[DigitalJack]

Time passes faster the older you get. It's something you ought to be noticing by 27, but sometimes it takes people a little longer.

Your 30s are going to go by in a flash, and when you are 45, you are going to chuckle at what people in their 20's think old is.

[barce]

I disagree. If you keep a journal, life goes by just as fast at 30 as at 19. The key is definitely novel experiences. There's some research to back this up: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2228221/Scien...

[justincormack]

Do not cite the daily mail. Or read it. Go and find some real research papers.

[jwoah12]

I always figured it was because you experience time relative to how long you have already lived. One year seems like forever when you are 5, because it's 20% of your life. One year at 50 is only 2% of your life, so it seems shorter.

[Xcelerate]

I'm 22 and I've noticed this trend when I was 10. It depresses me quite a bit actually, and I constantly check up on the latest research involving this phenomenon to see if there's a way to make time "seem" to go slower at least.

I asked my grandparents the other day if this acceleration of time kind of levels off once you reach old age, and they said nope, years go by in what months used to be.

[DigitalJack]

One way to slow down the perception of time is to embrace the schlep. http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Working on things that are tedious or generally unfun, can make the clock tick by slower.

Workouts slow the clock down for me.

However, instead of trying to slow down the perception of time, think about it trying to leverage it:

If you know that the days, weeks, years, etc., are only going to pass faster, it becomes easier to visualize the end results of cumulative effects.

Always wanted to learn a new language? Spend 30 mins a day on it. When those 2 years have flown by, if you were disciplined, you will reap the rewards.

Same for working out. If you have always wanted to be more fit, or stronger, or whatever, nothing can be as intimidating or embarrassing as struggling to lift the bench press bar before putting the weights on.

And at the end of the workout, especially in weight lifting, you can feel like it will never get better or take forever to get results.

But if you bank on the ever increasing speed of perceived time passing, add a dash of discipline, and before you know it, you will have achieved your goal.

Really the advantage is two fold, during the workout time slows to a crawl, so you have achieved goal one, slowing down time perception.

And the rest of your life blazes by, so in seemingly little time, you will have worked out every day for 2 years and trust me, you will see results you wouldn't believe.

[biot]

When you're young, every day is a new experience. Your brain timestamps these experiences and you can see a lot of activity in a given period of time. As you get older, you end up doing a lot of routine things and there are relatively fewer new experiences. As you look over a given period of time, you see a lot less activity. This is what I've come to believe is the basis for the universal phenomenon of the perception of accelerated time.

The solution is to break your routine. For me, the subjectively slowest passing of time is when I'm doing a lot of new stuff and haven't formed a routine around it. But if you're working a 9 to 5 kind of job you end up doing the same shit every day and every week and every month. Pretty soon you take notice and discover that another year has gone by. So do your best to avoid routine. Or if that's not practical (hey, we all need to make a living) then fill your non-work hours with new experiences and new learnings. Now that's some advice I need to take myself...

[drumdance]

Keep a journal. Does't have to be anything deep, just a list of any out of the ordinary activities you did on a given day. Things like movies you saw, dates you went on, conversations you had with friends etc.

I started doing this a few years ago and it's really great at the end of the to look back year and see all the cool things I did.

There are a few apps for this. I use Everday.me a bit and have been meaning to try Overdrive.

There's also a company called OhLife that sends you a daily email to reply to. I think they're YC.

[noname123]

It's weird, I'm 25 turning 26 in a month. On one hand, I feel quite old, meaning that I'm struggling in terms of trying to learn new things, like learning a new musical instrument, language and sport, things that should be done at an early age. I def. can feel the concept of going past my prime, and now doing things awkwardly and always will have an "accent" with the new things I take on now.

On the other hand, stupid things matter less to me now. Like the fear of missing out (FOMO) and trying to look cool, so all of the hip social badges like trying all of the yuppie-crap to present an image that I'm an renaissance man matter less to me. The more mature things like being responsible, on-time and saving money matters more to me. But I feel so inept in these things, so I feel both like I have peaked and very immature at the same time. But hey, Dota hasn't changed so to make myself feel better about myself, I just pub-stomp n00bs ftw!

[tcwc]

There was an interesting article/discussion on the subject a few months ago - "Why time appears to speed up with age" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402763

[cl8ton]

I was always told that when you turn 30 your birthdays start coming twice a year... interesting you made this comment.