Since I was young, I grappled with the thought of why adults always were so pressed for time. They always seemed to complain about not enough time in the day, too much to do and so on. As I thought, one day at the age of 13, it came to me. Follow this logic;
When we are young, we have little to fill our days. Sleep, eat, school. Summers seemed to last for years. Days for months. Hours for days. In short, things moved slow to us and our recollection of our childhoods support this notion. But as we grew, school became more demanding, we had deadlines to now deal with and schedules to keep. Yards to mow, practice to attend, etc. We became "responsible" for our expected actions. And as you continue to grow, so do your responsibilities. Because of this, I contend that a persons "sense of time" is directly associated with responsibility. After all, as we grow, what becomes more valuable to us than time? Our entire lives are measured by what time we have left, what time we have available, how many hours we have in a day.
Days seem like minutes, weeks like hours, years like months. The exact opposite of how we felt when we were young and had no responsibility. Anyway, that is my crazy theory of why responsibility is directly related to our perception of time. Hmm, I better get back to work. Only a few hours left in my day!
Discuss
sciencesaves on April 18, 2008, 2:41 PM
Good, now we can discuss something other than god?, or will this lead into some spritual connection? I really like this. I must say, though, that I am opposed to more marketing on the net, I have “faith” that it will increase “ad”-nauseum however.
every sandwich on April 18, 2008, 2:55 PM
I wonder if there’s an addendum. When your responsibilities are rewarded, time passes too fast. When they’re not rewarded, it passes too slowly. I mention this because some in unrewarding jobs report that vacations (with no responsibilities, ideally) seem to pass in an instant while meetings last for years.
Jeff Delano on April 18, 2008, 5:27 PM
I say we should all enjoy every second, have no expectation of how long time will feel or last. If a minute seems longer or shorter than normal, who cares enjoy it just as much as you will enjoy a minute 40 years from now or 10 years ago.
It is hard to compare time to anything though, I remember I was trying to figure out why time seems shorter the older we get and here is my theory. When we were younger 1 month was a much larger percentage of our life, lets say we are 20 months old, 1 month would be 5% of our life, but if we were 100 months old 1 month would be 1% of our life. So maybe with the percentage of our life being taken up by measurement of time, time feels longer the less experience you have in life and it feels shorter the more experience you have in life.
Musycks on April 18, 2008, 7:36 PM
We get older, our brains mature.. in boys slower than girls.. getting older we take in abstracts in a different way. Factor in that we are the ones who take responsibility, make plans for our future ourselves, not our parents, and it’s not surprising that we have a different perspective of time.
But 60 seconds is 60 seconds. That didn’t change, we did.
Bruce Allen on April 18, 2008, 11:08 PM
DF — An interesting proposition. However, I see an entirely different explanation for the perceived different rates of time.
Many years back, I read a work of fiction called [ I think ] “The Accelerator”. The concept was that this person could speed up his metabolism, creating the impression that the world was was running very slowly. And this is exactly what changes [ slows down ] as we age — the metabolic-rate. Another biological effect related to this, is the fact that we see things in slow-motion when we get an overdose of adrenalin. To me, this has been a valid explanation for my own lack of enough time to do all that I would like.
I really should look up that book and give due credit to the author.
[ Disclaimer: Biology & Medicine are not my fields, so I apologise if some of the references here are not entirely accurate ].
dennis ilic on April 20, 2008, 12:57 PM
Very interesting idea, I’ve mentioned it to three people over the past two days. Love to make a real comment but I really don’t have the time.
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