Interesting: Here is the reason that as you get older, entire years feel like a week: 🙇♂️ pic.twitter.com/V6spUNMrFT
— AlphaFox (@alphafox) January 4, 2026
1. There is no problem to be solved. You experience your life in the present in real time. It only looks compressed in your memory. You're not being deprived of time in which to live. You're just freed from detailed memory.
2. Even though novelties would cause your memory to seem to contain more time spent doing the things you have done, you can always find more detail within your familiar activities. It is best to love your normal life — your home, your loved ones, your work — and to develop your mind to pay attention to the variations within a normal day than to busy yourself with injecting novelties.
3. You can get yourself in trouble with novelties! Yes, these things will loom large in your memory, but that will be a burden. You may end up wasting the present in brooding and anguishing over these things. They might even lead to the loss of the very best part of your normal life.
4. Why not enjoy the lightness of memory? If you're doing what you love, time seems to fly. That's a good feeling. We've always known, even as kids, that time flies when you're having fun.
Watch the video before commenting, especially if you're considering making the point that a year seems longer to a 5-year-old because it's 20% of his life, and years look short to a 50-year-old because each one is only 2% of the whole.
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And on the sixth day god created the cloud.
I had quite enough novelty in my younger years. Now I run before the sun rises, go to work and then read. That's quite enough for me, and I do much the same regardless of where in the world I happen to be.
Muphry’s law is alive and well.
That flower illusion was powerful. I just have one nit to pick, why does he say, "and then when you get older you start focusing on novelty" or however he put it, when the rule doesn't change, it's just that when you are young, everything is novel, and as you age, less and less of what you see is new. There is no reason to suggest that the logic changes at some point, since it doesn't.
This is an AI type failure. AI can't do logic, and that was a logical error.
“Time only seems to go faster when your older because of the way your memory works.”
Sigh. And we were just talking about embarrassing grammar mistakes.
Anyway, time seems to go faster when you’re older because you have less of it left.
"I only looks compressed"
Did AI write this?
My theory is a take-off on the semi-comical observation that as you age each year becomes a smaller and smaller portion of your lifespan. As you get older your planning time horizon expands and you set milestones at farther intervals. Eventually, however, time will slow down again as you make fewer and fewer future plans.
AA Says:
"...I'm thinking:
1. There is no problem to be solved. You experience your life in the present in real time. I only looks compressed in your memory.
Your missing a t
Not the first to notice..kinda hurts my eyes.
Where is that novelty? If there is any it's lost in the immense flow of information, opinions, and images. And history rhymes and maybe even repeats itself. It was easier to sort things out when one was younger. In the 60s it was easier to understand the history of newly independent Algeria or Congo. Since then it's been coups and atrocities over and over again. Who can keep all that straight?
" it was easier to understand the history of newly independent Algeria or Congo. Since then it's been coups and atrocities over and over again"
I am sure that their former colonial masters had nothing to do with those coups and atrocities. Just read the history books or read the newspapers! Of course they didn't!
The people who used to control all of that wealth and had intelligence operations in those countries simply walked away and said to themselves, "better luck next time." I bet that's what happened!
Memory or probably perception.
https://x.com/idontexistTore/status/2007565477942554948
I'm learing to play the bagpipes. Definitely in record mode. Time has not slowed down while I'm learing.
Bagpipes only have nine notes so you would think it would be easy to learn but it is not.
One of my life goals is to keep learing new things.
That's all projection, narciso, China are amateurs at a science the US has perfected, and we learned it from the British, who mostly controlled the globe. from their little island for centuries. But the INGA thing is kind of funny.
I don't know about "novelty", but since I've retired I have really enjoyed new experiences other than sitting at home all day looking at a TV, computer screen, book, or cell phone. My wife and I have traveled to Egypt, Morocco, Cyprus, Columbia (South America), Panama, Jamaica, Mexico, and many other places. These travels have really opened up my mind. I think it helps me to remain young and inquisitive and curious about the whole big wide world out there beyond where I live. (And I really do enjoy living on my 5 acres on a gravel road in East Central Iowa.)
Youth is wasted on the young, dagnabbit!
That flower image was shown longer than each shoe image IMHO. I re-watched and counting in my head to estimate the time each image was shown.
Thanks for help with the typos. I’m writing this alone and doing my own proofreading.
Walking my usual walk to work, I would often make a game of finding new details continually. I always could find things, multiple things on every block, day after day. The blog is sort of like that.
By the way, "grabbing he and his wife in their pajamas” was not a typo. It was a choice based on ignorance of a basic rule of grammar.
I think you are right abut the flower thing. I think that by "the duration is the same" he means that you saw just as many frames with the shoe, added over all of the repetitions of the shoe.
The video seems to conflate the perception of time passing with the memory of time. I recall many meetings all taking exactly the same amount of time with some of them seeming to be extremely long duration with others flying by and ending too quickly. The only difference was how much I was mentally engaged with the meeting.
The memory of how long those meetings took is about the same, though.
Pronoun proliferation through anthropogenic selection is a clear and progressive problem.
One of the funniest bits in Catch-22 was that guy who was trying to cultivate boredom.
Why do you want to be bored?
Because it slows down time.
Why do you want to slow down time?
So I live longer.
What bothers me is I watched the video all the way through and didn't notice the gorilla at all.
The reason that time "goes faster" when you are older is much simpler than these things say and novelty will not help. Time is measured in relative terms. When you are 10, waiting 1 year for something to happen is 10% of your life. When you are 50, 1 year is 2% of your life. So, a year feels like it goes by 5x faster when you are 50 than when you are 10.
Plus, when you are 10 you are stuck 6-8 hours a day in a boring school where you have to ask for permission to use the bathroom. I hear time passes slowly in prison too.
When you're 4, the time between Christmases is 25% of your life. When you're 50, that time drops to 2%. Time seems to fly as we age.
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