I think there's something to this idea in the article. I remember my childhood well, perhaps because the cast is still somewhat intact, and we all had a good time. The time after finishing school is more blocky: a few years working in certain places, meeting my wife and having kids. My adult life takes up more calendar time, but less "experienced time". My cousin was on a chat last night, explaining that his day is taken up by taking three kids to different schools, then picking them up again. Over and over, but somehow it is one experience. Plenty of people will tell you the same about going to work.
By contrast, you remember things in your youth that happened only once, like spraining my ankle at a crossing with a train oncoming (it was less dramatic that it sounds lol), or going to a music festival, or finishing high school.
One thing that maybe needs to be talked about is that you can simply relive your life. This works best if you had a good time. So the answer to the question is not just that you should look for new firsts, you can replay some old tapes.
I'm lucky enough that I know people from every time in my life. I have a chat group with three other guys that I met when we were 4 years old, over 40 years ago. They sent messages last night. I got a message from my first grade teacher, and my high school English teacher. I have a chat with all my buddies from school, where we exchange messages that are about as mature as when we were teenagers. People I worked with, I keep in touch with.
I have an online photo album that is basically the only data I care to have a backup of. Now and again, I flip through it, and I see what I was up to, and have nice thoughts about that.
It might sound a bit weird for a mid-40s guy to be so resigned to being old. But I was talking to one of the mentioned buddies from nursery, and I turns out the big milestones have happened already. We already finished school, got jobs, had kids. There's a lot of little things to tick off, but they are little things: visiting various interesting sites, going to some concert, and so on.
My kids go to a stem focused magnet school. I realize different cultures value different things but its depressing to me how many kids are pushed to dedicate their whole childhood to get into top Universities. We'd go to the beach and their friends couldn't come because they were doing extra APs or science fair or Math Olympics or similar. These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
I was partially (largely?) one of those other kids. Honestly, I loved it and, though it wasn’t perfect, I definitely wouldn’t re-roll my childhood if given the chance.
Later in life, I managed to catch up in dating and other aspects, but kept a good streak of nerd pride and am totally happy about that.
If you were to have observed my childhood and got depressed about it, that interpretation would have been misguided.
Yeah you're right, I was a pretty geeky teenager myself. Its a tough winner takes all world, maybe working your ass off in HS is a good strategy that I messed up.
> These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
One of my friends in high school was like that - always studying, always doing extra classes. Straight As even without it, good grades, six highers one year and another two and four CSYS by the time he left. Then off to Uni where he got a first with distinction in Business Management. He never did anything but study, although he did play football a bit.
In the intervening 30-odd years he's mostly worked as a deputy manager in a supermarket in a small town maybe an hour's drive from the slightly smaller town I live in. He's never done anything else. Moved a couple of hundred miles from where we went to school, got a job, worked his way up to assistant manager.
I see him sometimes in passing when I'm working up that way.
I think time perception is contingent on cultural and lifestyle factors, I don't recognise it in my own life. My twenties (chaotic) lasted forever, now in my 30s, this last year in particular felt incredibly long (it was eventful and full of change).
It seems so obvious to me. It's all about what you do with your time, if you're stuck in a boring routine of commute, repetitive work, and a few soulless vacations here and there you'll build virtually no memorable moments and it will all feel like a blur
Move to a new city, get a radically different job, get a kid, switch up your routine, pick up unusual hobbies/interests and every year will feel like a new life.
Childhood feels very long because you have to go through mandatory checkpoints imposed from the outside, add that to your adult life and it'll feel the same. Why don't you go get a parachute intro course next weekend? Or rent a car on a race track? Go ice climbing next winter? Join a yoga club, a music class, a reading group, a dance class, &c. try things you don't necessarily want to do and you'll open many doors.
Most humans have a tendency to go the path of least resistance, and in today's world of working from home and unlimited screen based entertainment you can very easily waste decades your life
I would agree with this from subjective experience. My non-IT based career has been highly volatile with unintended unemployment, companies going out of business, changing entire sectors and roles many times. Huge volatility in relationships and partners also.
Much downside to this but the upside is my life feels incredibly long and I haven't even reached 50 yet. I have already lived numerous lives compared to the self that would have had a very stable life the last 25 years. My working life feels vastly longer than my very stable childhood. That came and went in the blink of an eye from this perspective.
right things that are eventful and full of change take a long time, childhood is generally eventful and full of change. If having an eventful and changing life increases the amount of subjective life we experience how should we live.
My childhood had less change than my adulthood. I've lived in different countries as an adult; I spent my childhood in one village near a town. The events I value most and recall most strongly all happened as an adult. I struggle to remember really significant childhood events. There were a few, like finally grokking a for loop in BASIC, or my first machine code execution, but the more common remembering is of undifferentiated days in school, reading, warm summer days.
But as an adult, learning how to ride motorcycles, touring; fine dining and discovering a love for fine wine; travel generally; the perspective that living in multiple countries gives you; the birth of my son, and how it changed my perception of my parents; these things were more significant and still more salient to me now. I am a very different man to the one I was at 20, and I feel I changed more between 25 and 35 than I did between 10 and 20.
Autopilot is a choice- most people are on it, some aren't. Society has always been like this. Society is attacking self aware and fully conscious people more than ever now though :(
Regarding the perception of time, I have a complete opposite perception of the author. He mentions 20 as a middle point. I was after that, in my 20s when I first took real full control.
I can remember the times before that. But I did so many "firsts" after that! My childhood years feel very short and boring to me; while the time after that feels gigantic and exciting.
There is so much in the world and so precious little time, I cannot really imagine running out of new "firsts" to do.
Just I think many people never take control.
(The article itself seems to be more about raising children, being dad and fulfillment than the comments and title suggest)
Whilst I did more new things in my 20s, I do recall my perception of days as a child being much much longer. I have distinct recollection of feeling almost clinical depression when I was about 8 after being told that we would be going to the seaside tomorrow and not today. To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.
> To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.
For me as a child, even getting a haircut was a dreary experience. It felt as an eternity I had to sit mostly immobile, while somebody else maneuvered sharp blades around my head. Nowadays it feels like I barely accomodated in the chair, it's already over.
I'm 22 and since late college things don't excite me the way they used to, even when I enjoy them. I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.
The 'vicarious firsts' framing doesn't quite land for me because of that, but the 'urgency that won't let you drift' observation resonates. Maybe what matters isn't renewed wonder but having something -- family, friends, caring about the world -- that demands presence. The forcing function matters more than the feelings themselves.
My dad always says something related in nature: caring about and loving your family makes you a better person more than it helps your family.
> I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.
It's a cliché but I (almost 50 years old) have found that when you get older, you notice patterns, Something "new" is often just an incremental improvement or two existing things combined.
Rust doesn't excite me much, and Go seems too boring to use for my side projects. Elixir + Phoenix LiveView is the only "new" thing that has excited me in the past decade, but I can't stand the Elixir syntax. Maybe it's because I have seen so much change during the years? If someone started out with React, a new version seems like a big deal, but to me it is just an incremental improvement.
When I was a kid, a new CPU or GPU had an extreme impact compared to the previous generations. We went from crappy Wolfenstein graphics to Quake in a few years. I have stopped following new releases now, because they don't really do much.
The same applies to mobile phones. The next iphone / samsung model doesn't really motivate me to replace my existing phone.
Thanks for sharing insight. I also feel like a couple decades ago, technology was also reasonably simple and understandable. Right now, everything is obfuscated and complex. Maybe that's natural, but makes it harder to get excited about seeing new things.
Similar to you, I don't care about mobile phones anymore. Instead of fancy hardware or features what I care is simple, secure, and private phone (open-source OS). I used to get excited on new models.
Recently a couple of my friends were talking about "Telegram vs Whatsapp." One is better because it has this feature, etc. They asked my opinion too. I don't care which is better, I only use them because I have to use them for contacting family and some friends. I just need the send text and image functionality (and I don't use it for private / secure texting).
There’s a term “geek out” or similar for getting deep into the details of something; especially technology. But it’s rare and not really needed for the use of it - there are people who geek out over phones or model trains or LEGO, etc.
But for most of things in life you just need to use them.
The hard part is finding something to geek out on that doesn’t turn you into a curmudgeon insisting everyone is “doing it wrong”.
> This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
This is just not my experience at all. I had a great childhood, but ask me about the most vibrant moments, and very few of them came before I was 18. The births of my children, my wedding, meeting my wife, lazy afternoons in college...
The one thing that childhood memories usually have is protection from the “real world” - looking back you realize that exciting vacation to a national park was because your dad lost his job that summer and couldn’t afford anything more, but had time. For you, it was amazing, but probably not as much for your parents worrying about where the next job would be.
> If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is
I don't accept that premise. I'm in my mid-fifties now, and a year is still a long time. They years get short if you fall into a routine and never do anything new, but it is easy enough not to fall into that trap. And I say that as someone who thrives in doing the same routine every day. I get my variety in the details, doing different projects, having different conversations, trying new foods, exploring new places.
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
I've found that we all have different memories. I know people who cannot remember their childhood at all, and I've known people who remember it well. But not having vibrant memories of your adult life? That feels a little depressing. Adulthood is when you step up and become your own self, directing your own life. It is when I climbed mountains, explored the world, met new people, tried different careers, moved to new towns, had long-term relationships including children, created art, studied subjects beyond the standard high school education. Childhood was OK, but was fairly anxiety-filled, at least for me. The truly amazing experiences in life were as an adult.
The author addresses this, of course. But he does so in a really odd way:
> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back.
This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
> This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
I'm describing my impression of other people's experience there, not mine, (note the word "exclusively") the sort of downside I see of living an inward life of hedonism.
Sure enough, if you model life experience as a 2d plot, you are going to have to simplify things quite a bit. Yes, time "felt" longer for a child (especially when the child has to wait or wants something yet to come, less so when it's time spent on video games), and children are particularly impatient compared to adults.
But is that experiencing life, though? How many strong memories from that "logarithmic first half" of my life do I have? Actually very few compared to what came later, and they are not particularly compelling either.
My guess is that the author just hit mid-life crisis after having spent one or two decades in an office. Boring mindless job is what makes life experience to plateau, not adulthood. If I think of the most accomplished persons that I know, who've done many things with their life, I can't imagine them saying that their childhood was half of their life. They would probably laugh at the idea.
Or maybe he hasn't reached that crisis yet, since he finds solace in the idea that his child is doing the living for him. Wait until the kids leave home, for the log to turn into a exponential panic.
I think you nailed it. This person is not living, and may never live. When their birds fly the coop and, worse, when they themselves retire, they're in for a whole world of emptiness.
This is something more dangerous that people realize, especially those “working for retirement” - if you only live to work, and then retire, you may find you retire from living, too.
Seen it a few too many times. Live life today, people!
“ So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
“ And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey
Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today”
I was absolutely not advocating for not having any thought for the future, nor for "living in the moment".
I was saying that you must do both - dont just slave away and expect that you'll live when you're retired (a lifestyle which makes it less likely that you would even live until retirement age, let alone be physically or even mentally capable of enjoying retirement).
Instead, live in a way such that there it is meaningful while you do it, and it also prepares you for the future. Again, this would also have the benefit of showing your kids and others how to do this themselves.
That’s fine, but the incongruence comes when one expects unlimited supply of healthcare and a cash payment for decades in old age. Especially if one didn’t raise enough productive kids to pay for it, so then the question becomes if you’re not planning for tomorrow, why are others who are planning for tomorrow paying for your tomorrow?
I did not espouse such views. There exist resource constraints in reality which contradict the attitude presented by the post I responded to, unless they were willing to forego those socialized benefits.
Best way is, don't make up new rules, don't come up with some new analysis and new ways of living etc. None of that is needed. Human life hasn't started just yesterday. Just live the way your ancestors lived. Don't give too much importance to children. Don't spend too much attention on them. Mind your work and let children mind their observation of the world around them.
> This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
Could anyone who is extremely fortunate and never had to work for money share their experience on this?
I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money. Both were fun, but the remaining memories differ by intensity.
I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing. Why are the first three or so years excluded from this? It seems more likely that new experiences make more impact, or that repeated memories make them more intense. Or dozens of other theories.
My family was not wealthy but I got the luck being born in the EU in a country where edu and Healthcare were basically free and you really cannot end up under a bridge unless extreme mental (and drugs issues that follow that) problems. My parents, even though we did not have much, always taught us to never follow orders unless you think they make sense and follow our own path. I guess that is why I mostly have no difference in vividness; I always did my own thing, that happens to be writing software so I got lucky and got rich by building stuff I thought was nice and needed. I still do that while also doing art (welding sculptures and writing). 2025 was not less vibrant than my childhood. Of course I am the most annoying employee; if you tell me 'have to', I will definitely never ever do it. So I never been an employee; guess that is the luxury you mentioned.
I have no clue how it would have turned out if I would have grown up in a country without a safety net. I hope the same as I never needed that net and will never need it, however I am not so sure; it makes taking risks very easy...
Extreme mental and drug issues are always in the picture with those outcomes, though. The real "safety net" when faced with the possibility of real homelessness is to get the hell away from uber-expensive places like SF and move to at least a semi-rural area where getting access to good shelter is going to be orders of magnitude easier. These are not bad places or areas of poverty or marginalization, people have literally been settled there and building functional livelihoods for generations.
I was homeless in my 20’s and moving, while of course not as straight-forward as buying a bus/train/… ticket, isn’t that difficult. e.g. many truckers are amazing folk who will help a person in need (as long as you are not an addict etc)
Last few years I've been my own boss mostly doing whatever I feel like with several years funds comfortable and no real pressure to do or die. Time hasn't really slowed down. I also took a year completely off work in 2016, that one also passed very quickly.
If anything, having new experiences is what seems to slow down time in my experience. Visiting new locations, doing and learning new things. I suppose more things will be new to the young than the old, so it would make sense as an alternative hypothesis.
I've also had a bad tooth ache since the day before Christmas I haven't been able to get dealt with since all the local dentists are off, and it feels like it's been the longest week in my life. Dunno if I'd recommend it as a way of prolonging the subjective experience of time though.
Another anecdote is that last year I quit coffee cold turkey, and a side effect was that time seemed to slow down significantly. A lot of people seem to be reporting this. Make of it what you want. Quitting coffee also sucks quite a lot, though not as bad as week of severe tooth ache.
So, short story long: Things weren't that bad before and during Christmas, but started getting bad last Friday. So last Saturday I paid a visit to an emergency dentist, who basically shrugged and said come back on Monday when we have more staff. Sunday sucked I was just in pain all day.
But said and done, I came back on Monday, they looked at it again, said it was probably an old filling that was maybe acting up, basically just drilled a bit and filled it back up again. This made it hurt a bit less for about a day (specially during the procedure, even with them drilling into the tooth, local anaesthetic made this the least discomfort I'd been in for almost a week), but since then it's been aching again. It's not as bad as before, but still barely manageable with OTC painkillers.
So tomorrow I'm hitting them up again, hopefully I'm able to convince them to pull the tooth, since it's way back in the mouth and has been nothing but causing me grief since I got the original filling, food getting stuck and causing inflammation, that sort of stuff. The alternative would probably be a root canal, but since it's in a very inaccessible location, that's a real hassle.
Update in case someone somehow got hooked learning about my dentistry adventures. Tooth is now removed. That hurt too. But now the lil' fucker is in the medical waste bin.
My best and “longest” memories are from a two year period spent in the university when I had earned some money in internships and could live with few obligations.
That was the happiest I’ve ever been.
Childhood is mostly blocked out (abusive parents, poverty), and adulthood is mostly work.
Maybe we just remember the periods when we’ve been happy. It would make sense evolutionarily.
i basically never had to work (EU privilege + luck of being born the skill of knowing how to sell to people well) and only worked on stuff that i enjoyed and not a lot of hours (and that turned into millions fast) and my 20s/30s flew like months instead of years and didn't have the intensity of my teen years. I think it's because despite technically travelling and living in different countries a lot, going to a new place is not really a new experience after you visit 7 very different ones. The same with women and a lot of other experiences. Having kids was the only think that surprised me. Making money got old fast (i mean trying to get to the "next" level)
Never been rich but .. who's richer, the one who has more stuff / buying power or the one who has less material needs? Anyway, I was always pretty frugal and lucked out on passive income 6 years ago but even before that I never had full time jobs and all my life I basically worked just enough to get by, never cared much about saving.
From my experience childhood felt like grinding my way to max level in an MMO. Had to be done to start playing the game but didn't really care for it. I had more freedom since I was 18 than before so I cherish those memories more.
>I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money.
>I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing.
I think this tracks though. When you do art or other things you can explore different things. Doing the same thing for 40-60h per week is just not such a varied experience.
Art can turn into work too. Spending ~4-5y on a solo graphic novel[1] was mostly about finding that routine of making sure to spend a few hours of every workday working on the comic instead of just faffing about aimlessly.
I always took it sort of that your mind, duplicates memories, and in your adult life almost every day is more or less the same and it just compacts all those memories and time goes quicker because you don’t remember doing the 9 to 5 thing day after day after day, your brain has no reason to remember that, in childhood significantly more items that pop up throughout the year that are extraordinary that your brain remembers. Also brain elasticity etc.
I, of course, have plenty of vivid memories from childhood. But I've also been fortunate to be able to travel in all senses - quick tourist vacation, a few months backpacking, and multi-year slow travel where I mostly just lived in different places (different nature settings, towns, cities etc).
Tourism is generally forgettable and I don't recommend it to anyone - save the money and do something where you live.
Backpacking feels meaningful in the moment, but is also largely forgettable. I truly have almost no meaningful memories from 2 separate 2 month trips in Europe and southeast Asia.
The slow travel is most recent, was the most "boring" but also, I think, most meaningful as I was explicitly focused on self-reflection and discovery of a more meaningful way to live after many years (or a lifetime, really) of aiming to be a better cog in the machine. I don't have a lot of "memories" - highlights that I reminisce about - from it, but rather various phase shifts/epiphanies in my understanding of myself, life, the world etc...
I now live in relative poverty in a poor country where I have been working for 7+ years to develop a project for the benefit of the multitudes who can't even conceive of being able to do anything that I've just describe. And for whom even childhood is rather joy and wonder-less, because of how hard life is. I'm mostly glued to my computer again, but it's not soul sucking in the way it was in a cubicle with spreadsheets - because the purpose is meaningful.
I do miss the slow travel days - they were absolutely the most enjoyable period of my life. But I've also met people who have done that for decades and they're profoundly sad people - they have no roots or connections anywhere, no meaningful vocation, etc.
A meaningful life is to be actively involved in the sorrows of the world, with joy.
Still, I really ought to get a bit more play and exploration back into my life.
In the past year, I've been coaching teen soccer/football and that has been wonderful. Both to help me fix my desk-broken body, as well as to help them, principally, become better humans. To succeed on the field they need to develop the same characteristics needed to succeed in life - discipline, determination, cooperation, empathy, solidarity, creativity, perspective, vision, patience, and more. The world around them is largely bereft of such things, so it has been challenging.
But they're vastly better at playing now than a year ago, and I've heard they generally behave better at home as well. The difference between this and the article's version of living through your kids is a) they're not my kids and b) I'm focused on helping them become proper adults via play, whereas the article is largely about recreating Neverland where everything is childish. I expect it'll be unlikely that I'll instill much community spirit in them - though, perhaps we'll incorporate some community service into the training at some point. But it all does seem meaningful.
Still, the real focus and crux of my life is the overarching project to help people everywhere become more self-sufficient. Hopefully I'll be finally ready in the next year or so to "go public" with it, and that people will be receptive to using it, collaborating, helping etc...
> Backpacking feels meaningful in the moment, but is also largely forgettable.
Was your schedule oversubscribed in these ? I ask because my experience of pleasure travel is very different. More so when there were (i) very little schedule to speak of, other than start and end dates, (ii) had a partner to share the experience of unplanned discovery to share with.
Both, I think, make a significant difference to the experience.
The other biggie are photographs and writing about it.
I dont have any idea what this means. Could you try again in plain english?
Yes, not having a schedule makes for better travel, as I described in my later multi-year experience. I think most things could probably be made better by having a genuine life partner to share it with. But doing things solo absolutely does not preclude you from meaning. (moreover, I wouldnt describe most romantic relationships as anything resembling a genuine life partner).
Photos and writing are also not inherently meaningful. I did plenty of both and, again, I thought it was all meaningful in the moment, but since realized it was all largely misguided.
If someone were to travel in a genuine manner - where you integrate with local communities, get involved with their traditions, problems etc, then that's an entirely other thing. But just roaming (let alone an itinerary) is largely not actually useful, unless you put it towards something meaningful (eg genuine reflection and improvement, which would largely lead you to realizing that travels themselves are not necessary or even important).
I was asking whether your days were (over) packed with scheduled activities. My best ones had very loose to non-existent schedules.
Other than that our experiences are different and that's ok. People are different. It's always a pleasure to meet my past self through those writings (usually emails to friend and family) and photographs I took or were taken by others in the trip.
Agree with you on the part that it is absolutely possible to have a meaningful trip without a life partner.
i have never traveled with a schedule, even when i was being a "tourist"
also, i probably didnt make this point nearly well enough, but the real point is that travel is completely unnecessary and will absolutely not solve any of your real problems. More likely it will just distract from them, or make them worse. Whatever genuinely beneficial things you and your partner experienced together while travelling could and should be experienced wherever you happen to live.
"travel" is a completely foreign concept to living, that has only become "possible" to most people recently. For millenia, people learned how to live quite well without it.
Definitely agree with your point that travel will not solve problems. Wherever you go there you are. However, we disagree in the value of travel.
We are creatures of our surroundings environment and changing the environment definitely helps regulate/alter internal states. Can it be done without the travel, presumably so, but travel makes it easier.
Besides all this stuff about internal state, that's too new agey for my tastes, travels are fantastic for its experiential / dopaminergic value, especially if it's a place that offers beauty.
My brain responds to the sights and sounds in the serenity of mountains in a way that I cannot recreate in constricted crowded settings of clutter. Maybe some people can, I just simply cannot.
Can one live without traveling, of course one can. One can live bed-ridden, paralysed as a born paraplegic. But that was never the question.
> whereas the article is largely about recreating Neverland where everything is childish
That seams like a rather uncharitable take.
To me it came across as being an adult about simple pleasures and joys. Not fantasy.
Perhaps it is because I super admire my friends that enjoy the simple things (one in particular has been rather successful as well). Other friends have big goals - I struggle with them - too often it looks to me they are partaking in a frustrating game of elusive status. Although as a geek, my status games are quite different from theirs, so perhaps it is just that I am misunderstanding them.
> various phase shifts/epiphanies in my understanding of myself, life, the world etc
That's interesting, and I've had that too when my purpose of traveling is to learn about myself (versus traveling just for pure fun).
> traveling
I've done a huge variety of traveling and long term backpacking (the luck of being paid well for a geeky childhood). My opinions about my experiences really don't match what you have written.
I recently came to realise that my memories of my experiences of early childhood are probably greatly affected by seeing my younger siblings going through those same experiences a few years later. At age five or six I would see my mother reading to them on the sofa and they would be lying with their heads on her tummy feeling her warmth and listening to her heartbeat and stomach gurgles. Seeing this would remind me of when I used to do that, thus reinforcing those memories and probably somewhat distorting them. One of the distortions is that this memory is set in the house we moved to when I was four, and most of my own relevant experiences would have been set in our previous house. I think the accumulation of memories is a bit like training an LLM on a combination of new data and its own data.
Life with young children is actually mostly dreary and stressful; the fun and excitement and reliving of childhood memories is 1% or less of life, in my experience. By time I realize I am having that <1% experience it is over. I still feel as though I am chasing after something vanishing and never catching it.
Physical Health, mental health, the economy, social disorder, family; we can influence these things that cause stress but often we can't "control" them.
You can't necessarily control external events. But you can, to a significant degree, control the effect those things have on your chronic stress levels. This requires cultivating a certain level of maturity and mental discipline.
I am sorry that this is your experience. A newborn brings in so much responsibility and unknowns and there is no rest - as with anything with a lot of responsibility, unknowns and no rest, it can cause tremendous amount of stress.
For centuries we lived in large families and those within communities where everyone witnessed birth at home with multiple siblings and responsibilities around raising children from a small age. The current atomic families with two adult both completely inexperienced in raising a child is unprecedented in history.
I agree that reliving memories is not a large part, though it is impactful. But it's not dreary ... large part is also having fun and good time with your kids.
> We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year.
I think this explanation is true but incomplete. I believe it's also related to Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency [0], the way I see it, if an organism is smaller it has a higher frequency, it sees more image per second, therefore perception of time is slower. (E.g. a fly sees you moving really slowly). Maybe it's related to the processing time of images, with smaller brains insect can process more of them per second.
Maybe humans process more images as children, therefore see the time time going slower.
It's been a while I didn't think about this, maybe some studies have been made in the past years.
That is largely true across a variety of sports. eSports like Starcraft typically peak between 18-22, and it's possible the real age is younger but minors are usually excluded from pro leagues because they can't sign contracts. Gymnastics seems to peak between age 13-16; it was enough of a problem that the FIG set an age limit of 16 so the sport wasn't dominated by prepubescent girls age 13-14 (18 for men because the events tend to be more strength-based than coordination-based). Top table tennis players usually tend to start between 4-6 [1] and win their championships around their early 20s. [2]
There's some lag between starting and being world-class simply because continued practice makes you better. Plus, you get much better at sustained focus and being able to connect disparate training experiences together as your consciousness develops in the teens.
Part of the gymnastics thing is flexibility of the young; if toddlers could be coordinated and strong enough they’d likely dominate as they can contort their bodies into positions impossible for adults.
IMO there is also muscle memory, strategy ect. Being able to process more information doesn't mean it's processed better, the contrary actually if you think about processing times
> The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This is the paragraph that grabbed my attention. I wasn't expecting to find something so human.
I remember coming to the realization during my more challenging school years that waiting all week for Saturday to come was literally wishing my life away. I didn't know what burnout was at the time, but an angel of a friend recognized it and helped me understand.
I have been reading the comment by Jim Grey on the bottom of the article, and I was thinking, is that mostly what we are - and why people like novelty (especially in tech) so much - because it makes us feel young ? Or maybe not young, but teaches us something new, learning something active - worth remembering.
> We also think that novelty rivets our attention and makes time seem to slow down. Childhood is full of novel experiences that, as they repeat, become less so. True novelty becomes unusual when you’re pushing 60 as I am now. The brain says, “Oh, that again,” and glosses past it.
> But what about those of us who are well into the flattening part of the curve, what can we do for ourselves? You can seek new experiences perhaps. If time goes faster because your life has fewer firsts and more routine, then it can be extended by adding firsts. You can learn new things, travel, take up hobbies, or new careers.
> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back. You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.
I like to think that life slows down once you form a stable image and story of yourself. The more you convince yourself that that image is fixed, the faster time will go by. That might justify why childhood seems longer, since that image seems to form around adolescence.
Experiencing new "firsts" but keeping that image of yourselfe fixed just works for a while. That is why it may lead to resentment, as the article says.
So dont fool yourself: some image of who you are gives you some stability, but just use it for that, so that you dont run crazy with options.
If you treat every event as something that might reshape your ego, then suddenly a big number of experiences are new, and time suddenly slows dont. It may even appear to dissapear from time to time.
We were discussing this last night. The solution seems to be we need to do very boring things each day, like stare at paint, watch grapes grow, etc, but then do that with different people in different places. In this way, each day seems very long, and retrospectively the changing of place and boring thing means there's a lot to remember.
I think it does mean though that optimising for this is probably not the thing to do.
It's a perception thing --- a given period of time is related to one's total life experience/recent memory --- to a toddler, a week is a long time because at that age one cannot remember many weeks and the weeks which one remembers are full of new experiences each of which is vivid and fresh, while to a person in middle age, there are many, many weeks accumulated into many repeated years, and the experiences are much the same and repeated.
The big thing which we need to change and solve is education --- I have memories of going to a school in Mississippi which my perception of was that it was quite well run, and that classes in it were divided between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, while academic classes were attended at one's ability level (4 grade cap up through 8th grade) and that students who progressed beyond high school courses were able to take college courses, some teachers being accredited as faculty at a local college, or instructors from that institution being brought to the school for classes at need.
Maybe AP classes offer a similar facility in public school systems? Though one wants to cue the _Doonesbury_ cartoon of the college dean who after being told that his entire Freshman class is taking remedial 051 level _everything_ is running a glorified pre school.
Roger Zelazny made much of college education becoming quite a different thing when Samuel Eliot of Harvard made the conceptual leap of dividing education by the college credit hour and allowing customization beyond the rote repetition of previous generations in his wonderful novel _Doorways in the Sand_ --- perhaps that should be extended down on some sort of skills basis? The school I attended after Mississippi did reading with a pair of boxes of Scholastic Reading Assessment (SRA) booklets, which, not understanding that one was supposed to do a two or three at each level and get approval on before moving to the next level, I did _all_ of in a matter of weeks, which left me with nothing to do for the balance of the school year but go to the (meager) elementary school library.
Childhood is only half of subjective life if you stagnate as an adult. If you keep changing your routine, you'll find each year has just as much subjective experience as the previous.
Start a company in an industry where you have no experience. Move to a country where nobody speaks a language you understand. Find a new sport and commit to being a top 0.1% participant (for most sports that don't air regularly on national television, this can be done in a year).
If subjective life is speeding up, throw yourself some curve balls.
If life is moving too fast, then make specific choices to slow down. Take up hiking or camping. Do things with your family if that's a valid option for you. Turn your phone off. Be mindful of your body and emotions.
Lots of small things that can help you slow down a little.
My life has had a 5 year event horizon since I left my family home. I.e. every 5 years has seen major changes I could not have predicted.
For much of that there have been critical pressures making most days important. Which makes them memorable.
Subjectively and objectively, things have changed so much, and so many times, I feel like I have had several lives, so far.
Right now I am in a “make” or “break” situation going three productive years. I solved some very difficult problems that I put myself in a “must solve” position. Each problem solved had significant life impact.
The indicators for “make” are going up month-to-month now, making it a tough but intense and wonderful time. Feels a lot like my early 20’s when I started a dream business (for me) while in school.
Definitely don’t experience time as indicated by those graphs.
Right its a weird take for me too. Childhood was fun sure, but you were stuck in a time/place not of your choosing, with others making many/most decisions for you.
As an adult, especially a well paid SWE like many on HN.. you can create the life, make the decisions and have the experiences that you want. Your life is as vibrant as you choose it to be.
Much of the stuff I used to read about or watch on TV as a precocious child.. I can just go buy/see/do with the agency & money I have as an adult.
Sure you have a 9-5 (or 8-6, or 7-7) job but you used to go to school and after school activities all day as a kid probably too. It’s your choice to do something or nothing with your hours of free time after work and weekends.
Small children in the picture adds additional time constraints, but should also bring additional vividness/subjective time experience to your life.
my best friend had kids before me and told me something before I had kids that changed my life forever - “I was here first and I have my life, the kids need to adapt to my life just as much as I have to adapt to theirs.” I have followed this mantra for the past 12 years and I think both my life and my kids life is much better for it. I see too many parents turning their lives upside down after they became parents, I have not much at all. I am definitely more risk averse which is probably the biggest personal change I made but otherwise I do everything I’ve done before I became a parent and my kid has experienced extreme levels of boredom while waiting for me to finish what I am doing
In the US, unless you have a few million saved up, children will probably make most people more conservative.
Wake up, drop kid off at school, go to job allowing one to afford health insurance for kids, come home, take kids to after school activity, eat, sleep, repeat.
A child is from the parents perspective a lot of repetitive motion over a very long time, and, I think, a main contributor to speeding up your relative passage of time.
Which you might find super rewarding! But I am fairly confused by the claim that children are interesting and wonder how people spent their pre-children time to arrive at that conclusion – or how much they actually are involved in all the parts of taking care of their kid.
A typical person in the western world spends like 4 hours on their phone each day. They also spend 8 hours at work, doing mostly the same-ish thing over and over again. Then there's commute along the same routes, and our habits and ways of life we calcify into. The brief moments of mental freedom are often terrorized by the anxiety induced by what we consumed during our phone binges. Let's add some degree of sleep deprivation into the mix. Might all of that have something to do with how we perceive life and how fast and meaninglessly it goes by?
Does putting a graph make a subjective feeling scientific? For me the past year was like 10 years, and who knows for the rest of the world.
Time is relative no matter what age you are and probably depends how much has changed in your life (maybe I should put a graph here to make it more scientific :)) )
The graph is just to clearly convey the idea, not to give it any more connotation of rigor than the idea itself has. The idea has a long enough history and enough research behind it to be in psychology textbooks and be referenced on Wikipedia, but it seems to resonate for some people and not others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#:~:text=Propor...
"The basic stratum of the personality and the associated underlying belief systems that hold it in place derive from a number of factors: the shadow aspects of parents; the same unresolved elements in the lives of grandparents (the ovum from which the mother sprang was already formed at eleven weeks gestation in the maternal grandmother); a commensurate and immeasurable twine of psychogenetic ancestral memories; the prenate’s own “baggage” from pre-conception; the experience of the conception itself; the phenomenology of implantation; and the whole duration of the gestation period; all together form layers of affect in this self-forging process."
Every assertion in this article is completely alien to me to the point that I can not even comprehend that people live like that, it seems untenable to life to me. A year did not feel like a fifth of my life when I was 5, I could not even comprehend a year in that sense and very much lived in the present. Now in my 40s I don't see a year as just another year and still don't think of it as one 45th of my life. When I was 5 I saw where I was, now I see how far I have come and how far I have to go; all that has really changed is that I have come to understand how the past and the future define the present instead of just accepting that this is what I am currently experiencing, I understand cause and effect, consequence.
Does this article seem accurate to your perception of life? It would explain some things regarding my interactions with most people if I am so completely missing something so fundemental about their existence.
Edit: Why does conveying my experience and desiring to understand the experience of others get a downvote? Genuinely curious.
Edit the second: I just started to wonder if this article is going to affect my birthday in a couple weeks. Part of me feels like I am going to think "well that is 1/46th of my life gone" and have a midlife crisis. The other part of me remembers Zeno and his paradox and giggles.
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
Is it just me or is this just not true?
I remember vibes about childhood: long days of boredom, especially in school; summer days in fields and by the river; days of learning how to code, of reading loads of books. More than anything else, a lot of time to fill not otherwise spoken for.
But specific events I can recall, there are far more of them from adulthood. Amazing experiences, things that changed the way I live, they were adult events and decisions.
That's assuming novelty is the only way to live long subjectively. Is that a decent assumption? Personally I find subjective life longer if you just take your time, no pun intended.
I’m going to combine this information with another idea. The second idea comes from Tony Robbins, who tells us we can have mastery over our memories and use them to influence our psyche.
You can magnify and clarify pleasing and positive memories. You can diminish and distance unpleasant or painful ones. This can change your view of the world, for better.
I have a pet theory that everybody gets one lifetime, and no matter how long that life is, it always subjectively feels like one lifetime. Whether you live three days or a hundred years, it will always feel about the same amount of time, both interminable and too short.
This was a both a nice, and extremely depressing, read.
It sounds like the author has had a good childhood and is a good parent to their kids. Wonderful.
But the whole article is appropriately summarized by their final sentences
> You recreate your memories in them. They recreate childishness in you. Life folds back on itself, but not quite the same. It loops, but continues. A helix.
>
> Life, then, is the creation of childhoods. You have yours, and then you get to create childhoods for others. The time is yours, and theirs
They have completely given up on their own life, and the possibility that they, too, could live in a child-like way, where they have their own wonder, joy etc.
Eg
> Children make you childlike. Skipping through the park as an adult man raises eyebrows (deservedly or not.) Skipping through the park as an adult man with your son or daughter skipping next to you on your arm is one of life’s greatest joys, both for you and for anyone who sees you.
Why do you care about people's eyebrows? Go skip, play, dance, be curious, be creative - whether just for the sake of it, or also in your "work".
Your kids need to see you actually living so that they, too, might be able to actually live once they've moved into adulthood.
> Your Christmas trees get smaller, your lights less ambitious. Some find all of these fun for their own sake, but if you are not the type of person who finds ritual appealing you will likely find yourself slowly disconnecting from holidays. You will find yourself asking what all the hustle bustle is for.
>
> Kids. That’s who it’s for. Of all the experiences that children renew, traditions are renewed the most. When you put up a Christmas tree, it’s for kids. When you decorate for Halloween, it’s for kids. All of these holidays are in essence a celebration of childhood, and children let you see them all for the first time again. If you remember the excitement of galumphing
Christmas, and other traditions, are NOT about trees and lights and presents. Thanksgiving is not about waiting to stampede a Walmart to buy crap. It's about genuine communion with family, friends, or - if you're particularly clued in - even strangers who don't have such traditions available to them.
And so on.
They talk about the joy of showing kids Saturn in a telescope. I won't argue with that. But that doesn't mean an adult can't have joy in discovering new things in the cosmos - be it through a career or hobby in telescopes, or exploring all parts of nature, from microbes to volcanoes. Whether as a hobby or a career.
This person is missing the point of everything.
We must do as nietzsche described and progress from a camel, to a lion, to a child again. Joseph Campbell - a wonderful interpreter and guide of all of these things - explains it all well, a quote of which is at this page https://centeroflighttulsa.org/three-transformations-spirit/
The metaphors of camel, lion and child have nothing to do with finding joy, experiencing life, or whatever that could matter in the context of this posting, and Joseph Campbell is pretty weak resource on Nietzsche.
No, it has everything to do with it all - particularly becoming a child again, rather than living via your children, who will eventually no longer be children and then leave you.
As for campbell, he studied him plenty and even curated a "portable jung" compendium. Moreover, his description of the camel, lion, child (from, at the very least, Zarathustra) is exceedingly accurate.
As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.
The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.
Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.
Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.
My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.
The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.
Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:
And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."
Half of your life is childhood because you weighed subjective experiences differently when you had no knowledge or life experiences so you should change your life based on that situation where you were in Plato’s cave?
Actually fuck even this title is bad. If life is subjective, don’t ask how “we” should live. Subjectiveness means that’s a “you” question.
I think there's something to this idea in the article. I remember my childhood well, perhaps because the cast is still somewhat intact, and we all had a good time. The time after finishing school is more blocky: a few years working in certain places, meeting my wife and having kids. My adult life takes up more calendar time, but less "experienced time". My cousin was on a chat last night, explaining that his day is taken up by taking three kids to different schools, then picking them up again. Over and over, but somehow it is one experience. Plenty of people will tell you the same about going to work.
By contrast, you remember things in your youth that happened only once, like spraining my ankle at a crossing with a train oncoming (it was less dramatic that it sounds lol), or going to a music festival, or finishing high school.
One thing that maybe needs to be talked about is that you can simply relive your life. This works best if you had a good time. So the answer to the question is not just that you should look for new firsts, you can replay some old tapes.
I'm lucky enough that I know people from every time in my life. I have a chat group with three other guys that I met when we were 4 years old, over 40 years ago. They sent messages last night. I got a message from my first grade teacher, and my high school English teacher. I have a chat with all my buddies from school, where we exchange messages that are about as mature as when we were teenagers. People I worked with, I keep in touch with.
I have an online photo album that is basically the only data I care to have a backup of. Now and again, I flip through it, and I see what I was up to, and have nice thoughts about that.
It might sound a bit weird for a mid-40s guy to be so resigned to being old. But I was talking to one of the mentioned buddies from nursery, and I turns out the big milestones have happened already. We already finished school, got jobs, had kids. There's a lot of little things to tick off, but they are little things: visiting various interesting sites, going to some concert, and so on.
My kids go to a stem focused magnet school. I realize different cultures value different things but its depressing to me how many kids are pushed to dedicate their whole childhood to get into top Universities. We'd go to the beach and their friends couldn't come because they were doing extra APs or science fair or Math Olympics or similar. These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
I was partially (largely?) one of those other kids. Honestly, I loved it and, though it wasn’t perfect, I definitely wouldn’t re-roll my childhood if given the chance.
Later in life, I managed to catch up in dating and other aspects, but kept a good streak of nerd pride and am totally happy about that.
If you were to have observed my childhood and got depressed about it, that interpretation would have been misguided.
Yeah you're right, I was a pretty geeky teenager myself. Its a tough winner takes all world, maybe working your ass off in HS is a good strategy that I messed up.
Stockholm syndrome. And also you were force to invest a considerable amount of time in a specific activity.
You say "were force[d] to"; I say "chose to".
Only one of the two of us was there.
> These kids got good grades but never went on a date, couldn't drive or go anywhere by themselves.
One of my friends in high school was like that - always studying, always doing extra classes. Straight As even without it, good grades, six highers one year and another two and four CSYS by the time he left. Then off to Uni where he got a first with distinction in Business Management. He never did anything but study, although he did play football a bit.
In the intervening 30-odd years he's mostly worked as a deputy manager in a supermarket in a small town maybe an hour's drive from the slightly smaller town I live in. He's never done anything else. Moved a couple of hundred miles from where we went to school, got a job, worked his way up to assistant manager.
I see him sometimes in passing when I'm working up that way.
We must imagine Stephen happy.
I think time perception is contingent on cultural and lifestyle factors, I don't recognise it in my own life. My twenties (chaotic) lasted forever, now in my 30s, this last year in particular felt incredibly long (it was eventful and full of change).
I rarely find myself on "autopilot". Is that why?
I think you are on to something.
My theory is that the brain is good at compressing memories, so if you do mostly the same things every day it's not stored as a separate memory.
I actually felt my 30s as one of the longest periods in my life, because of things that happened in my life
It seems so obvious to me. It's all about what you do with your time, if you're stuck in a boring routine of commute, repetitive work, and a few soulless vacations here and there you'll build virtually no memorable moments and it will all feel like a blur
Move to a new city, get a radically different job, get a kid, switch up your routine, pick up unusual hobbies/interests and every year will feel like a new life. Childhood feels very long because you have to go through mandatory checkpoints imposed from the outside, add that to your adult life and it'll feel the same. Why don't you go get a parachute intro course next weekend? Or rent a car on a race track? Go ice climbing next winter? Join a yoga club, a music class, a reading group, a dance class, &c. try things you don't necessarily want to do and you'll open many doors.
Most humans have a tendency to go the path of least resistance, and in today's world of working from home and unlimited screen based entertainment you can very easily waste decades your life
.
I would agree with this from subjective experience. My non-IT based career has been highly volatile with unintended unemployment, companies going out of business, changing entire sectors and roles many times. Huge volatility in relationships and partners also.
Much downside to this but the upside is my life feels incredibly long and I haven't even reached 50 yet. I have already lived numerous lives compared to the self that would have had a very stable life the last 25 years. My working life feels vastly longer than my very stable childhood. That came and went in the blink of an eye from this perspective.
right things that are eventful and full of change take a long time, childhood is generally eventful and full of change. If having an eventful and changing life increases the amount of subjective life we experience how should we live.
My childhood had less change than my adulthood. I've lived in different countries as an adult; I spent my childhood in one village near a town. The events I value most and recall most strongly all happened as an adult. I struggle to remember really significant childhood events. There were a few, like finally grokking a for loop in BASIC, or my first machine code execution, but the more common remembering is of undifferentiated days in school, reading, warm summer days.
But as an adult, learning how to ride motorcycles, touring; fine dining and discovering a love for fine wine; travel generally; the perspective that living in multiple countries gives you; the birth of my son, and how it changed my perception of my parents; these things were more significant and still more salient to me now. I am a very different man to the one I was at 20, and I feel I changed more between 25 and 35 than I did between 10 and 20.
Autopilot is a choice- most people are on it, some aren't. Society has always been like this. Society is attacking self aware and fully conscious people more than ever now though :(
Paranoid people sometimes perceive normal levels of apathy and friction in society as intentional attacks.
Everybody, looks like we got one. Attack!
Regarding the perception of time, I have a complete opposite perception of the author. He mentions 20 as a middle point. I was after that, in my 20s when I first took real full control. I can remember the times before that. But I did so many "firsts" after that! My childhood years feel very short and boring to me; while the time after that feels gigantic and exciting.
There is so much in the world and so precious little time, I cannot really imagine running out of new "firsts" to do. Just I think many people never take control.
(The article itself seems to be more about raising children, being dad and fulfillment than the comments and title suggest)
Whilst I did more new things in my 20s, I do recall my perception of days as a child being much much longer. I have distinct recollection of feeling almost clinical depression when I was about 8 after being told that we would be going to the seaside tomorrow and not today. To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.
> To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.
For me as a child, even getting a haircut was a dreary experience. It felt as an eternity I had to sit mostly immobile, while somebody else maneuvered sharp blades around my head. Nowadays it feels like I barely accomodated in the chair, it's already over.
Children run on “sleeps” and eventually weeks - a single day is such a large percentage of their life, after all!
And each year is new, even if just teachers changing; but most have new things you can do.
I'm 22 and since late college things don't excite me the way they used to, even when I enjoy them. I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.
The 'vicarious firsts' framing doesn't quite land for me because of that, but the 'urgency that won't let you drift' observation resonates. Maybe what matters isn't renewed wonder but having something -- family, friends, caring about the world -- that demands presence. The forcing function matters more than the feelings themselves.
My dad always says something related in nature: caring about and loving your family makes you a better person more than it helps your family.
> I sometimes wonder if this is what happens when people get older and happened to me early, or if it's just a personality trait.
It's a cliché but I (almost 50 years old) have found that when you get older, you notice patterns, Something "new" is often just an incremental improvement or two existing things combined.
Rust doesn't excite me much, and Go seems too boring to use for my side projects. Elixir + Phoenix LiveView is the only "new" thing that has excited me in the past decade, but I can't stand the Elixir syntax. Maybe it's because I have seen so much change during the years? If someone started out with React, a new version seems like a big deal, but to me it is just an incremental improvement.
When I was a kid, a new CPU or GPU had an extreme impact compared to the previous generations. We went from crappy Wolfenstein graphics to Quake in a few years. I have stopped following new releases now, because they don't really do much.
The same applies to mobile phones. The next iphone / samsung model doesn't really motivate me to replace my existing phone.
Thanks for sharing insight. I also feel like a couple decades ago, technology was also reasonably simple and understandable. Right now, everything is obfuscated and complex. Maybe that's natural, but makes it harder to get excited about seeing new things.
Similar to you, I don't care about mobile phones anymore. Instead of fancy hardware or features what I care is simple, secure, and private phone (open-source OS). I used to get excited on new models.
Recently a couple of my friends were talking about "Telegram vs Whatsapp." One is better because it has this feature, etc. They asked my opinion too. I don't care which is better, I only use them because I have to use them for contacting family and some friends. I just need the send text and image functionality (and I don't use it for private / secure texting).
There’s a term “geek out” or similar for getting deep into the details of something; especially technology. But it’s rare and not really needed for the use of it - there are people who geek out over phones or model trains or LEGO, etc.
But for most of things in life you just need to use them.
The hard part is finding something to geek out on that doesn’t turn you into a curmudgeon insisting everyone is “doing it wrong”.
> This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
This is just not my experience at all. I had a great childhood, but ask me about the most vibrant moments, and very few of them came before I was 18. The births of my children, my wedding, meeting my wife, lazy afternoons in college...
The one thing that childhood memories usually have is protection from the “real world” - looking back you realize that exciting vacation to a national park was because your dad lost his job that summer and couldn’t afford anything more, but had time. For you, it was amazing, but probably not as much for your parents worrying about where the next job would be.
> If you take this model literally, that your experience of an interval reflects what fraction of your life the interval is
I don't accept that premise. I'm in my mid-fifties now, and a year is still a long time. They years get short if you fall into a routine and never do anything new, but it is easy enough not to fall into that trap. And I say that as someone who thrives in doing the same routine every day. I get my variety in the details, doing different projects, having different conversations, trying new foods, exploring new places.
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
I've found that we all have different memories. I know people who cannot remember their childhood at all, and I've known people who remember it well. But not having vibrant memories of your adult life? That feels a little depressing. Adulthood is when you step up and become your own self, directing your own life. It is when I climbed mountains, explored the world, met new people, tried different careers, moved to new towns, had long-term relationships including children, created art, studied subjects beyond the standard high school education. Childhood was OK, but was fairly anxiety-filled, at least for me. The truly amazing experiences in life were as an adult.
The author addresses this, of course. But he does so in a really odd way:
> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back.
This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
> This is where my reaction was: "Dude, wat??" If adult experiences make you resentful, something is really off. If a good experience makes you wish you could go back to being a child, I'd be recommending therapy because that is not the reaction most adults have to new experiences. I don't say that to be mean, either - if your childhood memories are that much stronger than adult ones, that is not the typical human experience, and I would sincerely be asking for medical and psych support to figure out if something is wrong.
I'm describing my impression of other people's experience there, not mine, (note the word "exclusively") the sort of downside I see of living an inward life of hedonism.
Sure enough, if you model life experience as a 2d plot, you are going to have to simplify things quite a bit. Yes, time "felt" longer for a child (especially when the child has to wait or wants something yet to come, less so when it's time spent on video games), and children are particularly impatient compared to adults.
But is that experiencing life, though? How many strong memories from that "logarithmic first half" of my life do I have? Actually very few compared to what came later, and they are not particularly compelling either.
My guess is that the author just hit mid-life crisis after having spent one or two decades in an office. Boring mindless job is what makes life experience to plateau, not adulthood. If I think of the most accomplished persons that I know, who've done many things with their life, I can't imagine them saying that their childhood was half of their life. They would probably laugh at the idea.
Or maybe he hasn't reached that crisis yet, since he finds solace in the idea that his child is doing the living for him. Wait until the kids leave home, for the log to turn into a exponential panic.
I think you nailed it. This person is not living, and may never live. When their birds fly the coop and, worse, when they themselves retire, they're in for a whole world of emptiness.
This is something more dangerous that people realize, especially those “working for retirement” - if you only live to work, and then retire, you may find you retire from living, too.
Seen it a few too many times. Live life today, people!
“ So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
“ And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today”
I was absolutely not advocating for not having any thought for the future, nor for "living in the moment".
I was saying that you must do both - dont just slave away and expect that you'll live when you're retired (a lifestyle which makes it less likely that you would even live until retirement age, let alone be physically or even mentally capable of enjoying retirement).
Instead, live in a way such that there it is meaningful while you do it, and it also prepares you for the future. Again, this would also have the benefit of showing your kids and others how to do this themselves.
That’s fine, but the incongruence comes when one expects unlimited supply of healthcare and a cash payment for decades in old age. Especially if one didn’t raise enough productive kids to pay for it, so then the question becomes if you’re not planning for tomorrow, why are others who are planning for tomorrow paying for your tomorrow?
As the other comment pointed out; living for today doesn’t mean NOT planning for the future.
The key is not assuming that some future date will bring happiness - that is something that has to be found each day.
nice try ron paul
Puzzling reply (assuming ron paul is being used as a pejorative), considering your adjacent comment seems to agree with my sentiment.
no, not even slightly. Im very much in favour of socializing all sorts of things.
Ron paul was used to describe the sort of (seemingly) libertarian "leave me alone, i dont want to know you. please go die" views you espoused.
I did not espouse such views. There exist resource constraints in reality which contradict the attitude presented by the post I responded to, unless they were willing to forego those socialized benefits.
Best way is, don't make up new rules, don't come up with some new analysis and new ways of living etc. None of that is needed. Human life hasn't started just yesterday. Just live the way your ancestors lived. Don't give too much importance to children. Don't spend too much attention on them. Mind your work and let children mind their observation of the world around them.
> This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
Could anyone who is extremely fortunate and never had to work for money share their experience on this?
I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money. Both were fun, but the remaining memories differ by intensity.
I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing. Why are the first three or so years excluded from this? It seems more likely that new experiences make more impact, or that repeated memories make them more intense. Or dozens of other theories.
My family was not wealthy but I got the luck being born in the EU in a country where edu and Healthcare were basically free and you really cannot end up under a bridge unless extreme mental (and drugs issues that follow that) problems. My parents, even though we did not have much, always taught us to never follow orders unless you think they make sense and follow our own path. I guess that is why I mostly have no difference in vividness; I always did my own thing, that happens to be writing software so I got lucky and got rich by building stuff I thought was nice and needed. I still do that while also doing art (welding sculptures and writing). 2025 was not less vibrant than my childhood. Of course I am the most annoying employee; if you tell me 'have to', I will definitely never ever do it. So I never been an employee; guess that is the luxury you mentioned.
I have no clue how it would have turned out if I would have grown up in a country without a safety net. I hope the same as I never needed that net and will never need it, however I am not so sure; it makes taking risks very easy...
Extreme mental and drug issues are always in the picture with those outcomes, though. The real "safety net" when faced with the possibility of real homelessness is to get the hell away from uber-expensive places like SF and move to at least a semi-rural area where getting access to good shelter is going to be orders of magnitude easier. These are not bad places or areas of poverty or marginalization, people have literally been settled there and building functional livelihoods for generations.
This doesn't make any kind of sense. There's plenty of homeless people outside of expensive cities.
You say "move", but you must mean "get moved" since homeless people aren't known to have the finances required to travel to another city
I was homeless in my 20’s and moving, while of course not as straight-forward as buying a bus/train/… ticket, isn’t that difficult. e.g. many truckers are amazing folk who will help a person in need (as long as you are not an addict etc)
Last few years I've been my own boss mostly doing whatever I feel like with several years funds comfortable and no real pressure to do or die. Time hasn't really slowed down. I also took a year completely off work in 2016, that one also passed very quickly.
If anything, having new experiences is what seems to slow down time in my experience. Visiting new locations, doing and learning new things. I suppose more things will be new to the young than the old, so it would make sense as an alternative hypothesis.
I've also had a bad tooth ache since the day before Christmas I haven't been able to get dealt with since all the local dentists are off, and it feels like it's been the longest week in my life. Dunno if I'd recommend it as a way of prolonging the subjective experience of time though.
Another anecdote is that last year I quit coffee cold turkey, and a side effect was that time seemed to slow down significantly. A lot of people seem to be reporting this. Make of it what you want. Quitting coffee also sucks quite a lot, though not as bad as week of severe tooth ache.
In the present moment, time passes slow when something boring or painful happens, and passes fast for exciting or pleasant experiences.
But in hindsight, time passes slow in periods where you had many new experiences and is almost missing in periods of routine.
So an exciting experience might be fast in the moment and slow in hindsight.
Oh, my dear, thats hell! > I've also had a bad tooth ache since the day before Christmas <
Wasnt there any emergency dentist available? In my location, there are those for these reasons.
So, short story long: Things weren't that bad before and during Christmas, but started getting bad last Friday. So last Saturday I paid a visit to an emergency dentist, who basically shrugged and said come back on Monday when we have more staff. Sunday sucked I was just in pain all day.
But said and done, I came back on Monday, they looked at it again, said it was probably an old filling that was maybe acting up, basically just drilled a bit and filled it back up again. This made it hurt a bit less for about a day (specially during the procedure, even with them drilling into the tooth, local anaesthetic made this the least discomfort I'd been in for almost a week), but since then it's been aching again. It's not as bad as before, but still barely manageable with OTC painkillers.
So tomorrow I'm hitting them up again, hopefully I'm able to convince them to pull the tooth, since it's way back in the mouth and has been nothing but causing me grief since I got the original filling, food getting stuck and causing inflammation, that sort of stuff. The alternative would probably be a root canal, but since it's in a very inaccessible location, that's a real hassle.
Update in case someone somehow got hooked learning about my dentistry adventures. Tooth is now removed. That hurt too. But now the lil' fucker is in the medical waste bin.
My best and “longest” memories are from a two year period spent in the university when I had earned some money in internships and could live with few obligations.
That was the happiest I’ve ever been.
Childhood is mostly blocked out (abusive parents, poverty), and adulthood is mostly work.
Maybe we just remember the periods when we’ve been happy. It would make sense evolutionarily.
i basically never had to work (EU privilege + luck of being born the skill of knowing how to sell to people well) and only worked on stuff that i enjoyed and not a lot of hours (and that turned into millions fast) and my 20s/30s flew like months instead of years and didn't have the intensity of my teen years. I think it's because despite technically travelling and living in different countries a lot, going to a new place is not really a new experience after you visit 7 very different ones. The same with women and a lot of other experiences. Having kids was the only think that surprised me. Making money got old fast (i mean trying to get to the "next" level)
Never been rich but .. who's richer, the one who has more stuff / buying power or the one who has less material needs? Anyway, I was always pretty frugal and lucked out on passive income 6 years ago but even before that I never had full time jobs and all my life I basically worked just enough to get by, never cared much about saving.
From my experience childhood felt like grinding my way to max level in an MMO. Had to be done to start playing the game but didn't really care for it. I had more freedom since I was 18 than before so I cherish those memories more.
The MMO is a really great example because “working life” is often compared to raiding end-game dungeons (or vice versa).
Some really enjoy that, but the journey to max level was always more interesting to me.
There is a way to reroll; at least vicariously.
>I find that the years that I spent on art (playing around, learning new things, not taking other peoples' orders) lasted longer than the ones I spent doing software development for money.
>I personally don't find the logarithmic experience theory convincing.
I think this tracks though. When you do art or other things you can explore different things. Doing the same thing for 40-60h per week is just not such a varied experience.
Art can turn into work too. Spending ~4-5y on a solo graphic novel[1] was mostly about finding that routine of making sure to spend a few hours of every workday working on the comic instead of just faffing about aimlessly.
1: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/
What gave you the idea to write a graphic novel in the first place? What's your workflow?
I always took it sort of that your mind, duplicates memories, and in your adult life almost every day is more or less the same and it just compacts all those memories and time goes quicker because you don’t remember doing the 9 to 5 thing day after day after day, your brain has no reason to remember that, in childhood significantly more items that pop up throughout the year that are extraordinary that your brain remembers. Also brain elasticity etc.
I, of course, have plenty of vivid memories from childhood. But I've also been fortunate to be able to travel in all senses - quick tourist vacation, a few months backpacking, and multi-year slow travel where I mostly just lived in different places (different nature settings, towns, cities etc).
Tourism is generally forgettable and I don't recommend it to anyone - save the money and do something where you live.
Backpacking feels meaningful in the moment, but is also largely forgettable. I truly have almost no meaningful memories from 2 separate 2 month trips in Europe and southeast Asia.
The slow travel is most recent, was the most "boring" but also, I think, most meaningful as I was explicitly focused on self-reflection and discovery of a more meaningful way to live after many years (or a lifetime, really) of aiming to be a better cog in the machine. I don't have a lot of "memories" - highlights that I reminisce about - from it, but rather various phase shifts/epiphanies in my understanding of myself, life, the world etc...
I now live in relative poverty in a poor country where I have been working for 7+ years to develop a project for the benefit of the multitudes who can't even conceive of being able to do anything that I've just describe. And for whom even childhood is rather joy and wonder-less, because of how hard life is. I'm mostly glued to my computer again, but it's not soul sucking in the way it was in a cubicle with spreadsheets - because the purpose is meaningful.
I do miss the slow travel days - they were absolutely the most enjoyable period of my life. But I've also met people who have done that for decades and they're profoundly sad people - they have no roots or connections anywhere, no meaningful vocation, etc.
A meaningful life is to be actively involved in the sorrows of the world, with joy.
Still, I really ought to get a bit more play and exploration back into my life.
In the past year, I've been coaching teen soccer/football and that has been wonderful. Both to help me fix my desk-broken body, as well as to help them, principally, become better humans. To succeed on the field they need to develop the same characteristics needed to succeed in life - discipline, determination, cooperation, empathy, solidarity, creativity, perspective, vision, patience, and more. The world around them is largely bereft of such things, so it has been challenging.
But they're vastly better at playing now than a year ago, and I've heard they generally behave better at home as well. The difference between this and the article's version of living through your kids is a) they're not my kids and b) I'm focused on helping them become proper adults via play, whereas the article is largely about recreating Neverland where everything is childish. I expect it'll be unlikely that I'll instill much community spirit in them - though, perhaps we'll incorporate some community service into the training at some point. But it all does seem meaningful.
Still, the real focus and crux of my life is the overarching project to help people everywhere become more self-sufficient. Hopefully I'll be finally ready in the next year or so to "go public" with it, and that people will be receptive to using it, collaborating, helping etc...
> Backpacking feels meaningful in the moment, but is also largely forgettable.
Was your schedule oversubscribed in these ? I ask because my experience of pleasure travel is very different. More so when there were (i) very little schedule to speak of, other than start and end dates, (ii) had a partner to share the experience of unplanned discovery to share with.
Both, I think, make a significant difference to the experience.
The other biggie are photographs and writing about it.
> Was your schedule oversubscribed in these ?
I dont have any idea what this means. Could you try again in plain english?
Yes, not having a schedule makes for better travel, as I described in my later multi-year experience. I think most things could probably be made better by having a genuine life partner to share it with. But doing things solo absolutely does not preclude you from meaning. (moreover, I wouldnt describe most romantic relationships as anything resembling a genuine life partner).
Photos and writing are also not inherently meaningful. I did plenty of both and, again, I thought it was all meaningful in the moment, but since realized it was all largely misguided.
If someone were to travel in a genuine manner - where you integrate with local communities, get involved with their traditions, problems etc, then that's an entirely other thing. But just roaming (let alone an itinerary) is largely not actually useful, unless you put it towards something meaningful (eg genuine reflection and improvement, which would largely lead you to realizing that travels themselves are not necessary or even important).
I was asking whether your days were (over) packed with scheduled activities. My best ones had very loose to non-existent schedules.
Other than that our experiences are different and that's ok. People are different. It's always a pleasure to meet my past self through those writings (usually emails to friend and family) and photographs I took or were taken by others in the trip.
Agree with you on the part that it is absolutely possible to have a meaningful trip without a life partner.
i have never traveled with a schedule, even when i was being a "tourist"
also, i probably didnt make this point nearly well enough, but the real point is that travel is completely unnecessary and will absolutely not solve any of your real problems. More likely it will just distract from them, or make them worse. Whatever genuinely beneficial things you and your partner experienced together while travelling could and should be experienced wherever you happen to live.
"travel" is a completely foreign concept to living, that has only become "possible" to most people recently. For millenia, people learned how to live quite well without it.
Definitely agree with your point that travel will not solve problems. Wherever you go there you are. However, we disagree in the value of travel.
We are creatures of our surroundings environment and changing the environment definitely helps regulate/alter internal states. Can it be done without the travel, presumably so, but travel makes it easier.
Besides all this stuff about internal state, that's too new agey for my tastes, travels are fantastic for its experiential / dopaminergic value, especially if it's a place that offers beauty.
My brain responds to the sights and sounds in the serenity of mountains in a way that I cannot recreate in constricted crowded settings of clutter. Maybe some people can, I just simply cannot.
Can one live without traveling, of course one can. One can live bed-ridden, paralysed as a born paraplegic. But that was never the question.
> whereas the article is largely about recreating Neverland where everything is childish
That seams like a rather uncharitable take.
To me it came across as being an adult about simple pleasures and joys. Not fantasy.
Perhaps it is because I super admire my friends that enjoy the simple things (one in particular has been rather successful as well). Other friends have big goals - I struggle with them - too often it looks to me they are partaking in a frustrating game of elusive status. Although as a geek, my status games are quite different from theirs, so perhaps it is just that I am misunderstanding them.
> various phase shifts/epiphanies in my understanding of myself, life, the world etc
That's interesting, and I've had that too when my purpose of traveling is to learn about myself (versus traveling just for pure fun).
> traveling
I've done a huge variety of traveling and long term backpacking (the luck of being paid well for a geeky childhood). My opinions about my experiences really don't match what you have written.
I recently came to realise that my memories of my experiences of early childhood are probably greatly affected by seeing my younger siblings going through those same experiences a few years later. At age five or six I would see my mother reading to them on the sofa and they would be lying with their heads on her tummy feeling her warmth and listening to her heartbeat and stomach gurgles. Seeing this would remind me of when I used to do that, thus reinforcing those memories and probably somewhat distorting them. One of the distortions is that this memory is set in the house we moved to when I was four, and most of my own relevant experiences would have been set in our previous house. I think the accumulation of memories is a bit like training an LLM on a combination of new data and its own data.
Life with young children is actually mostly dreary and stressful; the fun and excitement and reliving of childhood memories is 1% or less of life, in my experience. By time I realize I am having that <1% experience it is over. I still feel as though I am chasing after something vanishing and never catching it.
I didn't find that to be true. It might depend somewhat on the individual children. Your individual stress level is largely under your own control.
Physical Health, mental health, the economy, social disorder, family; we can influence these things that cause stress but often we can't "control" them.
You can't necessarily control external events. But you can, to a significant degree, control the effect those things have on your chronic stress levels. This requires cultivating a certain level of maturity and mental discipline.
I am sorry that this is your experience. A newborn brings in so much responsibility and unknowns and there is no rest - as with anything with a lot of responsibility, unknowns and no rest, it can cause tremendous amount of stress.
For centuries we lived in large families and those within communities where everyone witnessed birth at home with multiple siblings and responsibilities around raising children from a small age. The current atomic families with two adult both completely inexperienced in raising a child is unprecedented in history.
I agree that reliving memories is not a large part, though it is impactful. But it's not dreary ... large part is also having fun and good time with your kids.
> We feel time differently over our lives. As a toddler, an afternoon feels like an eternity. In middle age, “no matter how I try, those years just flow by, like a broken down dam.” For a 5 year old, a year was a fifth of their life, and feels like it. For a 40 year old, it is just another year.
I think this explanation is true but incomplete. I believe it's also related to Critical Flicker Fusion Frequency [0], the way I see it, if an organism is smaller it has a higher frequency, it sees more image per second, therefore perception of time is slower. (E.g. a fly sees you moving really slowly). Maybe it's related to the processing time of images, with smaller brains insect can process more of them per second.
Maybe humans process more images as children, therefore see the time time going slower.
It's been a while I didn't think about this, maybe some studies have been made in the past years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
That would.im theory make kids the best at certain sports like table tennis say. Is there an objective test?
That is largely true across a variety of sports. eSports like Starcraft typically peak between 18-22, and it's possible the real age is younger but minors are usually excluded from pro leagues because they can't sign contracts. Gymnastics seems to peak between age 13-16; it was enough of a problem that the FIG set an age limit of 16 so the sport wasn't dominated by prepubescent girls age 13-14 (18 for men because the events tend to be more strength-based than coordination-based). Top table tennis players usually tend to start between 4-6 [1] and win their championships around their early 20s. [2]
There's some lag between starting and being world-class simply because continued practice makes you better. Plus, you get much better at sustained focus and being able to connect disparate training experiences together as your consciousness develops in the teens.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tabletennis/comments/1i085sr/a_coll...
[2] https://www.tabletennisdaily.com/forum/topics/what-is-the-pe...
Part of the gymnastics thing is flexibility of the young; if toddlers could be coordinated and strong enough they’d likely dominate as they can contort their bodies into positions impossible for adults.
IMO there is also muscle memory, strategy ect. Being able to process more information doesn't mean it's processed better, the contrary actually if you think about processing times
> The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
Almost makes me tear up. 1000 times this.
This is the paragraph that grabbed my attention. I wasn't expecting to find something so human.
I remember coming to the realization during my more challenging school years that waiting all week for Saturday to come was literally wishing my life away. I didn't know what burnout was at the time, but an angel of a friend recognized it and helped me understand.
I have been reading the comment by Jim Grey on the bottom of the article, and I was thinking, is that mostly what we are - and why people like novelty (especially in tech) so much - because it makes us feel young ? Or maybe not young, but teaches us something new, learning something active - worth remembering.
> We also think that novelty rivets our attention and makes time seem to slow down. Childhood is full of novel experiences that, as they repeat, become less so. True novelty becomes unusual when you’re pushing 60 as I am now. The brain says, “Oh, that again,” and glosses past it.
I quote for context:
> But what about those of us who are well into the flattening part of the curve, what can we do for ourselves? You can seek new experiences perhaps. If time goes faster because your life has fewer firsts and more routine, then it can be extended by adding firsts. You can learn new things, travel, take up hobbies, or new careers.
> This works, to a point, but there are only so many firsts for you, and chasing this exclusively seems to lead to resentment. You remember the things you had as a kid. You remember the excitement and warmth of that world, how immediate and raw everything felt, and you want to go back. You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.
I like to think that life slows down once you form a stable image and story of yourself. The more you convince yourself that that image is fixed, the faster time will go by. That might justify why childhood seems longer, since that image seems to form around adolescence.
Experiencing new "firsts" but keeping that image of yourselfe fixed just works for a while. That is why it may lead to resentment, as the article says.
So dont fool yourself: some image of who you are gives you some stability, but just use it for that, so that you dont run crazy with options.
If you treat every event as something that might reshape your ego, then suddenly a big number of experiences are new, and time suddenly slows dont. It may even appear to dissapear from time to time.
We were discussing this last night. The solution seems to be we need to do very boring things each day, like stare at paint, watch grapes grow, etc, but then do that with different people in different places. In this way, each day seems very long, and retrospectively the changing of place and boring thing means there's a lot to remember.
I think it does mean though that optimising for this is probably not the thing to do.
Well.
I, personally feel like having lived is a net win, joy-wise, mostly on the strength of my childhood. So I'm trying to give that to my sons as well.
It's a perception thing --- a given period of time is related to one's total life experience/recent memory --- to a toddler, a week is a long time because at that age one cannot remember many weeks and the weeks which one remembers are full of new experiences each of which is vivid and fresh, while to a person in middle age, there are many, many weeks accumulated into many repeated years, and the experiences are much the same and repeated.
The big thing which we need to change and solve is education --- I have memories of going to a school in Mississippi which my perception of was that it was quite well run, and that classes in it were divided between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, while academic classes were attended at one's ability level (4 grade cap up through 8th grade) and that students who progressed beyond high school courses were able to take college courses, some teachers being accredited as faculty at a local college, or instructors from that institution being brought to the school for classes at need.
Maybe AP classes offer a similar facility in public school systems? Though one wants to cue the _Doonesbury_ cartoon of the college dean who after being told that his entire Freshman class is taking remedial 051 level _everything_ is running a glorified pre school.
Roger Zelazny made much of college education becoming quite a different thing when Samuel Eliot of Harvard made the conceptual leap of dividing education by the college credit hour and allowing customization beyond the rote repetition of previous generations in his wonderful novel _Doorways in the Sand_ --- perhaps that should be extended down on some sort of skills basis? The school I attended after Mississippi did reading with a pair of boxes of Scholastic Reading Assessment (SRA) booklets, which, not understanding that one was supposed to do a two or three at each level and get approval on before moving to the next level, I did _all_ of in a matter of weeks, which left me with nothing to do for the balance of the school year but go to the (meager) elementary school library.
Childhood is only half of subjective life if you stagnate as an adult. If you keep changing your routine, you'll find each year has just as much subjective experience as the previous.
Start a company in an industry where you have no experience. Move to a country where nobody speaks a language you understand. Find a new sport and commit to being a top 0.1% participant (for most sports that don't air regularly on national television, this can be done in a year).
If subjective life is speeding up, throw yourself some curve balls.
You also don't have to do anything extreme. . .
If life is moving too fast, then make specific choices to slow down. Take up hiking or camping. Do things with your family if that's a valid option for you. Turn your phone off. Be mindful of your body and emotions.
Lots of small things that can help you slow down a little.
> You also don't have to do anything extreme
I think most people I meet would benefit from reframing what they consider to be extreme.
My life has had a 5 year event horizon since I left my family home. I.e. every 5 years has seen major changes I could not have predicted.
For much of that there have been critical pressures making most days important. Which makes them memorable.
Subjectively and objectively, things have changed so much, and so many times, I feel like I have had several lives, so far.
Right now I am in a “make” or “break” situation going three productive years. I solved some very difficult problems that I put myself in a “must solve” position. Each problem solved had significant life impact.
The indicators for “make” are going up month-to-month now, making it a tough but intense and wonderful time. Feels a lot like my early 20’s when I started a dream business (for me) while in school.
Definitely don’t experience time as indicated by those graphs.
Right its a weird take for me too. Childhood was fun sure, but you were stuck in a time/place not of your choosing, with others making many/most decisions for you.
As an adult, especially a well paid SWE like many on HN.. you can create the life, make the decisions and have the experiences that you want. Your life is as vibrant as you choose it to be.
Much of the stuff I used to read about or watch on TV as a precocious child.. I can just go buy/see/do with the agency & money I have as an adult.
Sure you have a 9-5 (or 8-6, or 7-7) job but you used to go to school and after school activities all day as a kid probably too. It’s your choice to do something or nothing with your hours of free time after work and weekends.
Small children in the picture adds additional time constraints, but should also bring additional vividness/subjective time experience to your life.
I share this view. I didn't feel like my life began until I graduated college, got a job, and moved out on my own.
Amusingly enough, one of the easiest way to serve yourself curveballs is to have children of your own.
You then are no longer in control of your house, schedule, or really much. And you have someone to cheer on.
my best friend had kids before me and told me something before I had kids that changed my life forever - “I was here first and I have my life, the kids need to adapt to my life just as much as I have to adapt to theirs.” I have followed this mantra for the past 12 years and I think both my life and my kids life is much better for it. I see too many parents turning their lives upside down after they became parents, I have not much at all. I am definitely more risk averse which is probably the biggest personal change I made but otherwise I do everything I’ve done before I became a parent and my kid has experienced extreme levels of boredom while waiting for me to finish what I am doing
In the US, unless you have a few million saved up, children will probably make most people more conservative.
Wake up, drop kid off at school, go to job allowing one to afford health insurance for kids, come home, take kids to after school activity, eat, sleep, repeat.
risk averse as well… prior to being a Dad my answer to just about any question was Yes. Now mostly the answer is a No and not because I am older now
A child is from the parents perspective a lot of repetitive motion over a very long time, and, I think, a main contributor to speeding up your relative passage of time.
Which you might find super rewarding! But I am fairly confused by the claim that children are interesting and wonder how people spent their pre-children time to arrive at that conclusion – or how much they actually are involved in all the parts of taking care of their kid.
A typical person in the western world spends like 4 hours on their phone each day. They also spend 8 hours at work, doing mostly the same-ish thing over and over again. Then there's commute along the same routes, and our habits and ways of life we calcify into. The brief moments of mental freedom are often terrorized by the anxiety induced by what we consumed during our phone binges. Let's add some degree of sleep deprivation into the mix. Might all of that have something to do with how we perceive life and how fast and meaninglessly it goes by?
Does putting a graph make a subjective feeling scientific? For me the past year was like 10 years, and who knows for the rest of the world.
Time is relative no matter what age you are and probably depends how much has changed in your life (maybe I should put a graph here to make it more scientific :)) )
The graph is just to clearly convey the idea, not to give it any more connotation of rigor than the idea itself has. The idea has a long enough history and enough research behind it to be in psychology textbooks and be referenced on Wikipedia, but it seems to resonate for some people and not others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception#:~:text=Propor...
"The basic stratum of the personality and the associated underlying belief systems that hold it in place derive from a number of factors: the shadow aspects of parents; the same unresolved elements in the lives of grandparents (the ovum from which the mother sprang was already formed at eleven weeks gestation in the maternal grandmother); a commensurate and immeasurable twine of psychogenetic ancestral memories; the prenate’s own “baggage” from pre-conception; the experience of the conception itself; the phenomenology of implantation; and the whole duration of the gestation period; all together form layers of affect in this self-forging process."
William R. Emerson, Ph.D. https://emersonbirthrx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Journa...
Every assertion in this article is completely alien to me to the point that I can not even comprehend that people live like that, it seems untenable to life to me. A year did not feel like a fifth of my life when I was 5, I could not even comprehend a year in that sense and very much lived in the present. Now in my 40s I don't see a year as just another year and still don't think of it as one 45th of my life. When I was 5 I saw where I was, now I see how far I have come and how far I have to go; all that has really changed is that I have come to understand how the past and the future define the present instead of just accepting that this is what I am currently experiencing, I understand cause and effect, consequence.
Does this article seem accurate to your perception of life? It would explain some things regarding my interactions with most people if I am so completely missing something so fundemental about their existence.
Edit: Why does conveying my experience and desiring to understand the experience of others get a downvote? Genuinely curious.
Edit the second: I just started to wonder if this article is going to affect my birthday in a couple weeks. Part of me feels like I am going to think "well that is 1/46th of my life gone" and have a midlife crisis. The other part of me remembers Zeno and his paradox and giggles.
Beautifully written. Thank you for this.
Yet wealth grows exponentially, meaning that half of your life you have relatively little.
Is there a citation or source for this? Or is this just the authors idea?
> Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
Is it just me or is this just not true?
I remember vibes about childhood: long days of boredom, especially in school; summer days in fields and by the river; days of learning how to code, of reading loads of books. More than anything else, a lot of time to fill not otherwise spoken for.
But specific events I can recall, there are far more of them from adulthood. Amazing experiences, things that changed the way I live, they were adult events and decisions.
The premise is that life stops being novel around 20 to suit this argument- but you can easily argue that that's more around 30 or even 40
Isn't the general principle sound? That novel experiences become rarer as we get older, leading subjective life to be highly skewed towards youth.
That's assuming novelty is the only way to live long subjectively. Is that a decent assumption? Personally I find subjective life longer if you just take your time, no pun intended.
Yeah sure. Here's one for the new year from a 57 years old:
There is always novelty if you stay curious. Boredom in your life will only start once you have become boring.
6-7 !!!
(who here also thinks the true meaning of 6-7 is reactive fear of 2026 & 2027 from the school-going crowd?)
Well that’s interesting.
I’m going to combine this information with another idea. The second idea comes from Tony Robbins, who tells us we can have mastery over our memories and use them to influence our psyche.
You can magnify and clarify pleasing and positive memories. You can diminish and distance unpleasant or painful ones. This can change your view of the world, for better.
I have a pet theory that everybody gets one lifetime, and no matter how long that life is, it always subjectively feels like one lifetime. Whether you live three days or a hundred years, it will always feel about the same amount of time, both interminable and too short.
beautiful read
This was a both a nice, and extremely depressing, read.
It sounds like the author has had a good childhood and is a good parent to their kids. Wonderful.
But the whole article is appropriately summarized by their final sentences
> You recreate your memories in them. They recreate childishness in you. Life folds back on itself, but not quite the same. It loops, but continues. A helix. > > Life, then, is the creation of childhoods. You have yours, and then you get to create childhoods for others. The time is yours, and theirs
They have completely given up on their own life, and the possibility that they, too, could live in a child-like way, where they have their own wonder, joy etc.
Eg
> Children make you childlike. Skipping through the park as an adult man raises eyebrows (deservedly or not.) Skipping through the park as an adult man with your son or daughter skipping next to you on your arm is one of life’s greatest joys, both for you and for anyone who sees you.
Why do you care about people's eyebrows? Go skip, play, dance, be curious, be creative - whether just for the sake of it, or also in your "work".
Your kids need to see you actually living so that they, too, might be able to actually live once they've moved into adulthood.
> Your Christmas trees get smaller, your lights less ambitious. Some find all of these fun for their own sake, but if you are not the type of person who finds ritual appealing you will likely find yourself slowly disconnecting from holidays. You will find yourself asking what all the hustle bustle is for. > > Kids. That’s who it’s for. Of all the experiences that children renew, traditions are renewed the most. When you put up a Christmas tree, it’s for kids. When you decorate for Halloween, it’s for kids. All of these holidays are in essence a celebration of childhood, and children let you see them all for the first time again. If you remember the excitement of galumphing
Christmas, and other traditions, are NOT about trees and lights and presents. Thanksgiving is not about waiting to stampede a Walmart to buy crap. It's about genuine communion with family, friends, or - if you're particularly clued in - even strangers who don't have such traditions available to them.
And so on.
They talk about the joy of showing kids Saturn in a telescope. I won't argue with that. But that doesn't mean an adult can't have joy in discovering new things in the cosmos - be it through a career or hobby in telescopes, or exploring all parts of nature, from microbes to volcanoes. Whether as a hobby or a career.
This person is missing the point of everything.
We must do as nietzsche described and progress from a camel, to a lion, to a child again. Joseph Campbell - a wonderful interpreter and guide of all of these things - explains it all well, a quote of which is at this page https://centeroflighttulsa.org/three-transformations-spirit/
> We must do as nietzsche described and progress from a camel, to a lion, to a child again
Nietzsche's ideas where not for producing self-help advice on having hobbies.
nor was what I wrote... Try reading it all, and him, again
The metaphors of camel, lion and child have nothing to do with finding joy, experiencing life, or whatever that could matter in the context of this posting, and Joseph Campbell is pretty weak resource on Nietzsche.
No, it has everything to do with it all - particularly becoming a child again, rather than living via your children, who will eventually no longer be children and then leave you.
As for campbell, he studied him plenty and even curated a "portable jung" compendium. Moreover, his description of the camel, lion, child (from, at the very least, Zarathustra) is exceedingly accurate.
You're really out of your depth
As someone who thinks a lot about how best to use one's limited time; is child-free by choice; and, who is also interested in the societal value of good parenting... this article drew me in on a number of counts.
The concept of time dilation explored in the article is fascinating. But I think it's possible the author has some wishful thinking about how experience and memory works. Or perhaps is using a plausible formulation as a reverse justification for his own life choices.
Here is how my childhood memories feel to me. Ages 0-14 are like an opaque tunnel, through which my brain and developing body was shot, like a cannonball, in an instant. I have some fragmentary memories of having gone through that tunnel, but they are mere fragment. My 14 year old self, somehow and miraculously, ended up on the other side of that tunnel healthy and of sound mind.
Age 14 is around where something resembling "the recorded video of my early memory" begins. I have clear memory of various episodes from ages 14-18, and this was also a period of intense individual development for me. This was where all my inclinations, passions, and life goals started to come into focus. That turned into full-blown adult individuation in college, where my goal was to pull away entirely from societal/parental expectations and live my own life. In other words: pretty much everything I associate with my adult character had its seed-like start in my age 14-18 period, exactly the period where I was pulling away from my developmental dependence on my parents.
My childhood before then is a blur. That might be a depressing thought for parents -- that this kind of blurred and fragmentary memory of childhood is possible, given that parents often describe this period as one where they are "making family memories" -- but I don't think I'm the only one. Importantly: this doesn’t make early parenting meaningless. Good parenting is ethically and developmentally important even when it doesn’t leave the child with later-retrievable episodic memories. But I don't think the point of parenting is to create said memories. It's to create a healthy child who can develop and individuate on their own in adulthood.
The article talks a lot about childlike wonder, and seeking that in adulthood. I'm all for that. But what's strange is that OP seems to believe the only place to find that childlike wonder is in parenting of your own children. I am sure parenting can be one such way to regain childlike wonder, but surely not the only one. People can reclaim their childlike wonder in sport, art, hobby, play, and travel, among other things. What's more, I know many parents who haven't the slightest bit of childlike wonder when they interact with their children. Or any other children in their family. So I'm not sure it comes as naturally to everyone as OP seems to think it does.
Two adult thinkers on how adult humans spend their time that have interesting thoughts on childlike play are John Cleese and Alan Watts. Cleese discusses it in the context of creativity in his wonderful lecture, summarized here:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-cre...
And Watts had this to say about it: "... if you don't have a room in your life for the playful, life's not worth living. 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's not really playing. He's just playing because it's good for him! Well, he's not playing at all! You have to be able to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it: beautiful! Don't try and get a sermon out of it."
Maybe by realizing that this is a crazy idea?
Half of your life is childhood because you weighed subjective experiences differently when you had no knowledge or life experiences so you should change your life based on that situation where you were in Plato’s cave?
Actually fuck even this title is bad. If life is subjective, don’t ask how “we” should live. Subjectiveness means that’s a “you” question.