Time flies…faster and faster
Why every year feels a little faster
This year flew by.
A few days ago, I was talking to my parents on the phone and shared that thought. They responded, in unison, “they only get faster.”
Intuitively, this is valid. I’ve seen examples over and over again in my own life. High school seemed to be over so soon. Then, college seemed far too short. The first few years working, time seems to be speeding up even more. When I turned 21 my parents told me, “it feels like you were just a baby.” But to me, the entirety of my life had gone by.
Time goes by faster and faster. Most of us know this, but rarely consider why.
The reason is that time is relative. Each consecutive year adds relatively less to the total time you have been alive. At age ten, another year is a 10% jump. At one hundred, it’s only 1%. In the same way, if you have ten dollars to your name and I give you one more, that’s a pretty big deal. If you have one hundred, it’s not going to change much.
I’ve thought about this before, but I had never seen a visual representation. put a few rough ones together and think they illuminate just how quickly things speed up.
The relative length of a year decreases rapidly
This is pretty shocking. The lower the y axis percentage, the faster a year should feel. In that case, this chart says that the years speed up fast. Really fast.
But, extreme changes at the beginning of your life throw off the whole chart and turn this into a somewhat alarmist visual. Still, looking at the extreme drop in the first years can help us understand the more subtle changes that continue on. The second year you are alive doubles the amount you have ever lived. But the next year only increases that number by 50%, and on, and on.
Starting at 8
Starting at age 8 makes more sense to me. We eliminate the drastic changes in the first few years. We have memories before then, but very few of us have started thinking about how long a year takes. Now the x-axis starts at 12.5%. When a child turns 8, the year that just happened was 12.5% of their total life.
As the slope of the graph mellows out, a year seems shorter because it adds relatively less to our overall years lived. When I think about this, it begins to make sense why college felt so much faster than any of the 4 year groups before it. It also shows why time is so different at 10, 20, and 40. A year at 40 is worth half as much as it was at 20. The bright-side to getting old, is that the decrease in how long a year feels begins to slow down. If we could remember it, a year at age two would feel much much longer than a year at age 3. But, a year at 60 and 61 is pretty much the same.
Responsibility
There’s another factor speeding up time that I won’t try to quantity. Responsibility. As you get older, you have more and more stuff going on. This probably speeds up the perception of time more than anything. A common explanation of relativity says, “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours.” I would imagine that responsibility increase in steps, as opposed to a continual increase. They also don’t increase for our whole lives. But, it’s safe to say that from high school to old age, few people have less on their plate each year.
Considering this, what’s to be learned?
Looking at youth
When we’re young, this is the picture we see. We know things are speeding up, but we’re not aware of just how much. We haven’t experienced what the graphs above show.
Life isn’t just short, the situation is more extreme than that. It is short, and also, it is getting shorter at a faster and faster rate.
A more accurate representation might be the inverse of this graph. How fast can a year get?
To me this is all a lot to take on. But, I think the lesson is simple and the conclusion is one many have come to before. Do the things you want to do now and, if you think you need to wait, ask why? Don’t waste time on stupid stuff. And, enjoy the moment.
Inspiration
Why can’t you achieve your 10 year plan in 6 months? — Peter Thiel
