Perceived Age (2024)

If the years feel like they fly by, shouldn't the older group give responses of greater than 120s for the 120s timer?

I say this in threads whenever this concept comes up, but I doubt the feeling has anything to do with something intrinsic in the brain, but is just representative of the variety of novel activities you do, and for most people their novel activity seeking wanes as they get older. Giving your brain more time to go on "auto pilot" and lose track of time.

The year I spent at a desk when I was 24 feels significantly shorter than the 3 months I spent at 39 traveling in strange lands.

My computer presents way less fps in same games as when i bought it 10 years ago. I myself am not as fast neither in games nor catching fast balls as when I was 20 instead of my almost 40 years now.

Surely the degrading hardware gotto play a role aswell.

> life is half over by 23 or 24

I'm just a few years shy of being 24 years older than 24, but I have to say my lived-experience does not agree with this observation. The time from 24-today seems much longer than the time from 0-24.

I do remember a period in my early 30s where time seemed to move fast, but hasn't felt that way in over a decade.

Though I suspect, agreeing with much of the article, this is because my life has had a fair amount of novelty in it, even as I age. I often marvel at how impossible to predict my life has been even a year out. Even a year ago I would not have imagined doing the job I'm currently doing, traveling to the places for work I currently need to, meeting the new people I have, solving problems in a space I had no understanding of.

As contrast I've often been shocked to talk with former coworkers to find that have had nothing change, not even what they're working on during the day, in the span of time that has resulted in my making multiple moves, changing multiple jobs (arguably even careers), learning new skills, etc. The most extreme was a college roommate I hadn't talked to in 20 years, and barring his marriage a few months after we last spoke, his day-to-day routine was identical to what it was 20 years ago. We only had a chance to meet up because I had briefly moved back near the area we went to school.

> first kiss, first job, first time living away from home

never had that. or worked a job. or lived away

sounds cool!

I would advise the author to be very hesitant about making pronouncements that are supposed to apply to a whole human life, when he's only 22.

I don't understand. If I feel like two minutes passed when only one has passed, am I not actually experiencing time as twice as slow?

I thought two minutes have passed, yet I have a whole other minute to live. I thought time passed quickly, but I get to experience twice as much time. By that logic, we think we're 80 when we're 40, and we have another subjective 80 years to live.

How is that "time flies by"? Time would fly by if it went by so slowly for me that ten hours had passed when I thought it had only been a minute.

> A study asked different age groups to mentally count 120 seconds. People under 30 averaged 115 seconds; those over 50 just 87. That's a 24% reduction in perceived time.

This seems bogus to me. I’m 51; I set a timer on my phone for 2 minutes, put it aside and counted to about 128 before it went off.

Why would your ability to count seconds change over time? A second has always felt a little slow to me, probably because my resting pulse is above 60.

(I think it’s also ambiguously described? Maybe they meant the opposite, in which case it took me about 114 seconds to count to 120.)

Time passes quickly because of jobs. We go in on Monday, we skip the week and come out on Friday, flushing 70% of our time down the toilet.

It's tragic, and I don't want to suffer that fate. Alas, there's no escape for common trash without at least 3 million in assets.

When I go travelling time slows down. Days and weeks become significant, a month feels like three. Whereas the past two months have felt like one. I much prefer when time slows down and I'd love to figure out how to make that happen when I'm home.

I try to seek novelty as much as I can. It's not about trying a new ice cream flavour, it's novel experiences. I might have to go into work for 8 hours, but there's at least 8 more hours where I don't need to always do the same things as before. And if you get a chance to work remotely and have no strong ties, you can pack up and go live elsewhere for a while.

This is a pretty sad post and touches on something I read on Cal Newport’s blog today where he referred to a similar piece written by another ambitious and established 22-year-old in the WSJ titled, “‘Work-Life Balance’ Will Keep You Mediocre"

https://calnewport.com/does-work-life-balance-make-you-medio...

https://archive.is/VCAih

I’ve come across tropes about how Millennial discontent is based on figuring out that the idea of grinding through your 20s like it’s twenty years ago is a trap. Or something like that.

Seems like the idea is rearing its head again.

But the last paragraph of this post tells me that he’s aware that his optimism and will has its limits. “COVID came and went,” ta-huh!

I thought this would be about "how do we recognize the age of a person by looking at him"

My head canon is that death is a choice your body can make when you stop experiencing anything new. In the past 20 years I have lived in:

   - Tujunga, CA
   - Marina Del Rey, CA (Two very different places)
   - St. Louis, MO (Three very different places)
   - Bethesda, MD
   - New York, NY
   - Lisbon, Portugal
   - Seattle, WA
   - Bangkok, Thailand
   - Seattle, WA (very different place)
   - Jersey City, NJ

I hope to keep this up for the rest of my life. I like new places a lot.

Reading this gives me flashbacks of my ~22 years old self who was, as most of us do, trying to come to terms with how life, responsibilities and the experience of it changes in your early adulthood.

At that age we all read academic literature, philosophy and short form texts from "thinkers" and then start believing that we have had a deep profound insight into life.

However at that tender age most of us have not experienced life enough to have those insights. We have not experienced profound love or heartbreak, nor hardship and relief. Life changing events that put everything else into perspective. To someone that young there hasn't formed a deep enough well of experiences to pull from to give those ideas perspective.

For me this was 20 years ago, and were I to stand infront of that young man now I would grab him by the shoulders and tell him to stop over analysing everything and worrying about how life might end up being and instead just get on with living it.

There is so much to see, do and experience, and so little time!

Interesting with the role of dopamine and how we perceive time. I've been having anhedonia for a while and damn time fly by fast. I do however have one routine and it's working out almost every day, so I'm in decent shape at least.

The length of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on. Maybe it is not so much about learning, but about the brain having enough free cpu cycles to keep track of time.

Anyway, it sounds attractive the idea of the brain is somewhat younger if you kept learning all the way. But it may not be about “age” but flexibility or other things that we may not associate with older people.

I'm (ahem) over 50 and I just timed 120 second in my head and came out to 2 minutes 9 seconds. I cheat though, since I count to the beat of ZZ Top songs. These days the CPR people use Staying Alive, which feels faster to me, so I tried that, and got 2:10.

Then I tried it without counting -- 2:12. That can't be considered fair, since I already read the part about how over 50s mark time faster, so I could have subconsciously slowed my roll. Still, it's fascinating to me that I'm 3 in a row within 3 seconds.

I wonder if you can train yourself to perceive time “properly”

Like if you practice counting everyday a few times, each time trying to correct when you’re over or under

Beyond that though, more importantly, I wonder if this would have a noticeable effect in your life - if so I wonder what that would be

My dad, who is now 80, recently told me that the years do seem to pass quicker, but the future is still as far away as it has always been. I can definitely feel that myself.

Well a couple of points as a senior techie over 50 now - considering the youth culture of the tech world, first of all this “hacking youth, hacking life” is all mostly ineffective in my opinion, it’s not so much a metric based existence that helps counter life’s speed but living better and learning the common wisdom of past generations that is more useful in my opinion :

1. Youth is wasted on the young - people in their twenties generally have not found their identities and this means they will often ‘discover’ and change their outlook into their 30s, 40s etc- things well known to older generations and why so many hippies become square, why so liberals become conservative, why so many skeptics take on religion. It’s human nature to rebel and discover the same lessons that past generations did and then pretend like their generation is the first to gain wisdom..

2. A substantial amount of life is not planned for, do not make the mistake of assuming your plans will bear fruition -life is what happens while you are making other plans -

3. Older age often means the things That gave you pleasure in your 20/30s will not as you age- that is part of your journey

4. Again life is a journey not a destination- live your life with optimism and instead of crazy ambitious year by year plans focused on achievement instead focus on the moment and your own personal health: I often see young people afraid to be adventurous, and young men in particular, fail to take care of their bodies, fail to take care of their mental needs and instead take on the road of overwork, stress, isolation and bad health (especially with the sedentary and isolating nature of programming)

5. As you really grow old (I’m not talking about you kids in your 20/30s here, you will find your tolerance for learning new things will lower, as will your skepticism of the new stuff, , it’s natural but it’s the antithesis of this industry- you will be yesterdays news and ageism in this industry is not something I see ending anytime soon. So find a way to stay relevant, maybe that means a career change, location change etc.. honestly the tech world as it today is not the insular but friendly optmistic and often artistic place of the 70s, 80s and 90s - when programming was as much an art as a corporate discipline, now it’s vastly larger industrialized and corporatized and corrupted by endless metrics, VC capitalism and social media doomscrolling and hype. (And Who really knows, how fast AI will change these modalities either negatively or positively)

5. A spiritual life of some kind is worthwhile- this article was about how fast life moves: IT DOES, I cannot believe how old I am, for example. The only counter to how fast life moves is savoring the moment - I think that an inward view is important in that regard, especially if you are an agnostic/atheist. That doesn’t mean to go out and adopt a dogma wholesale, but don’t be close minded and exclusionary and willfully obtuse, be willing to open yourself to others, be willing to forgive yourself too, above all Know Thyself… that takes decades

> A study asked different age groups to mentally count 120 seconds. People under 30 averaged 115 seconds; those over 50 just 87.

This can be interpreted in two ways, which lead to diametrically opposite conclusions.

1. I say "start" and you say "stop" when you think 120 seconds have passed, and the result (115 or 87) is the actual elapsed time.

2. I say "start" and some time later (which happens to be 120 seconds, but you don't know that) I say "stop" and ask you how much time you think has passed. The result is your response.

On the first interpretations, everyone's internal clock runs fast (everyone gets to 120 ahead of the actual time), and an old person's run faster than a young person's. On the second interpretation, everyone's mental clock runs slow and an old person's run slower than a young person's.