Does anyone else feel like 2020 was less than four years ago?
Does anybody else feel like the days are long but the years are incredibly short?
If you remember those distant days of 2020, it doesn’t feel like it was four entire years ago. And yet, we’re just a few scant months away from being five years beyond the beginning of our current decade.
A lot has happened since 2020, but in a weird way a lot of people are feeling like it’s almost been no time at all.
One theory goes that the events of 2020 put us further out of touch with the real world and immersed us more in a digital space, giving the past four years a feeling like it’s not even been all that real.
Someone else suggested the theory of a ‘lockdown age’ that makes us feel like we’ve got a different age to the actual number of years we’ve been around.
Please slow down a little bit. (Getty Stock Photo)
For example, your humble writer is 30, was aged 25 when the pandemic started and might have wondered on several occasions where on Earth the back half of his 20s went.
Someone else has now suggested another theory as to why it feels like time has been going faster since 2020, and it’s called the ‘time perception theory’.
TikToker Thomas Mulligan said: “Throughout our live the way our brains perceive time actually changes.
“There’s a couple of different things at play here. One being the most obvious, on your first birthday one year makes up 100 percent of your life.
“By your second, one year makes up 50 percent of your life. By the time you turn 20 one year makes up five percent of your life.”
The start of 2020 was almost five years ago now. Dear god make it stop. (Getty Stock Photo)
Not to make this all about me, but that would mean the vividly memorable chunk of my life between the ages of 20 and 25 would make up one fifth of my time spent in this world, while the time being 25 to 30 is now just one sixth of it despite lasting as long.
In essence, the older you get the more it feels like time is speeding up as our perception of it changes.
Cast your minds back to the school days when a term time felt like it lasted forever, now it’s just a few weeks out of the calendar and you might be wondering why it felt like such a long time.
Chronology itself hasn’t changed and is still going at the same pace, it’s just that you’re further through life than you were in 2020, and thus your idea of how long a year is in your life has shrunk quite a bit.
Spooky, isn’t it? Fortunately, Thomas had a bit of a possible solution that was to make your life ‘as interesting as possible for as long as possible’.
They say that time flies when you’re having fun, but when you think back on your memories, I bet it’s the times when you were doing something really unique and interesting that stick out most vividly, while the time in-between dedicated to your routine now feels like it went by in a flash.
Featured Image Credit: Tiktok/mulligan.tv / Getty stock
