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  Taek
  Childhood is only half of subjective life if you stagnate as an adult. If you keep changing your routine, you'll find each year has just as much subjective experience as the previous.Start a company in an industry where you have no experience. Move to a country where nobody speaks a language you understand. Find a new sport and commit to being a top 0.1% participant (for most sports that don't air regularly on national television, this can be done in a year).If subjective life is speeding up, throw yourself some curve balls.
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  canpan
  Regarding the perception of time, I have a complete opposite perception of the author. He mentions 20 as a middle point. I was after that, in my 20s when I first took real full control. I can remember the times before that. But I did so many "firsts" after that! My childhood years feel very short and boring to me; while the time after that feels gigantic and exciting.There is so much in the world and so precious little time, I cannot really imagine running out of new "firsts" to do. Just I think many people never take control.(The article itself seems to be more about raising children, being dad and fulfillment than the comments and title suggest)
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  smokel
  > This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.Could anyone who is extremely fortunate and never had to work for money share their experience on this?I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money. Both were fun, but the remaining memories differ by intensity.I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing. Why are the first three or so years excluded from this? It seems more likely that new experiences make more impact, or that repeated memories make them more intense. Or dozens of other theories.
• lordnacho
  I think there's something to this idea in the article. I remember my childhood well, perhaps because the cast is still somewhat intact, and we all had a good time. The time after finishing school is more blocky: a few years working in certain places, meeting my wife and having kids. My adult life takes up more calendar time, but less "experienced time". My cousin was on a chat last night, explaining that his day is taken up by taking three kids to different schools, then picking them up again. Over and over, but somehow it is one experience. Plenty of people will tell you the same about going to work.By contrast, you remember things in your youth that happened only once, like spraining my ankle at a crossing with a train oncoming (it was less dramatic that it sounds lol), or going to a music festival, or finishing high school.One thing that maybe needs to be talked about is that you can simply relive your life. This works best if you had a good time. So the answer to the question is not just that you should look for new firsts, you can replay some old tapes.I'm lucky enough that I know people from every time in my life. I have a chat group with three other guys that I met when we were 4 years old, over 40 years ago. They sent messages last night. I got a message from my first grade teacher, and my high school English teacher. I have a chat with all my buddies from school, where we exchange messages that are about as mature as when we were teenagers. People I worked with, I keep in touch with.I have an online photo album that is basically the only data I care to have a backup of. Now and again, I flip through it, and I see what I was up to, and have nice thoughts about that.It might sound a bit weird for a mid-40s guy to be so resigned to being old. But I was talking to one of the mentioned buddies from nursery, and I turns out the big milestones have happened already. We already finished school, got jobs, had kids. There's a lot of little things to tick off, but they are little things: visiting various interesting sites, going to some concert, and so on.
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  rr808
  My kids go to a stem focused magnet school. I realize different cultures value different things but its depressing to me how many kids are pushed to dedicate their whole childhood to get into top Universities. We'd go to the beach and their friends couldn't come because they were doing extra APs or science fair or Math Olympics or similar. These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
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  rwnspace
  I think time perception is contingent on cultural and lifestyle factors, I don't recognise it in my own life. My twenties (chaotic) lasted forever, now in my 30s, this last year in particular felt incredibly long (it was eventful and full of change).I rarely find myself on "autopilot". Is that why?
• zkmon
  Best way is, don't make up new rules, don't come up with some new analysis and new ways of living etc. None of that is needed. Human life hasn't started just yesterday. Just live the way your ancestors lived. Don't give too much importance to children. Don't spend too much attention on them. Mind your work and let children mind their observation of the world around them.
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  barishnamazov
  I'm 22 and since late college things don't excite me the way they used to, even when I enjoy them. I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.The 'vicarious firsts' framing doesn't quite land for me because of that, but the 'urgency that won't let you drift' observation resonates. Maybe what matters isn't renewed wonder but having something -- family, friends, caring about the world -- that demands presence. The forcing function matters more than the feelings themselves.My dad always says something related in nature: caring about and loving your family makes you a better person more than it helps your family.
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  huhkerrf
  > This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.This is just not my experience at all. I had a great childhood, but ask me about the most vibrant moments, and very few of them came before I was 18. The births of my children, my wedding, meeting my wife, lazy afternoons in college...
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  rixed
  Sure enough, if you model life experience as a 2d plot, you are going to have to simplify things quite a bit. Yes, time "felt" longer for a child (especially when the child has to wait or wants something yet to come, less so when it's time spent on video games), and children are particularly impatient compared to adults.But is that experiencing life, though? How many strong memories from that "logarithmic first half" of my life do I have? Actually very few compared to what came later, and they are not particularly compelling either.My guess is that the author just hit mid-life crisis after having spent one or two decades in an office. Boring mindless job is what makes life experience to plateau, not adulthood. If I think of the most accomplished persons that I know, who've done many things with their life, I can't imagine them saying that their childhood was half of their life. They would probably laugh at the idea.Or maybe he hasn't reached that crisis yet, since he finds solace in the idea that his child is doing the living for him. Wait until the kids leave home, for the log to turn into a exponential panic.
• WillAdams
  It's a perception thing --- a given period of time is related to one's total life experience/recent memory --- to a toddler, a week is a long time because at that age one cannot remember many weeks and the weeks which one remembers are full of new experiences each of which is vivid and fresh, while to a person in middle age, there are many, many weeks accumulated into many repeated years, and the experiences are much the same and repeated.The big thing which we need to change and solve is education --- I have memories of going to a school in Mississippi which my perception of was that it was quite well run, and that classes in it were divided between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, while academic classes were attended at one's ability level (4 grade cap up through 8th grade) and that students who progressed beyond high school courses were able to take college courses, some teachers being accredited as faculty at a local college, or instructors from that institution being brought to the school for classes at need.Maybe AP classes offer a similar facility in public school systems? Though one wants to cue the _Doonesbury_ cartoon of the college dean who after being told that his entire Freshman class is taking remedial 051 level _everything_ is running a glorified pre school.Roger Zelazny made much of college education becoming quite a different thing when Samuel Eliot of Harvard made the conceptual leap of dividing education by the college credit hour and allowing customization beyond the rote repetition of previous generations in his wonderful novel _Doorways in the Sand_ --- perhaps that should be extended down on some sort of skills basis? The school I attended after Mississippi did reading with a pair of boxes of Scholastic Reading Assessment (SRA) booklets, which, not understanding that one was supposed to do a two or three at each level and get approval on before moving to the next level, I did _all_ of in a matter of weeks, which left me with nothing to do for the balance of the school year but go to the (meager) elementary school library.
• youoy
  I quote for context:> But what about those of us who are well into the flattening part of the curve, what can we do for ourselves? You can seek new experiences perhaps. If time goes faster because your life has fewer firsts and more routine, then it can be extended by adding firsts. You can learn new things, travel, take up hobbies, or new careers.> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back. You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.I like to think that life slows down once you form a stable image and story of yourself. The more you convince yourself that that image is fixed, the faster time will go by. That might justify why childhood seems longer, since that image seems to form around adolescence.Experiencing new "firsts" but keeping that image of yourselfe fixed just works for a while. That is why it may lead to resentment, as the article says.So dont fool yourself: some image of who you are gives you some stability, but just use it for that, so that you dont run crazy with options.If you treat every event as something that might reshape your ego, then suddenly a big number of experiences are new, and time suddenly slows dont. It may even appear to dissapear from time to time.
• arichard123
  We were discussing this last night. The solution seems to be we need to do very boring things each day, like stare at paint, watch grapes grow, etc, but then do that with different people in different places. In this way, each day seems very long, and retrospectively the changing of place and boring thing means there's a lot to remember.I think it does mean though that optimising for this is probably not the thing to do.
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  JDEW
  > The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.Almost makes me tear up. 1000 times this.
• mentalgear
  I have been reading the comment by Jim Grey on the bottom of the article, and I was thinking, is that mostly what we are - and why people like novelty (especially in tech) so much - because it makes us feel young ? Or maybe not young, but teaches us something new, learning something active - worth remembering.> We also think that novelty rivets our attention and makes time seem to slow down. Childhood is full of novel experiences that, as they repeat, become less so. True novelty becomes unusual when you’re pushing 60 as I am now. The brain says, “Oh, that again,” and glosses past it.
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  elias_t
  > We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year.I think this explanation is true but incomplete. I believe it's also related to Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency [0], the way I see it, if an organism is smaller it has a higher frequency, it sees more image per second, therefore perception of time is slower. (E.g. a fly sees you moving really slowly). Maybe it's related to the processing time of images, with smaller brains insect can process more of them per second.Maybe humans process more images as children, therefore see the time time going slower.It's been a while I didn't think about this, maybe some studies have been made in the past years.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
• neutronicus
  Well.I, personally feel like having lived is a net win, joy-wise, mostly on the strength of my childhood. So I'm trying to give that to my sons as well.
• codingdave
  > If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval isI don't accept that premise. I'm in my mid-fifties now, and a year is still a long time. They years get short if you fall into a routine and never do anything new, but it is easy enough not to fall into that trap. And I say that as someone who thrives in doing the same routine every day. I get my variety in the details, doing different projects, having different conversations, trying new foods, exploring new places.> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.I've found that we all have different memories. I know people who cannot remember their childhood at all, and I've known people who remember it well. But not having vibrant memories of your adult life? That feels a little depressing. Adulthood is when you step up and become your own self, directing your own life. It is when I climbed mountains, explored the world, met new people, tried different careers, moved to new towns, had long-term relationships including children, created art, studied subjects beyond the standard high school education. Childhood was OK, but was fairly anxiety-filled, at least for me. The truly amazing experiences in life were as an adult.The author addresses this, of course. But he does so in a really odd way:> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back.This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
• amelius
  Yet wealth grows exponentially, meaning that half of your life you have relatively little.
• iammjm
  A typical person in the western world spends like 4 hours on their phone each day. They also spend 8 hours at work, doing mostly the same-ish thing over and over again. Then there's commute along the same routes, and our habits and ways of life we calcify into. The brief moments of mental freedom are often terrorized by the anxiety induced by what we consumed during our phone binges. Let's add some degree of sleep deprivation into the mix. Might all of that have something to do with how we perceive life and how fast and meaninglessly it goes by?
• rendx
  "The basic stratum of the personality and the associated underlying belief systems that hold it in place derive from a number of factors: the shadow aspects of parents; the same unresolved elements in the lives of grandparents (the ovum from which the mother sprang was already formed at eleven weeks gestation in the maternal grandmother); a commensurate and immeasurable twine of psychogenetic ancestral memories; the prenate’s own “baggage” from pre-conception; the experience of the conception itself; the phenomenology of implantation; and the whole duration of the gestation period; all together form layers of affect in this self-forging process."William R. Emerson, Ph.D. https://emersonbirthrx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Journa...
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  dbacar
  Does putting a graph make a subjective feeling scientific? For me the past year was like 10 years, and who knows for the rest of the world.Time is relative no matter what age you are and probably depends how much has changed in your life (maybe I should put a graph here to make it more scientific :)) )
• ofalkaed
  Every assertion in this article is completely alien to me to the point that I can not even comprehend that people live like that, it seems untenable to life to me. A year did not feel like a fifth of my life when I was 5, I could not even comprehend a year in that sense and very much lived in the present. Now in my 40s I don't see a year as just another year and still don't think of it as one 45th of my life. When I was 5 I saw where I was, now I see how far I have come and how far I have to go; all that has really changed is that I have come to understand how the past and the future define the present instead of just accepting that this is what I am currently experiencing, I understand cause and effect, consequence.Does this article seem accurate to your perception of life? It would explain some things regarding my interactions with most people if I am so completely missing something so fundemental about their existence.Edit: Why does conveying my experience and desiring to understand the experience of others get a downvote? Genuinely curious.Edit the second: I just started to wonder if this article is going to affect my birthday in a couple weeks. Part of me feels like I am going to think "well that is 1/46th of my life gone" and have a midlife crisis. The other part of me remembers Zeno and his paradox and giggles.
• anon
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• lm2s
  Beautifully written. Thank you for this.
• RickJWagner
  Well that’s interesting.I’m going to combine this information with another idea. The second idea comes from Tony Robbins, who tells us we can have mastery over our memories and use them to influence our psyche.You can magnify and clarify pleasing and positive memories. You can diminish and distance unpleasant or painful ones. This can change your view of the world, for better.
• Dumblydorr
  Is there a citation or source for this? Or is this just the authors idea?
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  t0lo
  The premise is that life stops being novel around 20 to suit this argument- but you can easily argue that that's more around 30 or even 40
• rendall
  I have a pet theory that everybody gets one lifetime, and no matter how long that life is, it always subjectively feels like one lifetime. Whether you live three days or a hundred years, it will always feel about the same amount of time, both interminable and too short.
• anon
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• ronitize
  beautiful read
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  nchmy
  This was a both a nice, and extremely depressing, read.It sounds like the author has had a good childhood and is a good parent to their kids. Wonderful.But the whole article is appropriately summarized by their final sentences> You recreate your memories in them. They recreate childishness in you. Life folds back on itself, but not quite the same. It loops, but continues. A helix. > > Life, then, is the creation of childhoods. You have yours, and then you get to create childhoods for others. The time is yours, and theirsThey have completely given up on their own life, and the possibility that they, too, could live in a child-like way, where they have their own wonder, joy etc.Eg> Children make you childlike. Skipping through the park as an adult man raises eyebrows (deservedly or not.) Skipping through the park as an adult man with your son or daughter skipping next to you on your arm is one of life’s greatest joys, both for you and for anyone who sees you.Why do you care about people's eyebrows? Go skip, play, dance, be curious, be creative - whether just for the sake of it, or also in your "work".Your kids need to see you actually living so that they, too, might be able to actually live once they've moved into adulthood.> Your Christmas trees get smaller, your lights less ambitious. Some find all of these fun for their own sake, but if you are not the type of person who finds ritual appealing you will likely find yourself slowly disconnecting from holidays. You will find yourself asking what all the hustle bustle is for. > > Kids. That’s who it’s for. Of all the experiences that children renew, traditions are renewed the most. When you put up a Christmas tree, it’s for kids. When you decorate for Halloween, it’s for kids. All of these holidays are in essence a celebration of childhood, and children let you see them all for the first time again. If you remember the excitement of galumphingChristmas, and other traditions, are NOT about trees and lights and presents. Thanksgiving is not about waiting to stampede a Walmart to buy crap. It's about genuine communion with family, friends, or - if you're particularly clued in - even strangers who don't have such traditions available to them.And so on.They talk about the joy of showing kids Saturn in a telescope. I won't argue with that. But that doesn't mean an adult can't have joy in discovering new things in the cosmos - be it through a career or hobby in telescopes, or exploring all parts of nature, from microbes to volcanoes. Whether as a hobby or a career.This person is missing the point of everything.We must do as nietzsche described and progress from a camel, to a lion, to a child again. Joseph Campbell - a wonderful interpreter and guide of all of these things - explains it all well, a quote of which is at this page https://centeroflighttulsa.org/three-transformations-spirit/
• pixelmonkey
  As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-cre...And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."
• lovich
  Maybe by realizing that this is a crazy idea?Half of your life is childhood because you weighed subjective experiences differently when you had no knowledge or life experiences so you should change your life based on that situation where you were in Plato’s cave?Actually fuck even this title is bad. If life is subjective, don’t ask how “we” should live. Subjectiveness means that’s a “you” question.
• galgaldas
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