The Holiday Paradox

Day 363 / 365

As the year nears an end, everyone seems to be telling the same thing to me — “I can’t believe how fast the year went by!”. You would all feel the same. Why does time seem to go by so quickly?

I used to think there was a simple explanation for this. I remember reading somewhere that people perceive time relatively. So for a 5-year-old, 1 year is about 20% of his lifetime, and so feels significant. On the other hand, 2019 was just 4% of my lifetime, maybe that’s why it felt shorter. Apparently things are not as simple as this.

We perceive time lengths in two ways. One when it is in the present, and the other when we are reflecting about an event in the past. Our perception of how long a time period feels doesn’t only depend on our age, but also on the things that we were doing in that time period. Time does fly when you are having fun. So when you are in a present moment, a boring activity would feel to last longer than an interesting one. But what about the retrospective perception?

It turns out that it’s just the opposite. If you had a great vacation, where you did lots of fun and new things, you would, later on, perceive it as lasting longer than a mundane weekend spent at home. This is known as the holiday paradox.

Why does this happen?

Our brain encodes new experiences into memory, but not familiar ones. And when we look back at a time, we judge it’s length based on the number of memories we have of that time. So the more new things you do, the longer that time would feel to you in retrospective.

Coming back to our original question, why does time seem to fly by more quickly as we grow old? We can use the holiday paradox to explain this. When we are young, almost all of or experiences are novel. So our brain is busy making loads of memories. As we grow old, sadly, life begins to be more routine.

Reading all this I finally understand this phrase —

“The days are long, but the years are short…”

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Reading one book a week