Originally Posted by Exo (Post 2053759)

What is this? Reddit?

My answer? Time.

Time when you were younger was a different kind of time. You wake up at maybe nine or ten. I don't know because it was a while ago but it was morning and you put on your clothes and you go eat some f*cking cereal and watch a cartoon or two and you go meet your friends in the f*cking woods and an ETERNITY passes until you see those summer street lights come on and you know you have to go home. I want to bring back the slow acting time that made Halloween last what seemed like forever after the sun went down and you got to cover the entire damn neighborhood and still have time to dig into your pillow case for the good sh*t before you went to bed. I want the slow moving molasses time that allowed for a cross town bike trip to the skate park, a full day of f*cking around, smoking pot, coming back down from being too high as a teenager (which takes a long time), and then making it home for dinner made by Mom only to go back out and get drunk in the woods.

Where's that kind of time gone? I wake up, take a sh*t, drive to work, and all of a sudden it's four PM and I'm already hoping for sleep. Being an adult is fun but you don't have the kind of time you had as a kid and I miss it f*cking terribly.

Originally Posted by rostasi (Post 2053867)

There's a perfectly reasonable explanation of this time-dilation feeling having to do with prospective vs retrospective vantage points.
From a prospective point, time nearly always goes by quickly at all ages when you're doing fun or creative stuff.
It only appears that your younger self experienced "eternity" when you look at that time after decades gone by.
The more decades the slower it appears in retrospect because your brain is choosing from all of the earlier new
experiences it encoded in memory and not the familiar ones. As you get older, your brain is fed a smaller number
of new experiences into its memory and you end up re-living older, more novel experiences in the here-and-now
which give the impression that they lasted longer than they really did (or even than they appeared to when you
experienced them at the time). The only way around this dichotomy, is to accept that time has nearly always
appeared fast during the pleasant experiences, then and now, and that the comparisons are moot if you're
always learning and doing new, creative stuff in the here-and-now.

Originally Posted by Dharma & Greg (Post 2053868)

I don't know, years did legit feel like they passed a lot slower back in the day and I don't think it's just hindsight. Perhaps perception of time is affected by brain development or something.