1. Time just seems to move sooo fast. When I was 6, 30 minutes seemed like forever. Now as I close in on 40, 30 minutes feels like a handful of breaths. I can easily spend 2 hours on something, feel like I made no progress because the time is short. Even into my 20s, I felt like I could crank out tons of things hour after hour. Now the work of a week feels like the work of a day.
2. I think why this happens is that I've noticed I feel like I take in more space-time at once than I used to. Hypersmall details I used to obsess over seem to blend into an entire scene. I'm gulping space-time rather than sipping it. I think it's because I have much more experience and knowledge than I used to that I just automatically filter out most things. "Bigger picture" isn't just a word to me anymore. I've largely stopped thinking in hyper-local ways and started thinking more strategically, in terms of systems rather than components and in terms of aggregate behaviors rather than individual behaviors, etc.
I have to consciously focus down my attention onto small, local concerns when it used to just happen. When thinking about business ideas, I don't think as much about smaller concerns like the technology stack or whatever, but where I can take the entire idea over the next 5-10 years. Ideas grow like trees in my mind stretching out for a decade without mush effort, but looking at an individual leaf (which used to be easy), is exhausting.
It's given me a lot more understanding of what my parents are going through as they age, things I never really understood when I was a precocious child, but now make perfect sense. I don't know what they're going through now, but now that I understand roughly the trajectory of my own mind and thinking, I can kind of see how they're arriving at where they are.
With regards to point #2, do you feel the same if you put yourself into some completely novel situation. I.e. let's say you've never been diving, you go diving for half an hour, does it pass by in the blink of an eye or does it take as long as you once remembered?
Is your perception of time because you're just so used to most things you do in your daily life that you don't notice the details, or is it some innate change in the brain as we get older?
It's just personal observations, pop-psychology...so YMMV.
But I like to travel overseas. I find that the stranger the environment, the more enjoyable. I think it's because the details, the things I can't readily filter out all come flooding in again.
A week in Seoul is a totally different kind of experience for me than a week in NYC. Even though they have lots of superficial similarities.
But I also notice that my brain seems to spend more time subconsciously analogizing what I'm seeing rather than learning things new from whole cloth like when I was young. It's like the filtering mechanism is working overdrive and knows it can't just toss things away (it can't make a value judgement) so its first pass is to try to find similarities so it can start to make these judgments.
"So this kind of place is like a department store, but also like a fleamarket..." my inner monologue goes.
After a few days in a new country, I'm usually just mentally exhausted and look for some familiarity, something I don't have to work for.
After a week or two, I'm usually comfortable enough in a place this feeling goes away and everything starts to look "normal" again. Meaning my filter is locally tuned and working at normal efficiency.
Just to add to your second point, one of the reason that time moves faster is that, in a sense, it is moving faster. When you're 10, a whole year is increasing your life by 10%. That's a huge percentage of your life. By the time your 60, that year is a much much smaller percentage. Thinking of it like that, it's not surprising that 10% of your life seems longer than ~1%.
I can't relate to this. The fact that you have lived for 23 rather than 10 years might make a single year feel less significant in retrospect, but there is no obvious connection to how you feel about that year when it is actually happening.
But the same thing applies to days, or even hours. So while every microsecond is the same, at the end of the second, in retrospect it was a faster second. And at the end of the hour, in retrospect, a faster hour, etc.
Thinking more about this, if you're running at a marathon, your concerned not with how far you've come, but how far is left. Such a view of life isn't likely to be very productive. I still think my point holds for your marathon effort -- 1 meter after start is very different from 2 meters after start (or say 50 and 100) -- however the difference between 1000m and 1001 (1050) -- not really easily perceptible without some kind of aid?
1. Time just seems to move sooo fast. When I was 6, 30 minutes seemed like forever. Now as I close in on 40, 30 minutes feels like a handful of breaths. I can easily spend 2 hours on something, feel like I made no progress because the time is short. Even into my 20s, I felt like I could crank out tons of things hour after hour. Now the work of a week feels like the work of a day.
2. I think why this happens is that I've noticed I feel like I take in more space-time at once than I used to. Hypersmall details I used to obsess over seem to blend into an entire scene. I'm gulping space-time rather than sipping it. I think it's because I have much more experience and knowledge than I used to that I just automatically filter out most things. "Bigger picture" isn't just a word to me anymore. I've largely stopped thinking in hyper-local ways and started thinking more strategically, in terms of systems rather than components and in terms of aggregate behaviors rather than individual behaviors, etc.
I have to consciously focus down my attention onto small, local concerns when it used to just happen. When thinking about business ideas, I don't think as much about smaller concerns like the technology stack or whatever, but where I can take the entire idea over the next 5-10 years. Ideas grow like trees in my mind stretching out for a decade without mush effort, but looking at an individual leaf (which used to be easy), is exhausting.
It's given me a lot more understanding of what my parents are going through as they age, things I never really understood when I was a precocious child, but now make perfect sense. I don't know what they're going through now, but now that I understand roughly the trajectory of my own mind and thinking, I can kind of see how they're arriving at where they are.