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Published: Friday, February 26 2021 14:42

Written by David A. fuess

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I have been pondering the acceleration of time with age. If you're over 50 you know the feeling that time seems to be flowing faster and the older you get the worse it gets. Of course I would not have brought it up if I didn't have a theory :). So here goes. The basic idea is that our perception of time is relative to the time we have already lived. So to a one year old a year is a lifetime. But to a 75 year old a year is like a few days and a week like a few hours. so the perception that it's can't possibly be Friday because it was just Friday yesterday is quite understandable as a fraction of life lived. When you examine everything you have done is the week  you see that everything seems to be in order time wise but you still can't shake the feeling that time has somehow sped up. So relativity aside (which holds that time slows with increasing velocity as a fraction of the speed of light) time appears to accelerate as a fraction of age. To first order one could assume the process is linear, but at 74 both last week and the last ten years seem to have melded into some form of "yesterday" so it probably is not linear and may even be exponential. I say this because I can recall some instances in time that occurred over 50 years ago as though they took place yesterday or at the most a week ago. Unfortunately those instances involve some very painful memories and that may also be a factor.

There are a number of interesting articles online that attempt to explain the relationship between the perception of time and how engrossed one is in something or the age at which the time is perceived. I, for one, believe that this perception is purely subjective, hence, probably does not have a precise scientific explanation.