Why Time Passes Faster as You Get Older

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Do you ever wonder why time seems to pass so much faster now than in years past? The explanation is pretty simple. It has to to with the total number of years lived compared to a randomly chosen slice of time. Let's say five years.

To a five year old child, five years is a huge amount of time. It is as long as he has been alive. The prospect of being ten years old is considered to be so far away that it will never arrive. At the the age of ten, though, that same five years is only half of his lifetime and the prospect of turning fifteen, although still far, far away is more thinkable than when he was five. Starting to get the picture?

As you get older, five years becomes a rapidly shrinking fraction of your total lifetime.
The progression is like this:
age 5yrs =1/1,
10yrs = 1/2,
15yrs =1/3,
20yrs = 1/4,
25yrs =1/5,
30yrs = 1/6,
35yrs = 1/7,
40yrs = 1/8,
45yrs = 1/9,
50yrs = 1/10, and so on.

As we grow up, we get accustomed to anticipated events in the future taking forever to come to pass. So when subjective time starts to speed up, we don't notice it . However, by the time we are 40, the wait for a future event is such a small fraction of the total time we have lived that the shortened subjective time becomes noticeable. By the time we have lived 50 years, five years is only 1/10 of our total lifetime, 5 percent. And smaller slices of time are a commensurately smaller fraction of our years.

That's why time seems to blur past after the age of fifty. Keeping this in mind. It would mean that the longer a person lived, the faster subjective time would become. If this subjective time speed up held true for all ages. Then it might negate any benefits derived from extending the total lifespan. Because life would still seem too short. So, the lesson is... enjoy the time you've got, because you'll never have enough.

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