We've all heard that time seems to accelerate when you get older. I've heard it in so many places that I assume it's consistently true. Subjective experience of time is significantly faster. It's true of me now that I'm up in the high middle age. It's September, and I expect that by noon today, it'll be October. When I wake up tomorrow, it'll be December and snowing. That's an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like.
Oddly enough, if someone lives until they're eighty, they probably feel like they spent half their time as a child and teenager. Part of it might be familiarity. Later in life we're familiar with the cycles of day-and-night, going to work, of eating our meals. The same familiarity applies to the seasons. Our brains would throw events related to these cycles in the “yada, yada, yada” file, and our passing retrospective of them would become abbreviated.
However, that can't account for the entire effect. It's definitely a neurological phenomenon, not a real space-time effect. Maybe, like our aging eyes which far-sighted, maybe our memories have a similar distortion in their lenses?
I accidentally tested this out, though I didn't know I was doing it. I'm now keeping a journal and a bunch of logs like I never have before. This is likely the best documented period of my life. Last week, I tried to remember what day my father went into the hospital. I thought it was Friday, but checking my journal, it turned out to be Wednesday. Then it occurred, I thought the news was three days old, but it was actually five.
Could it be that it's the reverse of the rear-view mirror effect. “Objects in the mirror are further away than they look”? Suppose my entire memory has that distortion? It means actual time is passing sixty-seven percent faster than recalled time. That is significant.
So, from here on out, I'm going to use my journal that way. I'm going to make an estimate of when events took place in the past and check them against my journal. I'll see if this distortion is in some way consistent.
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