Logtime: Why Years Feel Shorter as You Get Older
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I’m now in my mid-40s.
I find that time is speeding up and passing by much faster than it was before.
Heck, when I started writing this newsletter, I was in my late 30s.
Where did all that time go? Has it really been 646 Editions and 39 podcasts?
In my mind, I don’t feel my age. In fact, some younger people seem much older than I am, and I know at least one person who is 20 years older but thinks younger than me in many ways.
That makes me wonder if time just keeps speeding up. Does someone in their 60s look back to their 40s and think, “time seemed to pass slowly compared to now”?
Does someone in their 80s look back to their 60s and think the same?
If we cure enough of the diseases of aging to make the median lifespan much longer than it is now, does this acceleration just keep going, or does it ever plateau?
I understand the logarithmic nature of subjective time perception and the U-shaped curve of memory. But even when you understand it, it still feels very strange to live it.
If you aren’t familiar with the logtime hypothesis, the 101 primer is basically:
The years feel shorter as we age because we size up each new one against all the time we’ve already lived.
A year feels enormous to a kid because it’s such a big slice of the life they’ve lived so far. It’s 10% of a 10-year-old’s life but only 2% of a 50-year-old’s.
If this is correct, 10–20, 20–40, and 40–80 should all feel about equally long.
The idea resembles the Weber-Fechner law, which says we perceive loudness, brightness, and pitch on a logarithmic scale, not a linear one. Time may just be one more sense wired the same way.
It explains why childhood summers feel endless while whole adult years disappear in a blink.
Maybe we should stop counting life in decades and start counting it in octaves, each one a doubling of age: 1–2, 2–4, 4–8, 8–16, 16–32, 32–64.
It might also explain why our earliest years feel so impossibly distant. On a log scale, they’re a ton of octaves back, which could be part of why almost no one remembers being two.
Are you experiencing the same thing, wherever you are on the time ladder? 🪜
🧭 This first appeared in Edition 646 of Liberty’s Highlights. New here? I made a page for that: Start Here.
Very true.