Why Life is moving so fast? Can we do something about it?

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."―Ferris Bueller

Who knew 80s pop culture could really have a grain of truth to it after all. As we move forward with our lives, haven't you noticed that the time between two weekends kind of feels like it went by in a split second? Life is moving at a super-fast speed with super-fast internet, super-fast deliveries, super-fast innovations, and countless more super fast things. Just take a step back to the time when you were in school and couldn't wait for that final bell to ring. Those ten minutes felt like eons. What happened in the last ten years? Was it us? Or did time somehow change its pace?

The perception of time with growing age has been debated for quite a long time. But we have yet to receive a concrete explanation why it feels like the sand in the hourglass is slipping faster than ever. Adrian Bejan, Duke University, proposes a theory that our nerves and neurons grow in size and complexity as we age. Electrical signals take longer to traverse through the network. This, coupled with the wear and tear of the neural pathways with aging, means our mental images are produced and processed slower. Since we see lesser things at the same duration, time passes quickly for us. "The end result is that, because older people are viewing fewer new images in the same amount of actual time, it seems to them as though time is passing more quickly.", says the Duke University article. Bejan says, "Days seemed to last longer in your youth because the young mind receives more images during one day than the same mind in old age."

From a more physics point of view, Einstein came along and proposed that time is relative and is created by things. It moves slower when the object is moving at a fast pace. Newtonian physics sensed a time as past, now, and the future. Einstein's theory explains that things do not happen in a set order. There is no sense of universal "now." In contrast, many physicists such as Carlo Rivelli believe that time is an illusion. There could be more ways than how we humans perceive time on earth.

Whether science agrees on some theory or not, we experience time every passing moment of our lives. The perception and meaning of time are linear for us. We have a past, a now, a future. At least for now. In our regular lives, when the weekend whizzes through like a second and we are waking up Monday morning, getting ready for work, many of us feel, "Damn, that went fast." Why? and What can we do to not feel like that?

For a baby, every day is full of new experiences, a lot of "firsts." First time seeing a tree, a man, a woman, another child, a dog, etc. A child experiences new things as he grows up. But when we reach adulthood, we have encountered most of the things that we will witness in our daily lives. The novelty of our surroundings fades. In other words, we have a routine, and our experiences are repeated in that routine.

The United Nations estimates a global average life expectancy of 72.6 years. So when you are 5, you have lived about 7% of your life. Fast forward to when you are 30; you have now lived about 41% of your life. When you are a kid, a year feels very long, but when you are 30, a year feels like a lot less time. Philosopher Paul Janet proposes a theory of "interactive timeline," whose primary idea is that "we perceive time relative to the total time we have experienced on the whole."

Another factor is stress. The pressure of getting things done within a deadline makes us feel like we have a lot to do but never time to do it. We want to finish it quickly and be done with our day. By focusing on one single task, the surrounding environment often fades away, diminishing our perception of time.

Keeping aside all the theories aside, what can we do to feel a little less like this?

One such piece of advice is to be more present. Sounds ambiguous? Not really. Many scholars across different fields have proposed that being more mindful of our actions can affect our perception of time. Meditation is one method to be more aware of our present. When we focus on our breathing in meditation, we focus on the present; we do not see time as relative to the rest of our lives. We see it in an absolute sense or the "now."

Making new memories requires experiencing more unique things. Imagine going on a vacation where you indulged in trekking, river rafting, camping, etc. After the holiday, it would feel long when you go through your memories. And that's because there were many new experiences you had, unique memories that you built; hence your week seemed "full." You don't need to take a vacation to feel this. Try a new restaurant, or take a different route to your office; break the routine, and you can experience this. We aim here to remove our lives from the autopilot that we have put it on by doing the same things repeatedly without any change for years. This can help change your perception of time.

Learn. Doesn't matter what. When we try to learn something new, we ultimately experience things we have never done before. Maybe it's a new language, a musical instrument, or an entirely new subject that you are trying to learn. All of these activities will bring back novelty to your experiences, and quite possibly, time will feel a lot less like it's passing by you.

Time will never slow down to how we used to see the world as a 10-year-old, but there are things that we can do to make it a bit less fast than it is now. A life filled with vivid memories will feel longer than a life without. If we can create a life novel enough, rich with experience, in retrospect, life will seem complete, a life well-lived.

Links for further understanding:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmr1-K4dfvg

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIx2N-viNwY

-https://www.sciencealert.com/psychology-holds-clues-to-slowing-down-time-when-it-feels-like-it-s-racing-away

- https://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/its-spring-already-physics-explains-why-time-flies-we-age

- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191203-what-we-get-wrong-about-time

- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200306-how-to-live-without-time

- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200520-why-lockdown-life-feels-like-its-going-faster

- https://lifehacker.com/why-time-feels-like-it-s-flying-by-and-how-to-slow-it-1745852093