Have you ever thought of how time passes by quickly as you age?
I always hear someone or the other remarking how this month passed by without much notice.
Sometimes the day passes by nonchalantly, and sometimes it’s the whole year. You’ll even come across old geezers who’ll tell you that decades have passed by just like that.
A large part of it can be attributed to how we perceive time psychologically. But that doesn’t mean that the passage of time is merely an illusion. We can also perceive time realistically.
What I am now is different that what I was yesterday. And from my previous experiences and observation I can predict that I’ll be different tomorrow too.
Maybe not by a large margin, but over a period of time those changes can add up to create a new me. That’s why it’s so hard to recognize your old friends and acquaintances when you meet them after a long gap.
Heck, I’ve even seen people say that they don’t recognize themselves anymore after seeing an old pic of theirs (that includes me too). And this is not just restricted to your physical appearance (which is obvious), but your mental makeup too.
It just so happens that you’re experiencing less and less as time passes by. Let me explain this with a basic example.
Imagine that you’ve just been born. New to the world, your experiences are next to nil (apart from the wailing and crying).
Then, a day passes by. At this point of time, your complete life experience is that single day you’ve lived through. 100% of what you’ve experienced so far in this world happened on that first day.
The next day arrives right after your first day ends. And it passes by as quickly as the previous one did. Objectively, you’ve experienced the same amount of time (well, almost the same) on your second day too.
But relatively, what you experience on your second day comprises just 50% of your total life experience.
You experience even lesser on your third day; it’s around 33.33% of your total life experience. On the fourth day you experience just 25%. The fifth 20%. The sixth around 16.67%. And the cycle continues forever, so long as you live.
Only the day you’re born is your relative life experience the highest. It keeps on reducing progressively thereafter. By the end of your third year, your relative life experience is less than 0.1% every day.
Extrapolate the same logic to months, or years, or even decades. Do you get it now? You experience less and less as time passes by.
