Ever intimidated by how quickly time passes?

[EsotericPhilosopher]

Yesterday morning it was the end of 2019 and I was chilling.

This morning I woke up and we're into the second quarter of 2023.

I am no longer chilling.

I can't attribute this to covid or lockdowns or anything else, but the last three and half years has gone by positively frighteningly quickly.

I just turned 37, positively a grown ass dude, no longer youthful and entirely carefree (which I kind of felt like up until I hit this most recent age).

Frightening.

It feels like the last 3+ years I've spent sat about doing very little, where as prior, I would make every day count, getting qualifications, travelling, etc etc.

Is it just me?

[StringJunky]

Your mind harks back to the last interesting thing that happened in your life. As time passes your memory tends to just string together the interesting parts and ignore the boring inbetween bits.... interesting to you that is. What we then do is put all these interesting evehts in sequence, removing the gaps. So, say you did something memorable in 2015 and then you plodded along for a few months/years, then had another memorable experience, only those two items in that period were memorable to you are likely to be remembered via long term memory far down the line of time.

For things to be memorable in the long term, they need to have a significant impact on you in some way, such that that they impress on your memory more persistently. If an event doesn't alter your level of mood, say, then it will likely go down the memory toilet.

What we are actually forgetting is the mundane, routine bits because they are plastically embedded in our brain and we don't need to remember... those routines are executed automatically.

If everything you do is routine everyday, you'll likely feel a deficit of accomplishment when you try to look back... as you do now. The solution is to try and do something everyday that stimulates you and, most importantly, feels novel to you. This can be acheived by learning something that interests you. Also, try and make your life less routine where you can... mix things up abit.

The other thing is your age. As we get older we slow down physically and in alertness. The subjective pace of time speeds up as well because of decreasing metabolism, in part. Our personal clock slows down so events seem to flow faster; further exacerbating that feeling of insufficient accomplishent and losing time.

Import some novelty into your life and live everyday like it's your last... You should have lots more to remember with shorter gaps between significant memories. Most people go through your situation at some point, particularly near 40.

This is how I've addressed this to myself over the years. I'm 61 now.

Edited April 13, 2023 by StringJunky

[Genady]

In addition to the above, there is usually logarithmic relation between a stimulus and our perception of it, aka Weber–Fechner law (Weber–Fechner law - Wikipedia).

See example here: Logarithmic Time Perception - Exponential/Logarithmic Functions (weebly.com)

[Peterkin]

There is another factor. We calculate the segments of past time in relation to the whole. 

When you're two years old, a year is half of your life. Odds are, you can recall only the last week or so as a continuous segment, in which a large part of what happened was unique, unfamiliar. You may not recall any suppertimes except the one when you threw a tantrum over the carrots, but that's still an event. That week was 1/104th of all the time and events you've experienced, and you're already allocating memory-space according to significance.

As your mental faculties expand, so does you memory - at the same time that novelty of experience and memorability of individual events diminish. What happened in the past week becomes a smaller and smaller portion of all that has happened in your lifetime. When a year is 1/50th of your life, the past week contains only 1/2600th of your experience, and most of what happened in that period is insignificant. 

(I also think Covid and lockdown tended to flatten all of our experiences, as fewer venues and opportunities for social encounters were available and much of our daily activity became constrained routine.)  

Edited April 13, 2023 by Peterkin

[iNow]

2 hours ago, Peterkin said:

I also think Covid and lockdown tended to flatten all of our experiences, as fewer venues and opportunities for social encounters were available and much of our daily activity became constrained routine

Where everyday just feels like Blursday. 

I believe the correct word for our OP is languishing. 

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, iNow said:

I believe the correct word for our OP is languishing. 

Yes, I think that's part of it.

There are periods in every life of something like hiatus or fallowness, when not a lot happens, when we're not particularly creative or productive. Like writer's block or burnout; sometimes grief, or recovery from physical or mental trauma, depression... a lot of bad shit rains into people's lives, and they need time to regroup, rebuild before they get on with the next thing. Most of what happens in that interval is not noted or recorded.   Usually, these periods last weeks or months, and then we're back at the desk, on deck, on the route, on the assembly line, our good reliable old selves. (not really; never the same) 

Those times-out are blank in the memory; time resumes, as if no time had passed. But life has gone by without us, and we can never catch up.  

Edited April 14, 2023 by Peterkin