Time Moves Faster as You Age
I turned 31 in December.
It’s hard to believe that there’s only about seven and a half months left until I’ll have to call myself 32.
The old cliche of time moving faster as you get older is actually based in scientific truth; you have less novel experiences as you age, so your brain is taking in less new information. As a result, information is processed more slowly, which leads to fewer experiences being inferred. If your brain was a camera, it would take fewer new photos each year, which in turn leads to the perception that each year was shorter than the last.
There is also another theory based in mathematics that explains this phenomenon as well, known as Log Time Theory. Essentially, each year is a smaller fraction of our lives, leading to a faster conscious proportionality of the passage of time. For example, when you were 10 years old, one year was 1/10th of your entire life, or 10% of the total time you’ve lived through. When you’re 20, one year is now 1/20th of your lifespan, which is only equal to 5%. So even though one year is still the same 365 days, it’s now experienced faster. Perception is reality, after all.
I first learned about these ideas some ten years ago, when time certainly felt slower. I remember being 20 years old, having just graduated from college, feeling as though there were infinite possibilities in front of me. 12 years later, I’m now much more aware of how fleeting life is, how fast things seem to be moving, and have had the worries and fears set in related to my own mortality. Will I leave a legacy? Am I happy with the person I am today, if nothing were ever to change? Will I have regrets? How do I make peace with the regrets I already have? Will I accomplish or achieve anything meaningful, beyond the professional success I enjoyed early in my career? Will being a housewife hinder my development later on? And the big one; should I have children? Will I regret it if I don’t? Will I regret it if I do? How does one come to this conclusion before they have spent so much time contemplating it, that they are now outside of their childbearing years?
There are no easy answers, that I’m well aware of. Increasingly, I’ve also learned that there are no ‘right' answers. The outcomes of our choices are largely ours to live with and lead to different alternative lives that we will live; but there isn’t some grand moral compass of right and wrong when it comes to personal decisions of fulfillment. Also, there’s no roadmap on regret; that’s why it’s retrospective. It is probably impossible to know if you’ll regret a decision you make in the present later in the future, so analysis paralysis is largely a waste of time. All you can do is follow your heart, get clear in your mind, and listen to your gut. Those are the best tools at your disposal that will guide you in the right direction. The right direction also may change as your life continues to unfold.
I’m starting to feel fear alongside of hope when it comes to the longterm future, which is a relatively new phenomenon. I worry about hwo the consequences of my actions today will affect me 20, 30, even 40 years from now. I hope to still be healthy and well in that amount of time; I recognize that the summation of my choices is and will continue to impact me. As I start to feel more physiological signs of aging for the first time too, I find myself reflecting on how the food I ate, the beer I drank, the people I surrounded myself with, the jobs I held, the places I’ve lived and the ways I spent I time have come to accumulate into my physical state of wellbeing today. I can understand the impacts of my choices in a way I didn’t 10 years ago and that itself is a liberating feeling. The hard part? Making different choices that might not be fun day to day, to lead to better long-term outcomes. Those 10 years I didn’t go to the dentist? They’ve now lead to more rapid tooth decay. The two years I’ve barely exercised? They’ve led to weight gain and aches and pains. The friends I lost touch with? They’ve now moved on with their lives and I don’t know anything more than what they post on Instagram.
I’m almost halfway through my year of 31. Even though it seems too soon for almost half a year to be behind me, I have to choose to look at the glass half full and see that I still have the majority of this year to go. I still have all of that time to live and a lot can change in 7 months. Hell, much of my life did already in the first five-and-a-half months of my 31st year. Moving to be closer again to family, committing to connecting with old friends, and committing to a more sustainable, abundant, and radiant future have already paid off in dividends. But that was all me: I found my dream house, I trusted my gut even when it didn’t fully make sense logically, I made it happen with the help of my amazing husband, I hired the right people, I did all of the work to take the leap of faith with courage and bravery. I have reached out to new neighbors and friends, I’ve made the time to show up for myself and others, and now, I need to continue to build what I’ve already started.