Have you noticed that time seems to speed up as you get older?

Do You Wish Time Would Slow Down?

Have you ever noticed that time seems to speed up as you get older?

An afternoon could stretch on without end, in childhood, and a summer could be almost a lifetime. In childhood, so it seemed, and so it seems now, time was a slow, steady, tick tock.

But not so in adult time. We are racing forward into the future so fast that it sometimes seems as if our days are over before they have really begun.

If only we could slow time down! To do so would be to extend our lives. Not by making them objectively longer, in the sense of measurable clock time, but by lengthening out and thickening up the present.

Even if you don’t want to live forever, who wants to feel as if they are trapped on a runaway bus lurching out of control into the future?

Time is relative, said Albert Einstein; it slows down as you speed up (at last relative to an outside observer). He might have been right about clock time, but he is exactly wrong, it seems, when it comes to lived time. Our time speeds up — and it speeds up because we are moving faster (at least relatively). To read more from ALVA NOË, click here.