A Perspective On Time Passing

I saw this posted elsewhere and it was kind of a jolt. Kind of like when I realized that 2015 was the year they traveled into the future in Back to the Future II.

I know it's purely psychological but it's interesting how time seems to drag when you are a kid but it just seems to FLY by as you get older.

At 5 years of age, your perspective of a year is 1/5th of your life. At 65, it is 1/65th. That’s the best explanation I’ve heard anyway.

Apparently, as we age, our reaction time (brain) slows. Because we're slower, things seem faster.

This does not necessarily affect "reasoning" -- but, it does take a little longer to solve a problem of a given difficulty.

They say

It's no coincidence that almost all of the international chess champions have been in their 20's and 30's. Fast thinking is critical to being able visualize multiple moves in advance while playing chess.

Funny to think back when I was a teenager, early 80's. I felt like I had all the time in the world. Having kids seemed to speed up the time too. Now they are 23 and 19.
I married my wife in 1997, she was 22, I was 30. She turned 46 two days ago. When I was 15 I was best friends with her brother, I remember her at 7 years old.
Time does come at you fast.

Man, you ain't kidding about it taking longer to solve problems. Getting older plus the long term lingering affects of chemo (known as chemo brain) really concerns me sometimes.

Meanwhile, you are a little bigger when you're older than when you're younger, along with everything else around you, imperceptibly so. The Hubble constant ensures this.

I remember when American Graffiti came out, it was set 11 years in the past on the film's release, and it seemed like another world entirely.

Set a film 11 years in the past today, and it'll be practically no difference.

You make a very good observation. American society fundamentally changed from 1962 to 1973 due to a bunch of different major influences.

Ditto. These last two semesters of school have been really hard and time consuming.

BUT... it still beats the heck out of the alternative.

Yes, and that same concept is represented in that image I posted too, I think. There seems to be so much difference between an F4F Wildcat and an F-14 Tomcat, but not nearly as much difference between an F-14 and an F-35. And of course F-15s of the same era are still front-line fighters. Can you imagine an F4F being a front-line fighter in 1981?

Same with music. "Oldies" stations played '50s music and it seemed so different, but now music has not only not changed that much, but music from the '80s remains popular and widely accepted.

I also find it interesting that the term "Oldies" is specific to the 50's and 60's and is not used at all with later era music even though by now, music from the 1980's and 1990's should also be labelled "Oldies" if we use the same logic.

I distinctly remember listening to my "Oldies" radio station during the 1980's as a kid and at that time the music being played was only 2 and 3 decades old.

Regarding music and the passage of time, I grew up listening to 50s and 60s music -- as it unfolded. Music of the 80s (when it came) sounded "foreign".

One of the things we like about "International Standard" style ballroom dancing is that it revolves around very romantic music (Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Foxtrot, Quickstep) with the sound of dating/dancing the 1920s to late 1960s (not necessarily music written or recorded then). Just Monday, as we practiced to such music, there were tears in my eyes -- I looked down and saw them in my wife's eyes -- we were "feeling" how "time had passed" -- and is close to "passing us by".

But, I'll try to squeeze a couple more decades out of the system -- however unlikely that is

Well, in all fairness 1981 is much closer to 1941 if you are sailing on a Nimitz Carrier off the coast of Hawaii.

I quit listening to the Oldies station in Phoenix, because they moved past Doo-Wop and 1960s music and gone to 1970s and early 1980s rock.

No way this crowd should have let that pass without comment.

I just watched that particular movie a few months ago. For me it still held up fairly well.


Wheels

Kirk Douglas at his best and the premise was quite unique for its time.