depressing at first, but I think it is also liberating in a way. The knowledge that no human will be able to live normally for so long puts an effective limit on us and reframes what we should do with our lives (which in my opinion is be happy and ignore horrible existential problems because there is little we can do about our inevitable destruction).

Anyway, the speed I have been experiencing had a rapid onset. It felt like as soon as spring/summer started there was a noticeable shift in how I felt time pass, even though there is no triggering event I can think of. This is why I ruled out simply getting a bit older.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Indeed, the subject rate of time's passage is highly variable, depending on the manner in which conciousness is focussed. A blink of an eye into a daydream can give a lifetime's experience in but a few seconds, for example.

 

[TGO]

Time goes by incredibly fast once you stop wishing you were older, I noticed. As a kid you pass by several milestones on your journey to adulthood, typically marked by a certain age. For instance, at age 10 you hit double digits which includes everything from preteen shenanigans and puberty to fads and Jr. High School.
At 13 you become a teenager,
at 15 you can get your drivers permit,
at 16 you can get a license,
at 18 you are technically an adult and can now purchase tobacco products,
at 21 you can legally consume alcohol
at 25 you can now rent a car (This can vary from state to state and agency to agency. I'm in the USA, btw)

As a kid, I was always looking forward to hitting that next age, wondering why older folks always told me not to grow up too fast and enjoy my time as a child. I just wanted to get there as fast as I could purely for the sake of being older but time would always drag on and on. After I turned 21 (I'm 26 now) time started to feel different. I wasn't racing to get to the next milestone anymore and yet time seemed to be speeding up with each passing year. Of course, there will be many more milestones to come in my life, I'm sure, but since I'm a little bit older now, they are approached a bit differently then when I was, say, 17 and counting down the days until my 18th b-day.

It is all a matter of perspective.

Spoiler

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way"

"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"

"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death"

"Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say"

"Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell"

Time by Pink Floyd

 

[Praxis.]

I think about this all of the time!

I haven't had the time to read through all of the replies in the thread, so my apologies if someone has already said the same kind of thing - but I had this conversation with a friend of mine a while back and his simple explanation really made a lot of sense to me. He said that time might subjectively feel like it's passing faster because our frame of reference expands as we age.

For example, when you're just a year old a month is a whopping 1/12th of your whole life. 1/12th of your entire collective experience up to that point. When you're 12 years old though, the passing of a month makes up a much smaller fraction of your life - only 1/144th of the time you've been alive. You've already experienced 144 months previously, what's just one more?

In short: as you age and your frame of reference gets larger, increments of time become exponentially smaller parts of your life.

Maybe this is a simplistic approach, but I think of how our subjective perception of so many other things in life drastically changes as we grow and expand our awareness, so this makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

Great thread

 

[hug46]

I am in agreement with the perception of time being proportionate to how long one has been alive theory that other members have put forward. One thing i have noticed is that, although i am experiencing time more quicker as i get older, i sleep less. I get by on six hours a night whereas when i was a teenager and in my 20s and 30s i was a 12-14 hours a night person.
This makes up for the accelerated passage of time.

Another thing that may cause time to speed up as we get older is that, as we age, we usually get taller. This in turn leads to our brains being a further distance from the earths surface. If the brain is responsible for our perception of time, the further away it is from the surface of the earth will result in a weaker gravitational potential andso gravitational time dilation will occur.
One way to test this theory out is for a fully grown human to spend one month living in the normal upright position and the next month crawling about on their stomach and then compare the experienced perception of time for each month. I am pretty sure that the month spent crawling about on the stomach would feel much longer.

 

[Praxis.]

Looks like some others had already said exactly what I was thinking when I made my previous post

Another thing that may cause time to speed up as we get older is that, as we age, we usually get taller. This in turn leads to our brains being a further distance from the earths surface. If the brain is responsible for our perception of time, the further away it is from the surface of the earth will result in a weaker gravitational potential andso gravitational time dilation will occur.
One way to test this theory out is for a fully grown human to spend one month living in the normal upright position and the next month crawling about on their stomach and then compare the experienced perception of time for each month. I am pretty sure that the month spent crawling about on the stomach would feel much longer.

Interesting thought - but don't most people start to 'shrink' after they reach peak physical maturity? After middle age most people lose a couple inches, if not more. Does the perception of time slow down again as we experience our twilight years, or does it continue to accelerate?

 

[hug46]

Does the perception of time slow down again as we experience our twilight years, or does it continue to accelerate?

I am happy that you have asked this question because i did consider age related shrinkage when formulating my theory. My thoughts are that perhaps shrinkage will have a slowing down effect on time perception but this is counteracted by the ever increasing ratio between time of life lived and it's relation to a specific unit of time.
If i make it to my twilight years i will come online, resurrect this thread and give you my experiential prognosis.

Apparently we also shrink during the day as the pads between our vertabrae compress, which brings up the question as to whether mornings (or whatever time one happens to get up) seem to go by more quickly than evenings.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

If the brain is responsible for our perception of time, the further away it is from the surface of the earth will result in a weaker gravitational potential andso gravitational time dilation will occur.

This must be why the ancient hermit lives atop the high mountain.

 

[hug46]

Slightly off topic (or maybe not) but i remember watching the incredible shrinking man when i was a kid. Never forgot the ending.

[YOUTUBE]

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite; but suddenly i knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up as if somehow i would grasp the Heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number ~ God's silver tapestry spread across the night! And in that moment i knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension, i had presumed upon nature - that existence begins and ends, is man's conception.... not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting.... becoming .... nothing.... my fears melted away and in their place came - acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it HAD to mean something..... and then I meant something too! Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.
TO GOD, THERE IS NO ZERO..... I STILL EXIST!!!

This must be why the ancient hermit lives atop the high mountain.

I wonder whether a hermit would be happier living their life in a percieved shorter amount of time or a longer time. If time is actually the same, does it matter if we experience it speeding up? Or is how we percieve things everything to us? Is it possible to remould our perception by hammering it with objective facts?

 

[Bancopuma]

I am in agreement with the perception of time being proportionate to how long one has been alive theory that other members have put forward. One thing i have noticed is that, although i am experiencing time more quicker as i get older, i sleep less. I get by on six hours a night whereas when i was a teenager and in my 20s and 30s i was a 12-14 hours a night person.
This makes up for the accelerated passage of time.

Another thing that may cause time to speed up as we get older is that, as we age, we usually get taller. This in turn leads to our brains being a further distance from the earths surface. If the brain is responsible for our perception of time, the further away it is from the surface of the earth will result in a weaker gravitational potential andso gravitational time dilation will occur.
One way to test this theory out is for a fully grown human to spend one month living in the normal upright position and the next month crawling about on their stomach and then compare the experienced perception of time for each month. I am pretty sure that the month spent crawling about on the stomach would feel much longer.

I don't really buy the tallness-time affecting hypothesis presented here. I know there may be very very slight differences in the time of atomic clocks in satellites in orbit around the Earth compared to the Earth's surface, but such differences are incredibly tiny, and these satellites are in orbit, with a great deal less gravity acting on them than us down here, however tall one is. So I really don't see this as making an meaningful difference. If anything, the time dilation caused by this effect should slow time down, where the overwhelming majority experience time moving faster as they age.

I have definitely noticed that time seems to move faster and faster as I age, the speed of its passing seems to continually increase. I think this very much a matter of relative experience, of perspective...the longer one has been alive to experience the passing of time, the quicker, relatively speaking, it seems to pass.

 

[Aum_Shanti]

Haha, I almost literally had to ROFL when reading the "taller" hypothesis...

I think I once read a theory, that our perception of time is basically that of one perceived event to the other. If you observe many "events" in a period of time you subjectively experience it as enduring longer.

So for a child everything is new and interesting and therefore a lot of new stuff and events, so you experience the time going by very slowly.
As an old man you have seen already everything, nothing catches your minds interest, therefore subjectively time is passing by very fast.

But that doesn't really explain why french lectures dilated time by eternity...
(we had to learn french in school)

While tripping I also made up the theory that our minds observance of time deliberately gets stretched to stay in sync with the body.
What I do know is that our mind has a certain time window, which it perceives as now (which is actually bigger than I thought, but don't know the actual value anymore). This is to compensate the different signaling delays of the different extremities. E.g. if you touch your feet with your hand you experience this as happening at the same time, whereas the signals coming from the extremities have quite some time delay.
And e.g. if you perceive time as from one "now" to the other, then the longer such a time window is, the faster time goes by.
So if you get old, and your signaling gets lamer and lamer you experience time faster and faster.
But honestly, this was a typical stoner theory I made up while tripping...

I was just amazed to experience that some substances seem to decouple you from your body sync. Then you can think much faster, but if you try to move the body in this condition you realize that it reacts very very slowly. It's really hard to coordinate anything like that if an arm movement e.g. needs like eternity to happen.
But I have been told by the people around me, that I actually in reality moved very fast.

IMHO a fascinating topic.

 

[hug46]

If anything, the time dilation caused by this effect should slow time down, where the overwhelming majority experience time moving faster as they age.

I understand and respect your scepticism but on the above point i beg to differ. If Clocks that are far from massive bodies (or at higher gravitational potentials) run more quickly, and clocks close to massive bodies (or at lower gravitational potentials) run more slowly, then surely when one's head gets further from the earth time will pass more quickly (admittedly at an infinitesimally small scale).

As an old man you have seen already everything, nothing catches your minds interest, therefore subjectively time is passing by very fast.

But that doesn't really explain why french lectures dilated time by eternity... Big grin

If old people are less interested in things they would be bored, as you were in your French lessons. So surely time must pass more slowly for them, as it did for you.

 

[SpartanII]

I've noticed this effect also, as well as many people I've discussed this with. As has been pointed out, perception is everything. Reality can be perceived in many ways. Think of how the perception of time is in dreaming or tripping! We can get flooded with alternate perceptions of time and memory without a reference point of "real" time. How trippy!:surprised