Writing a blog like this, I tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the past, whether it is my own history, local history for the area where I grew up, or that of culture or technology. In doing this, I notice some curious effects of this mental time-travel.
One of the most noticeable is that when I recall the 1970s and 1980s, they rightly feel like a long time ago, but when I recall the 1990s they feel so recent, like they were maybe ten years ago instead of thirty.
After a fair bit of reading and discussing with people why this might be the case, I figure that there are probably a few possible reasons for this phenomenon.
The first reason that was suggested to me was that the 1990s was the first decade that I spent entirely as an adult. Born in the 1960s, I have no meaningful memories of that decade; I was a child in the 1970s and a teenager and young adult in the 1980s. By the time 1990 rolled around, I was a member of the workforce and had adult responsibilities – my formative years were largely behind me.
Another possible reason is that, for example, when I was five years old, a year represented 20% of my life, a full fifth, so seemed like a long time. When I was 50, that same year was only 2% of my life so seemed a lot shorter.
Psychologists have done several studies on the perception of time as we age, and have come up with some interesting observations that indicate that there could be some truth to both of these notions, plus some other fascinating insights.
For a start, when we are children, life is full of new experiences. Every day we are seeing things for the first time and learning new things. Our brains are recording these new experiences and building our picture of the world. When we look back on this period of our lives, the time therefore feels full of significant events, and this fullness makes it seem as though the time passed more slowly.
As we get older, more and more things are familiar to us, so our brains do not record those details, contributing to the feeling of time passing more quickly. This feeling is compounded when we are in a routine, doing similar things every day, like going to work or school. We probably have clearer memories of our first days at a new job than any particular day after working there a number of years, unless some significant event occurs to cause it to be written to memory. Humans are creatures of habit, and take comfort in routine, so some of this is going to be inevitable.
Let’s add yet another factor to the adult equation, that of stress. Research has shown that stress has all kinds of effects on the brain’s ability to focus, form new memories and recall old ones. When we are dealing with work deadlines and the other pressures of adulthood, the effects of stress can also contribute to the feeling of time passing quickly.
There are other physiological factors at play too; our brains developed to absorb and process lots of new information when we are young. Neuroplasticity (the ability to form new connections in the brain) decreases as we get older, hence the old adage about teaching old dogs new tricks.
Finally, the accelerating pace of technological change since the turn of the millennium may also contribute to the sense that time has flown by – so many of the technologies that are commonplace today were the stuff of science fiction in the 1990s, and developed so rapidly that it is hard to keep track of the significant moments.
That idea in itself leads me to an interesting thought. I remember being at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco in January of 2007. Apple had just unveiled its iPhone, and I remember standing among a crowd of people around a glass case where one was being displayed on a revolving plinth. People were holding up their digital cameras (remember them?) to take a picture of this exciting new product.
Did I realise that I was witnessing a major point in history, the release of a device that would change the way we interacted with each other, how we spent our time, how we did business and much more? Absolutely not. At the time, it was just an interesting new kind of mobile phone.
Sometimes we are aware that certain events are going to have lasting effects, even change the world (the terrorist attacks in September 2001 come to mind). Others, we have no idea at the time about how big and far-reaching their consequences will be (say, the results of the 2016 US Presidential election).
I often think of this when someone asks a question like “if you could go back to when you were sixteen years old, but with the knowledge you have now, what would you do differently?” It’s an amusing thought experiment for sure, but entertaining it even briefly I see a major snag in any potential plans to rewrite the future.
Being back at sixteen years old, with the knowledge that I have today at almost sixty, but with every other aspect of life unchanged, the effect I could have on my life’s outcomes is actually likely to be fairly small given the huge number of factors over which I would still have no control. Remember, I would still be a child, with little of the independence and agency I enjoy as an adult. If anything, the extra knowledge I possessed might be a significant source of frustration. OK, there’s a girl I might have been less nervous about asking out, but even then, her answer would still be out of my hands.
The fact is, I probably couldn’t change much. In the end, the here and now is all any of us have, and we have to do the best with it that we can. And that’s OK, it really is. Maybe the real message is that we should try never to stop learning new things, seeking out new experiences and to keep on making those memories that make our lives feel full.
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