How to Slow Down Time, According to Reddit
When my son went to kindergarten, my mother made a real bomb on me: “Now that he goes to school full time,” she said, “the years will really fly by.” Thanks to her, I noticed how every year has passed faster and faster since then, and this fact can be confirmed by almost every adult I know.
“How can it be summer already ??” we say, and after five or six minutes we say: “Man, this summer has passed quickly!”
This phenomenon seems to get worse with age; unfortunately for one sad Reddit user, u / Ed_Wretch, time is speeding up too early :
I am still relatively young, in my early 20s, but I have noticed that the years have begun to pass me by at an increasingly alarming rate.
What can I do to slow things down? This is giving me a damn existential crisis.
Other users have come up with helpful tips, such as u / Ricky_RZ, which suggests, “Go to a history class, then time goes by very slowly.”
Ok, this might be helpful during the day, but I think Ed_Wretch was looking for a longer term solution. Many Redditers have said that to slow down time, try to find new experiences:
- “By shaking things up and doing something new, you have more memories that make the years seem longer when you look back.” (u / rogueqd)
- “The reason it seems so fast is because when you are young, you have more new experiences and it takes longer for your mind to store and remember them. Now that you are older, there is not much new in your life. ” (u / boepoepie)
- “The more varied sensory experiences you have, the slower the time will seem. New experiences are likely to have the greatest impact. So do as many different and new things as you can. ” (u / vb_nm)
- “If you want a life worth remembering, you have to do something worth remembering. This does NOT mean constant parties, vacations and time with family. They also quickly transition into each other. This means constant challenge and growth. Growth necessarily includes actual new experiences (since repetition for the sake of growth involves seeing the same thing with new eyes). Study sports. Study math and physics. Take on challenging life projects. Live in new places. ” (u / OphioukhosUnbound)
They are right. Psychologist Claudia Hammond told Scientific American that our lives become more routine as we age. We experience fewer unfamiliar moments than in the early years, so the memories of our early years are overrepresented in our memory.
Our brain encodes new but unfamiliar experiences into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a given period. In other words, the more new memories we accumulate on a weekend trip, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.
This phenomenon, which Hammond called the holiday paradox, seems to provide one of the best clues to why, in hindsight, time seems to flow faster as we get older.
So grab the ukulele you’ve always wanted to learn to play, hike your first mountain, try the trampoline the next time you take your kids to the pool. This will slow down your summer a little.