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Why Time Flies By As You Get Older
Ant notes a piece up on WBUR Boston addressing theories to explain the universal human experience that time seems to pass faster as you get older. Here's the 9-minute audio (MP3). Several explanations are tried out: that brains lay down more information for novel experiences; that the "clock" for nerve impulses in aging brains runs slower; and that each interval of time represents a diminishing fraction of life as we age.
If you are 1 year old, then 1 day represents about 1/365th of your life. If you are 10 years old, then 1 day represents about 1/3,650th of your life. Thus the older you are the faster time may appear to pass by. When you are 1 year old, 1 day may seem to last much longer than 1 day when you are 10 years old.
Also, when you're 5 years old, the maximum amount of time that you need to spend doing something in order to feel like you've achieved something worthwhile is probably in the order of 5-10 minutes or so (drawing a picture, writing your name, building a sandcastle at the beach, making something with Lego).
When you get to middle-age, things take much longer (achieving success in your chosen field, raising children, paying off a mortgage etc).
My theory is that it's the lengthening of the distance in time between major milestones that makes time appear to move faster as you get older. It simply takes a lot longer to achieve anything of significance.
There was a show on the BBC recently that was a biography of John Mortimer, who died last year at 85. He was interviewed a lot in the show and one of the methods that he advocates to stay young is to keep changing and doing new things - career changes, move city, just keep doing something new. He said that think if people can do that, they can cram more new experiences into their later years, and get more out of life.
Seems kind of obvious, in a way, but it's amazing how many people become trapped in their own routine. Routine is what makes time pass quickly.