[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

My daughter started P1 and I'm sure that was like a month ago, but I blinked and now she's in P5 and I'm scared to blink again because then she'll be in high school .

Definitely too fast.

And it's (literally) true about age; remember when you were a kid and it felt like FOREVER from one Christmas to the next... But now, one minute you're eating your turkey, the next it's the day after Halloween and you're saying "Oh ffs shops have Christmas decorations up already!".

If anyone's remotely interested; this is because in hindsight we estimate the passage of time based on the time from one "new memorable experience" to the next. The younger you are, the more experiences are "new", therefore the more stretched out time feels. As you get older you get into daily routines / work patterns and can autopilot through weeks without any meaningful new memories being formed, so most of that gets discarded as "junk data" and therefore, in your memory that time seems far shorter.

It's a memory illusion though. In the moment you experience time at a uniform rate, but all that actually matters in human experience is memory. If the moment has passed and you don't remember it, it effectively didn't happen to you.


In other words, if you want your life to feel as long as possible when you look back on it, you need to fill it with as many diverse new experiences as possible. Change careers, visit NEW places on holiday instead of heading back to the place you loved last year, switch up your diet lots... Etc.

Yeah, this is true. The longer you go between "meaningful" new experiences the quicker the time in-between feels as it just disappears in a blur of sameness.

So then when you think back to that last exciting experience you had two years ago, it feels like those two years have just vanished into nothing.