I've had months of work I can barely remember, and three-day vacations that feel like a year's worth of memories.
Weird, I have always been told that when the brain is functioning "normaly" (outside of disorders/syndromes, such as PTSD) that it has a tendency to forget bad things, to help us get over traumatic experiences.
Consider the brain as a giant recording device with very good compression based recognizing patterns from previous data. So the first time you eat an apple, it stores a lot of data because it's a new experience. The next time, it stores something more like "like the last apple, but a little more tart".
I think our perception of time (at the macro scale) is roughly a perception of how much new data our compression-oriented brain is storing. It's the sensation of accumulated novelty.
So a monotonous 60 year existence is a fraction of the perceived duration of 60 years of a wild and adventurous, constantly reading, learning new languages, making new deep human connections - existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)?w...
Take a year off work to travel the world and you'll find your subjective sense of time passing slows right down.
Does it matter though? Does it matter how many experiences you collect? You can't take them with you. Better to develop relationships that can be a source of joy (I imagine. I have not done that).
But if you want your sense of time passing to slow down, increasing the rate of new experiences might be one way to get there.
Do whatever makes you happy.
Sure, I sometimes think: "Wow, another year passed so fast.", but I distinctly remember the same feeling from when I was a child. School years seem to have flown past me the same as calender years do now.
rzk•1d ago