I was reading an article on aging that was written by Philip Yaffe and it got me to thinking ….. “Why now, do the years seem to fly by so much faster?”

It seems that the older you get, the faster time seems to slip by. I’m in my 60’s now and it only seems like a short time ago that we were all agonizing over 2YK, fearing civilization as we know it would end. They say life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer to the end, the faster it spins. It is a widely accepted adage that, “The older you get, the faster time seems to go.” But why should aging have this effect? After all, there is the parallel adage that, “Time flies when you are having fun.” But as we age, time flies whether we are having fun or not.

So what’s going on?

I think it all has to do with 3 things: “anticipation”, “retrospection” and “brain speed”.

Anticipation – Whatever the nature of our individual lives, we all anticipate things important to us. Then after they happen, we look back at them and exclaim. “Did it really happen that long ago?”. For example, our first love, our first heartbreak, driving a car, landing a job, marriage, etc. When we are young and looking forward, all these milestones seem impossibly far in the future.

Retrospection – However, once achieved, how quickly they recede into the past. So, the older we get, the more milestones we have to look back on. So the farther and faster they appear to recede. So if sometimes the clock may seem to have stopped, the calendar always continues racing ahead.

Brain Speed – Or rather lack of. As we age our nerve conduction velocity decreases. Basically, “brain pulses” of information are further apart. (We think slower). It’s a lot like walking, if you walk slower then everyone else will appear to be walking fster. If you think more slowly, the world seems to be going faster.

Now all of this is just a proposed explanation, I guess the scientific explanation for why the years seem to be going by much faster is: “Nobody really knows.” The brain is a complex instrument and time perception is the result of many areas of the brain working together. We just don’t know how it works.

The fact is We are all born to die. What happens after that is the subject of considerable controversy. But whatever it is, we are certain it is going to happen, and that it will almost certainly be different from whatever we know today.

Since I am now in my seventh decade, for me this inevitability will probably occur sometime within the next 10-30 years. Today this seems like a very long time. However, the years are accelerating, so when it does occur my most probable reaction will be: “What! Already!”

Thank you Philip Yaffe – I am now really depressed!