Whilst listening to the radio this morning, a terrible thought crossed my mind: in not too long a length of time I shall be beyond the age range for club 18-30 holidays. Gosh! That makes me feel old. It seems not long ago that I was only just coming into the bottom of that range at 18.
What happened to the last decade or so? Where has all the time gone? I remember as a small child the summers seemed to go on forever. It was a very long way between Christmases. Now time just flashes by. I’ve been trying to work out why this change in time perception occurs. It does, after all, seem to be a common perception. The best I can come up with is that when you are two or three years old, each year equates to the equivelent of a large percentage of your previous life, so seem a lot. Once you get past twenty or thirty, each year is a much smaller percentage equivelent of your entire life, so therefore appears to pass faster because there are more memories of previous time to refer to in your mind. Or something like that.
I just get annoyed that there never seems to be enough time to do all I want anymore. I feel old.
I think you’ve hit on the main reason time seems to go slower for children but I have another theory to add to yours. It’s complementary rather than superceding it, however: compression rates for information.
Data that is similar will compress easier because there are more shared portions of data, so they can be compressed into 2x, 4y, etc. As you get older, chances are your days become more similar than if you were a child, learning new things all the time and having new experiences. Also, adults will improve their ability to sort data in their memories, simply through experience of doing it.
Adults, therefore, find memories are, effectively, shorter but they have all the data they would have picked up as children.