The Washington Post answered the question for us why time flies, in the article. “Why half of the life you experience is over by age 7,” by Ana Swanson, July 23, 2015. Here is the link to the entire article and graphs that are descriptive of the theories.
“There’s a reason that one summer seems to stretch out forever when you’re a kid, but zips by before you know it when you’re 30. That reason is perspective, as a gorgeous interactive visualization, by Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener, demonstrates. When you’re one year old, a year is literally forever to you — it’s all the time that you’ve ever known. But as you grow older, one year is a smaller and smaller fraction of your total life. It’s like watching something shrink in your rear view mirror.”
“This idea has stunning implications. It means that parents actually see their children grow up much faster than children perceive themselves to be. It means that waiting 24 days for Christmas at age 5 literally feels like waiting a year at age 54. It might also explain why kids on car trips are always asking that annoying question, “Are we there yet?” A car journey actually feels longer to kids than it does to adults. It’s a simple concept, but the feeling is explained beautifully by Kiener’s interactive. The interactive has you painstakingly scroll through each year, and experience how time seems to speed up as you “get older.”
Here is how the theory works:
“For example, when you are one year old, a year is 100 percent of your life. . . .But the proportion falls sharply as you age. As you scroll through the years, you notice that each year takes significantly less time to pass by than the first. By the time you’re eight, a year is only 12.5 percent of your life. By 18, that proportion has fallen by half again. One year is now 5.56 percent of your life. As Kiener writes, your summer vacation in your first year of college feels as long as your whole 76th year. After 30, the proportion begins to level off, and each year of your life is similarly short. By the time you’re 35, one year is 2.86 percent of your life. At 98, it’s about 1 percent.”
Wow! Our GG (great grandmother), who is 92, really sees life speed by. So, why the title: “Why half of the life you experience is over by age 7:”
“. . . . The idea is that we perceive time by comparing it with our life span: The apparent length of a period of time is proportional to our life span itself. We perceive our first few years to be much longer in duration than the years that come later . . . . If you measure your life this way, in “perceived” time rather than actual time, half of your “perceived life” is over by age 7. If you factor in the fact that you don’t remember much of your first three years, then half of your perceived life is over by the time you turn 18, Kiener writes. In mathematical terms, our time perception is logarithmic — stretched out at the beginning and compressed at the end — rather than linear, in which each year has the same length.”
This is fascinating, and the author, Ana Swanson fills us in on other theories as to why time flies:
“More recent theories about how we experience time draw on psychology and science. One says that our sense of time is governed by biological processes that run the body. Researchers have long shown that we experience time as going by much slower when our body temperature is higher. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that children have higher body temperatures than adults, and also experience time more slowly.”
“Other theories have to do with attention, memory and emotion. One idea is that the passage of time speeds up with familiarity. As we get older, things become more familiar to us, and time slips by as a result. There is some evidence that we tend to remember events between the ages of 15 and 25 most vividly because we experience so many new things in that time. A related idea is that we can actually slow down our experience of time through paying attention to the present moment, what people call mindfulness.”
Practicing being present, enjoying each day to its fullest, and learning something new each day is what we teach our grandchildren. It is something we Boomer Grandmas should practice too. Yes, this Grandma wants to do as much as possible to counter all these theories on why time flies with
Joy,
Mema
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