Your support helps us tell the story.
From reproductive rights to climate change and big tech, The Independent is on the ground as the story unfolds. Whether investigating the finances of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word,' which sheds light on American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to analyze the facts from the messaging .
At such a critical time in American history, we need journalists on the ground. Your donation allows us to continue sending journalists to talk about both sides of the story.
Americans across the political spectrum trust The Independent. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to exclude Americans from our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to all and paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.
TOAs I sit here, contemplating the fact that we are about to enter the year of our Lord 2025, I feel a deep weariness take over my aging body. It may be reaching that quarter-century mark, but the very notion of “2025”… twenty twenty five! – sounds absurd. It can't be a real year, happening in real time; It's the stuff of time travel stories; films set in a space-age future; Dystopian novels that paint a bleak picture of social collapse in the coming decades. It can't possibly be happening now.
However, the calendar doesn't lie. It's about to turn 2025, whether you think it's temporarily possible or not. The passage of time seems to be playing tricks, because the pandemic surely occurred just a couple of years ago. The London Olympics were five years ago, right? And the millennium was a decade ago, at most, I'm sure of it…
It's not just me who experiences the feeling that the years pass at an increasing rate as I get older. While Albert Einstein popularized the concept that time is relative (an hour spent with someone you like passes in a moment, a moment spent with your hand on a hot plate stretches on endlessly), research consistently shows that our perception of how quickly time really passes. It accelerates as we age. According to a recent study from Liverpool John Moores University, the vast majority of people in the UK felt that Christmas was approaching more quickly each year, for example, while people in Iraq felt that Ramadan was coming earlier.
“Physical time is not mental time,” as the mechanical engineering professor and author of Time and beauty: why time flies and beauty never diessays Adrián Beján. “The time you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.”
One side of the equation to explain this phenomenon is physiological. Remember as a child when summer vacation seemed elastic, an endless wad of gum stretching out as the hours melted into lazy afternoons? There is real science behind this. “The brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when it was young,” says Bejan. Their theory is that the rate at which we process visual information slows as we age; As the size and complexity of neuron networks in our brain increase, electrical signals must travel greater distances, leading to slower signal processing. The result? We perceive fewer “frames per second” as we age and therefore time seems to pass faster. It's like a flip book: the fewer the number of images, the faster you will get to the end.
“People are often surprised at how much they remember of days that seemed to last forever in their youth,” he said. “It's not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it's just that they were being processed at full speed.”
Furthermore, the less time we have experienced, the greater proportion of our lives is actually a given period of time. For a four-year-old, one year represents a much larger percentage of their total life expectancy so far than for a 40-year-old, so it is no surprise that it seems longer and more significant.
While there is not much we can do about these physiological elements, there are other important factors at play that do have some control over. Another reason time seems longer when we're younger is that the brain is programmed to hold on to new experiences, Bejan says, and when we're young, we have new experiences all the time. There is a lot that a child encountering the new world can absorb and digest each day. After all, in the beginning everything we do is the first time we do it.
The older we get, the more likely we are to have fewer and fewer new experiences with each passing year. This is partly because, naturally, the more things we experience, the fewer new things there are. is experiment. But part of it is due to human nature; As we age, we can become increasingly stuck in old habits, too comfortable with the familiar and unwilling to seek novelty or challenge ourselves to take a step into the unknown. Even trying a new food can seem like a bridge too far.
However, if we do the same things week after week, we aren't presenting our brain with anything juicy or notable to latch onto. With few new memories created, the weeks blend into months, blend into years, with little to differentiate them. Time, for all intents and purposes, has sped up.
By contrast, when we look back on an eventful period, “time seems to stretch… and it seems very long,” according to Cindy Lustig, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan.
With few new memories created, weeks blend into months, blend into years.
Routine is the enemy of expanding your time; Changing things up, whether it's simply taking a new route to the store, dabbling in a new hobby, or branching out and listening to a different type of music, could be the key to lengthening each year instead of looking back at one stage at a time. more poorly defined. blur.
“Slow down the pace a little more, force yourself to do new things to get out of your routine,” says Bejan. “Give yourself surprises. Do unusual things. Have you heard a good joke? Tell me! Do you have a new idea? Do something. Do something. Say something.”
And then there's that dreaded word: “mindfulness.” If time is a matter of perspective, then making sure we spend some of it living in the moment (and being intentionally present in the present) is critical to living the longest life possible in the time we have. “None of us know how much time we have, but interestingly, we actually have a lot of control over how we experience that time,” Lustig says.
Constantly thinking about past mistakes or worrying about possible future problems guarantees that you are missing out on the most important part of your life so far: here and now.
