Short Stuff: Why Does Time Speed Up As You Age?

It’s not just you – time really does seem to pass faster for people as we age. But exactly why remains a mystery, though some of the theories for why life passes by so quickly are make a lot of sense.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I should say
Happy New Year and welcome to the short stuff, Chuck.
It's it is. We're living in the future. Yes, well,
I'm Josh and there's Chuck, and there is guest producer
jj over there, and we're all living in the future.
Time flying. I've got my jet pack, flying car sweet

(00:24):
uh and yeah, times flying, Chuck, do you know why
it's flying? Hold on him about you see this pill
on my plate, about to add water to it to
make it into a Thanksgiving dinner. Oh I thought it
was a pot roast dinner. Yeah, exactly. It always was
pot roast, wasn't it. Yeah, it really is. But Thanksgiving
this a close second for sure as far as future
food pills go. Okay, I just had it delicious? Was

(00:46):
it didn't didn't have any kind of blueberry dessert like
Willy Wonka. Yeah, that was a compote. So um, you
said something. You said time flies or times flying. I
agreed time flying, And then I asked to you why
time is flying. You didn't answer, so I'm gonna answer
for you. It's because we're aged. Yes, we're getting old, Chuck,

(01:11):
as anyone who has ever gotten old nose the older
you get, the faster time goes. Where you're just your
you're working, working, working, and you lift your head up
and all of a sudden, it's March, and then it's July,
and then it's the holidays, and then it's the next
March and then the next July pretty much, and you

(01:32):
start to get a little panicky because you're like, wait
a minute, wait a minute, these these years are important.
You know, I need to pay attention to them. But uh,
everybody knows that as you're when you're grown up, you
have so many more responsibilities than when your kid. Of course,
time's gonna fly. The thing is there there seems to
be objective evidence that time actually does speed up as

(01:56):
you age relative to your experience, Like subjectly, you experienced
time moving faster as you age, and that doesn't quite
make sense. Yeah, and there's um this has always been
an interesting, uh concept to wrap my head around, because
it's definitely something that you cannot avoid noticing as you

(02:17):
get a little older. Uh. There was one study done
I thought this was kind of interesting in the nineties.
A psychologist named Peter man gun Man Man gun You
butchered that Peter mangan there you go, and he had
twenty five young people between nine and then fifteen older
people between sixty and eighty. I'm sorry real quick. I

(02:39):
also saw that he had some middle aged people too,
but go ahead, I would think, so, yeah, because that's
a big jump. Yeah. Uh to estimate a three minute
time interval just by counting out loud, yeah, So he said, hey, you,
sixteen year old, count out three minutes second by second
by going one one thousand, two, one thousand, right, And
so the younger sat at averaged three minutes and three seconds.

(03:03):
They kind of nailed it. He went over to the
older set, he woke them up and they would hey,
what uh, three minutes and forty seconds is what they average.
So they were off by thirty seven seconds from the
younger set, and you know, basically thinking that three minutes
had elapsed. And the thinking here is is that, hey,

(03:26):
your brain's internal clock runs slowly if you're older, right, right, So,
and that would mean that if your if your internal
clock is running more slowly relative to the actual passage
of time, then to you it would seem like time
is speeding up because what you're counting off is way

(03:47):
slower than what's actually going on. Which would account for
why UM it would seem like time speeds up as
we get older, because it actually is relative to our
own internal clocks. Yeah, and there's a few ideas behind this. UM.
One is that um our biological internal clocks do slow down.

(04:09):
Our metabolism slows down. Are breathing our heartbeat. Um. I
listened to my daughter's heart beat the other day. I
put my ear door chest because she did the same
to me, and her heart was going and we were
just hanging out and she listened to mine and it
was like pooop beat and it wheezed and farted between

(04:31):
every beat. That's great, made like a cranky gear sound. Yeah.
So and I heard hers and I was like, did
you just run a sprint? Like what is going on?
And that really hit me, Like it's different when you're
a little kid. Yeah. Kids, metabolisms are way faster. Their
bodies are just operating way faster. And then as you age,
all of these processes start to kind of level off

(04:53):
and then slow down or death basically the exit ramp.
That's another way to put it. UM. But the the
idea behind this is that there's this internal clock, not
our circadian rhythm. Which is, you know, how we know
when to to like wake up or eat or that
kind of stuff. This is at a separate internal clock

(05:16):
that we actually measure time with, and it's theoretical. We've
never found it, but they think that it's located in
this dry atom in the midbrain, and that it uses
internal and external cues to measure time. And one of
the internal cues that it uses is something like heartbeat
or breaths. And so if you're a kid and you're

(05:38):
breathing faster and your heart's beating faster, time seems to
pass more slowly because your clock is speeded up. It's
the exact opposite of what would happen if those breaths
in those heartbeats slow down as you age, and your
your clock slows down, So it seems like time is
speeding rather than going slowly. Yeah, there's another idea. I mean,

(06:01):
there's a lot to then it's it's probably all of
these things combined. Well, yeah, a lot of them do
have to do with this brain's internal clock thing. Yeah, absolutely. Um.
The another idea is that a child has so many
new experiences every day. You know, you hear about a
kid being a sponge and everything is brand new. And
as you know, you get to our age and you
have a job, and you live in a house and

(06:23):
you have a certain commute, and you do certain things
and you're walking the dog. It's like it's a repetitive um.
In many cases, it's a repetitive circumstance of doing the
same things over and over and over. So there's no
newness there, and so all those new experiences aren't happening
to us like they're happening to children. Uh, this one.

(06:44):
I wonder if you did a test where you only
experience new things still as an adult as if you
were a child, if that would counter the time is
flying effect. You would think it would. I don't know
how you would test that, but you know that theory
says probably yeah for sure. Plus also would be like, whatever,

(07:05):
whatever you're doing to test this, I want to do
because that sounds like a lot of fun. But it's
the idea is that you have, like all of these,
it requires more brain processing to to process these novel
stimuli rather than just letting life pass you by because
it's all familiar and so kind of in the same
way that your heart's beating faster and you're breathing more.

(07:27):
It um makes your clock run faster, and so time
seems to pass more slowly. It's basically the same thing,
but rather than heartbeat, it's it's processing new experience. And
that also really kind of ties into this other thing
that you do notice, in addition to time passing more
quickly when you age, is that it's easy to just
kind of be in a rut as you age, too,

(07:50):
because there are so so fewer experiences that are just
brand new to you. It's done it, seen it, done it,
all right, let's take a break, let's go do something new,
and uh, we'll come back and see how that feels.
Right after this things, I feel great. I feel like

(08:33):
I'll never never be able to replicate that. We shouldn't
even bother telling people about it, because I don't think
anybody could ever do it. That's right, Okay. So one
thing I did want to mention was the notion of uh.
And this is something I've noticed from being a kid
to being an adult. If you drive to a vacation,
uh as h it always seemed as a kid like

(08:55):
getting to the vacation happened really fast. Is maybe you're
excited about things you were gonna do or no, no, no.
It seemed super slow when you were a kid because
the anticipation, uh, and driving on the way home went
super fast. That is reversed for me as an adult
is when I drive to a vacation, it goes pretty

(09:16):
fast because I'm super excited. Um, But on the way
home it's a slog, right because you know you're coming
back to a recording session with me. No, not that,
but it's weird there a switch happens at some point. Yeah,
and I think that has to do with the same well,
some of these theories suggest that has to do with
the same thing you you are. Um. Actually that that

(09:37):
would be kind of new and on its own huh. Yeah.
I think it sort of flies in the face of
that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, because yeah, I don't
know what the what the answer is, I'm not even
an adventure I guess all right, what about um? This
guy Steve Taylor, who wrote a book called Making Time,
He he has a theory that basically, um, because we

(10:01):
become more familiar with everything as we go by, not
only are there fewer experiences new experiences to be had,
but the experiences that we have over and over again
become so familiar to us they barely even register when
they do happen, which makes time seem to pass even
more quickly because we're processing less new information. It kind

(10:24):
of ties into that, um that that brain processing one.
It's just it just kind of really drives home how
grim adulthood is. Yeah, and could be aided by the
fact that you're not getting as many dopamine hits because
this novel stimuli is not coming along as often, right,
So that all ties back into that brain clock thing

(10:44):
again too, which is the idea that um, when we
when are that part of our mid brain is learning
to to measure time. As it's doing that, it gets
little hits a dopamine to help train it. Well, they
found that your hits of dopamine decrease as you age,
which also kind of correlates with the idea that time
seems to um go faster as we age and our

(11:05):
biological clocks seem to start to run slower. So they
think that maybe that that we us getting less dopamine
is part of that that internal clock slowing down thing. Uh,
the thing that makes a lot of sense to me,
and we're not going to get two in the weeds
with what logar rhythmic scales are. But let's just say this.

(11:25):
If you measure an earthquake on the Richter scale, that's
a logarhythmic scale, and it's not the same as a
linear scale. So if you jump from ten to eleven
on the Richter scale, it's like a tenfold jump, it's
not a ten percent jump. Uh is that good enough
for that? I think so? Yeah, So I think this, Uh,
this can apply to life. And this one makes a
lot of sense because if you are a ten year old,

(11:49):
then you've experienced uh, one year is ten percent of
your life, So that's a big chunk. But by the
time you get to twenty, it's only five percent. And
we could keep going here, and it just gets more
and more depressing as you go. But they basically are
saying you should think of it in terms of this
logarithmic scale as opposed to a linear scale, because by

(12:09):
the time you get to you know, sixty seventy eight
years old, that's a big chunk of your life. Uh,
that's gone by at that point, right, And so any
new amount of time that goes by is proportional to
the increasingly larger amount of time that has gone by.
And so if that's how we process and measure the
time in our lifetime, then the longer you're alive, the

(12:34):
longer it takes to seem like a lot of time
has passed by. Like this guy, Um Christian Yates from
University of Bath. He said, the reason why the summer
lasted so long, or it took so long too for
a birthday to come and in a new one to
come is that that year, if you're like five, like

(12:55):
you're saying, that's like a fifth of your life. One
year is a fifth of your life. If you're fifty,
one year is a fiftie of your life. So a
year can just start to zip by and zip by
and faster and faster the more you age. And he
ended with something um, he wrote a good article in
the conversation, so shout out to him for that one.
But he he basically said, for you to experience what

(13:18):
seems to you is the same amount of time between
the ages of five and ten, would require you to
live from age forty to age eighty, depressing proportionately speaking,
it would be the same suggestion subjective experience of time
for you. Yeah, because occasionally I will think like, let's

(13:39):
say I got twenty more great years left, and then
I think that's not much time. But then I think
man from birth to age twenty was forever. Yeah. Uh
so I'm good, but that's not how it works. Yeah,
because forty seemed to zip by a lot faster than
zero to twenty. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah. I think I think
they're onto something with that last one. All right, so

(14:01):
I'm thoroughly depressed. Now I am too. Let's go celebrate, buddy. Actually,
we don't need to be depressed. We need to take
this as motivation to go really pay attention and be
grateful for this year. Then live life. Well, let's do it,
all right, Short stuff out Stuff you Should Know is

(14:21):
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