Because working days don't count as living (days spent worrying also don't so being jobless hardly helps). Only secure spare time is life time. After all the chores you have to do besides your job, an average adult doesn't have much time to live. A day per week max. Even if you have full 2-day weekend for yourself you still need a day to recover a bit from the burnout before you can really live. This said, count how many days of life do kids get per annum and how much do adults get. Many don't get any.
Exactly this. Plus, when I was a kid, there were also other kids that had just as much time as me, and so I would hang out and actually do stuff all the time. Now, whenever I have some time off, chances are that no-one else has any time because everyone's busy with their own lives. So I'll just putter around instead of doing something that would possibly create a future memory worth keeping.
As a kid you have friends and no money. As an adult you have money and no friends.
This is tongue in cheek, it's just it's been on my mind a lot as all my close friends have families now. We have all the resources we wanted growing up but no time and no friends to play. =/
Being tired or exhausted from daily/weekly chores is definitely a thing people deal with, but let’s not start calling that “burnout”. Burnout is a much different thing that’s a profound sense of exhaustion that can take years to recover from, and it would be better if we don’t start diluting its meaning.
This depends. Some people just are tired, but some live burtn out, I mean like this[1]. In some cases even having much less real work to do, just because being much more sensitive to some specific stressors they have in their lives. Some burnt out, also some genuinely depressed people still manage being (even without proper medication) reasonably functional and live this way for decades. A 15-hour sleep followed by a day of doing nothing can be a relief even though you can't really recover any close to fully this quick.
That very much resonates with my thoughts on the matter.
I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.
Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.
kids go to school. that's hardly better than working. on the contrary, it's worse. i had a lot less freedom to do things the way i liked in school. i "lived" during holidays when i went traveling. once i started working, i was able to incorporate work into my life. i picked jobs that i actually wanted to do, where i would learn something interesting. where i had the freedom to structure my work as i wanted. where i had colleagues that i enjoyed working with. especially as a freelancer i have a lot of freedom. i also picked jobs in other countries, so every day i was learning about new cultures and ways of doing things not only in my free time but also at work. so while i had a full time job, i was also a full time traveler.
so for me the full day is part of life. balancing the priorities, and making the best out of every situation. even chores go into that. i enjoy cooking. i enjoy seeing a clean kitchen. chores are a part of making my home livable. and for most chores i can pick an audiobook or something else to listen to, making the time even more worthwhile.
if you think work and chores are not part of life then they will probably cause you more stress and you'll be in a situation that you can't get out of because you can't stop working and doing chores. on the other hand by incorporating those into living, i can detect things that really cause me stress and avoid them. i can fire bad customers and quit bad jobs. if work is not part of living then changing jobs won't help. if a chore is causing me stress, i find a different way of doing it, or for things like cleaning, maybe try to avoid that needing to be cleaned in the first place.
on the topic of the article: how fast i perceive time depends on how much of that time is spent experiencing something new.
i write a diary that is a reflection of that. days where nothing happens go by fast, and my diary is one paragraph. days that are filled with novel activities cause me to write more, sometimes a lot more.
children spend more time experiencing something new
From what I've seen, perception of time depends a lot on how much time one has experienced. Five years is a quarter of the time experienced by a 20 year old, but not even a tenth for a 60 year old.
I think it's not just proportion. There is a qualitative element. As we age, we have less and less 1st time of any experience and more nth time. So they become routine and less memorable.
Paying attention to what time it is as things are happening is a wonderful way to counteract the "time flies" phenomenon. Likewise, looking at the clock less often is a wonderful way to make a dreary slog of a process feel like it didn't drag on as bad as it seemed.
Memory lossy compression, keeping us sane. Why on earth would evolution want us to remember last month what we did on 16th, when the day looked exactly same as 15th and 17th? What about same dates but 15 years ago? Absolutely meaningless.
Do novel new intense things in your life, at literally any age, and you will remember them very well, and the feeling of how much time passes will change dramatically, I call it personally 'adding decades of life felt'.
When I did my 2 stints of 3 months backpacking all over India (and a bit of Nepal) around age 30, I wasn't prepared. Every day completely different than previous one, no strict plan just massive Lonely planet book and return flight ticket in 3 months, no phone, no credit card (2008 and 2010).
After few weeks, I felt like I was on the road for 6 months. After 2 months... hard to describe by mere words - the entire life back home, didn't matter which part or when, felt like literal memory of a dream you had last week, very hazy, somehow it felt real since I went cca 1x a week into internet cafes to check emails and yes those were my parents writing back, but were they? It felt brutally distant, and Indian/Nepalese reality felt like the only truth, that always was and always will be. Literal different life with reborn moment somewhere on a plane there.
I managed to recreate exactly same experience on a second visit, 100% since I behaved in same fashion. Much shorter stint in Tanzania afterwards lasting 3 weeks achieved milder effect of it - say it felt like 3-6 months on the road, its not linear how it scales. Did Kilimanjaro for 1 week, Serengeti/Ngorongoro another one, and last week on Zanzibar (way before it became cheap european holiday destination). Again, the key was novelty.
I still remember so many events, people, places etc. from those trips like it happened yesterday. I came back different, and made changes in my life for better, much better. Looking back, it was literal life (re)defining moment. I don't think I can recreate it easily these days, it would have to be done without phone again. But going there into some luxury resort, none of that would happen, its not about distance but how far out of your comfort zone you push yourself out for a long period.
Because childhood is spent waiting to become an adult. Everything is forward looking with the desire to get to experience the next big thing, which gives the impression of a long wait. In the micro you can experience the same as an adult by standing in a long lineup waiting for something you want. That wait in line will feel like it takes forever. But, in the macro adults stop wanting the future to come.
i didn't have that feeling in my childhood at all. i feel this is a cultural problem. in some cultures children are not allowed to make their own experiences, and are told they have to wait until they are grown up. if that is your experience, you have my pity. and i want to scold your parents for denying you a happy childhood. i joined scouts and other groups as a kid, and we went hiking with a tent almost every holidays and 3-day weekends. when i was 15 i started traveling through europe on a bike alone. that's probably on the more extreme side of freedom, but i didn't have the impression that my classmates were longing to be grownup either.
Sorry to hear that your childhood had no hope for the future.
Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.
Like how Christmas comes around slowly when you are a kid, but each year it speeds up a little because life has lost its new-ness. So then, your brain takes short cuts - like how when the first journey somewhere takes AGES, but after a few times, it feels a lot quicker (whilst being the same physical time)
Readit News
This is tongue in cheek, it's just it's been on my mind a lot as all my close friends have families now. We have all the resources we wanted growing up but no time and no friends to play. =/
I get your point and upvote though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461499
I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.
Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.
kids go to school. that's hardly better than working. on the contrary, it's worse. i had a lot less freedom to do things the way i liked in school. i "lived" during holidays when i went traveling. once i started working, i was able to incorporate work into my life. i picked jobs that i actually wanted to do, where i would learn something interesting. where i had the freedom to structure my work as i wanted. where i had colleagues that i enjoyed working with. especially as a freelancer i have a lot of freedom. i also picked jobs in other countries, so every day i was learning about new cultures and ways of doing things not only in my free time but also at work. so while i had a full time job, i was also a full time traveler.
so for me the full day is part of life. balancing the priorities, and making the best out of every situation. even chores go into that. i enjoy cooking. i enjoy seeing a clean kitchen. chores are a part of making my home livable. and for most chores i can pick an audiobook or something else to listen to, making the time even more worthwhile.
if you think work and chores are not part of life then they will probably cause you more stress and you'll be in a situation that you can't get out of because you can't stop working and doing chores. on the other hand by incorporating those into living, i can detect things that really cause me stress and avoid them. i can fire bad customers and quit bad jobs. if work is not part of living then changing jobs won't help. if a chore is causing me stress, i find a different way of doing it, or for things like cleaning, maybe try to avoid that needing to be cleaned in the first place.
on the topic of the article: how fast i perceive time depends on how much of that time is spent experiencing something new.
i write a diary that is a reflection of that. days where nothing happens go by fast, and my diary is one paragraph. days that are filled with novel activities cause me to write more, sometimes a lot more.
children spend more time experiencing something new
I’m not convinced anybody is any closer at really quantifying this experience, but they tried to control for it
Do novel new intense things in your life, at literally any age, and you will remember them very well, and the feeling of how much time passes will change dramatically, I call it personally 'adding decades of life felt'.
When I did my 2 stints of 3 months backpacking all over India (and a bit of Nepal) around age 30, I wasn't prepared. Every day completely different than previous one, no strict plan just massive Lonely planet book and return flight ticket in 3 months, no phone, no credit card (2008 and 2010).
After few weeks, I felt like I was on the road for 6 months. After 2 months... hard to describe by mere words - the entire life back home, didn't matter which part or when, felt like literal memory of a dream you had last week, very hazy, somehow it felt real since I went cca 1x a week into internet cafes to check emails and yes those were my parents writing back, but were they? It felt brutally distant, and Indian/Nepalese reality felt like the only truth, that always was and always will be. Literal different life with reborn moment somewhere on a plane there.
I managed to recreate exactly same experience on a second visit, 100% since I behaved in same fashion. Much shorter stint in Tanzania afterwards lasting 3 weeks achieved milder effect of it - say it felt like 3-6 months on the road, its not linear how it scales. Did Kilimanjaro for 1 week, Serengeti/Ngorongoro another one, and last week on Zanzibar (way before it became cheap european holiday destination). Again, the key was novelty.
I still remember so many events, people, places etc. from those trips like it happened yesterday. I came back different, and made changes in my life for better, much better. Looking back, it was literal life (re)defining moment. I don't think I can recreate it easily these days, it would have to be done without phone again. But going there into some luxury resort, none of that would happen, its not about distance but how far out of your comfort zone you push yourself out for a long period.
Primarily, if I had to guess, it’s simply what we’re experiencing that makes time feel slower or faster.
Having fun? Time goes by faster.
Boring class? Time goes by slower.
Up all night with a newborn? Those first couple of years feel like a long time.
When that newborn is older and now you’re playing video games, riding bikes, and having fun? The saying goes, “They grow up too fast.”
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Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.
Like how Christmas comes around slowly when you are a kid, but each year it speeds up a little because life has lost its new-ness. So then, your brain takes short cuts - like how when the first journey somewhere takes AGES, but after a few times, it feels a lot quicker (whilst being the same physical time)