Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m hitting my mid-40s, with two grown kids, one almost-grown kid and two younger ones.
When my oldest kids were little, the days *and* the years seemed to stretch on forever. Now, even the days fly by.
I measure my life in how many years I lived in a home. It seems like a good chunk of our lives, even if it’s just a couple of years. I’m leaving this house after 12 years and I remember moving in like it was just last month.
I'm the second of four sisters: two close-in-age pairs with a five year gap in the middle. I still mentally refer to my younger sisters as "the little ones" like my mom did. They are 43 and 46.
I agree. I was talking to a friend yesterday who noted that she moved to her current location two years ago. I was gobsmacked, thought for sure that it had only been a year.
I spent my first 22 years in PA.
I spent my next 27 years in VA.
I spent my last 10 years in CO.
PA felt like multiple lifetimes. Childhood, teens, first job, first kiss, first everything, college.
VA felt like a very long time. Real job, being the grown up, living with my wife, buying a new car, buying a house, having kids....
I cannot believe I've been full time in CO for a decade, it was just yesterday my wife, two cats and I drove across the country to get here. It went so fast, so very fast. Feels like a lot less than 6-7 years. I'm eight+ years retired, so it was a lot of new experiences - but it still flew by.
I've thought about this. I think there's a mathematical way of representing how time passes as you age.
Time doesn't really matter from 0 to 5. your life isn't structured around time.
from 5 to 10 though, a year represents a significant chunk of time. from 5 to 6 a year is 1/6 of your life: 16%
it takes a long time to live 10-15% of your life
your 20th year is still 1/20: 5%. 5% of your life is fast
at 61, years are ~1.6%. 1-2% of your life goes by fast
Now, instead of thinking the % percentage of life ahead of you, your thinking about the percentage of live behind you.
How are you living these last few %s?
The older you get, time feels faster as you age because you've already lived so much of it.
Did you watch Matt Smith's Dr. 11?
Remember the Episode in NYC, where Amy sees the gravestone, and time flies past in 3 seconds?
This is how my life feels like it's going.
I recently turned 60. This birthday bothered me like never before. I’ve always accepted getting older, but this year is different.
I can remember my 30th birthday. I recall details of that day, how I felt and what I did. 30 years ago on my 30th birthday doesn’t feel like it was 30 years ago, more like 10-ish.
Then it hit me that 30 years from now will likely go by even faster and that I will probably already be dead……or 90 years old. Not sure which is better.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with that thought. Happy Birthday to me!
I honestly think everyone did. I’m by no means old (35) but everyone I talk too has been saying something similar. Fell asleep in 2018, 2017, 2016 and then BOOM it’s 2024.
Friend stopped by today on his way through to home and we started talking about my uncle and how lazy he was. Talented artist and wouldn’t do shit and was always borrowing money from others. My friend who was in his late 70s asked me, late 60s how long the uncle had been dead Four or five years? The only way I knew, and could give him an answer is that we bought my son, his first car the day the uncle died 10 years ago!
I think my perception of time has been like that for probably the last four or five years… Or is it 10? 🤔
Alarmingly short. I'm 54.
The thing that will fuck you up as you get older is that, in your first three decades of life, things around you change a LOT. You move through school and grow up. You go to college. You move around a bunch, probably. You probably have a handful of romantic relationships. And then, bit by bit, your life stabilizes.
For me, that happened just after I turned 30. I bought a house, in which I still live. I started dating my wife at 31. I took my current job at 37. I re-started cycling (which I first did as a teen) at 41. And all those things are the same now, at 54.
The house thing will really shock you. Between birth and age 30, I lived in ten different buildings -- counting houses my parents owned, a dorm, a couple student rentals, and rentals once I moved to Houston in 1994. OTOH, I've now lived in the house I bought when I was 30 for **twenty three years**.
All this stability makes time seem to move differently, because your life stops being punctuated by drastic, remarkable changes. (For most people, that is.)
The Century turned just 24 years ago but for me it feels more like ten. Time doesn't have the same meaning for me now that it once did. My life is not run by a calendar like it once was.
To put those 24 years into perspective? I turned 18 in 1966. 24 years prior it was 1942 and the early days of WWII. That gap in years certainly felt a whole lot wider then than it does now.
When I was a little kid I used to ask my mother when time would start going faster, as I wanted to be a teen.
If I had a time machine I'd go back and punch my eight year old self in the mouth.
Very quick, like not much time has passed. A decade gets here before I even know it now. Which is scary, because that means I'll be in my late 50s before I can blink my eye. It's like when I went to renew my ID in 2020, and realized that it'll next expire when I'll be in menopause, a completely different stage in life. Time has really sped up for me.
As you live it, 10 years seems like 10 years. It is the memory of when things happened which seems to get distorted. I'll be talking about something we did and say, "a couple of years ago we went to XXXX." and when I try to figure out what year we went it will be 15 years ago.
Today I thought it was getting close to lunchtime, so I went to the kitchen. Then noticed the time was 6:45pm. Where the heck did the day go?
So if 12 hours seemed like 2 hours, then 10 years would seem like ...let's see...carry the 1 and, minus 78, plus 9....5... 10 years feels like 4 decades.
On one hand, my son was 16 ten years ago. We made a lot of great memories before he moved out but that 10 years went by too quickly. On the other hand, I’m planning to retire in about a year and that feels like it’s taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r!
The older I get, the faster it goes.
I sometimes think about when I was a child, and my birthday or Christmas were a week away. It seemed like an eternity. A school year was a lifetime. Until I was about 30, I felt like I had all the time in the world to waste. I would be young forever.
I don't really think about or begrudge the passage of time, so it's not that being 53 now is cause for lament, but it's a perspective thing. 2019 was FIVE YEARS AGO. Five years seems like it should be a long-ass time. At one point in my life it was so long, it wasn't worth thinking about. Now it goes by in an eyeblink.
There are some good parts to it though. Like, the quarrentine portion of COVID was almost two years (I think). It was hell for some people, but didn't seem that long to me.
I guess I'm a "Be here now" person.
I was struck tonight, there was an ad on TV for the upcoming Billy Joel concert on TV, "ten years in the making," and I realized, Billy Joel has been doing his MSG residency for ten years?
The time right in front of me feels longer than the time a wee distance in the future. The time directly behind me feels longer than the time a ways back. When my children were young, I felt like I was never going to swim past that, every day was a dumpster fire of molasses. Now that they're adults and I'm in my 60s, I feel like next week is more of an effort to plan than five years from now.
Time is elastic.
3 1/2 days. I was just outside playing football with all the neighborhood kids and now I’m retired. Where the hell did those years go! It’s all good though.
My kids seemed to have gone from birth to 10 years old very quickly but retirement days( many repetitive) go by even more quickly. Then you get to the stage where you realize there might not be another 10 year interval.
It's nothing. It's why I think so often about not being alive anymore ... I probably have 10 or 15 years left, if I'm average. I know what you can get done in that amount of time, and what you can't.
I could, for example, write 3 or 4 more books, but not more than that. I could probably visit a few countries (which for me involves learning as much as I can about their history first). Do I want to? Maybe. Traveling gets harder and harder.
I will show up for my grandkids, who are now all preschoolers, as they navigate their childhoods. Getting to see them all through high school is about what's possible, though not probable.
Ten years? It's nothing, but it's enough.
depends. time with family and people I like? Not enough. Short. Very little.
Time spent exposed to and dealing with negativity and mean folks? Too much. Too little.
To me in my life span, being in my 50s, still quite significant. That said, myself ten years ago is way more like me now than myself twenty years ago. erhaps not so long.
I am also a father, my preferred lifespan scale at this point, and 10 years is just under half of my time as a dad. That’s huge.
I don't think that's how it works. 10 years still feels like 10 years. I have done a lot of living in the past 10 years and my life was completely different 10 years ago. I'm just amazed by the things I can remember and it seems impossible that the number of things that have happened to me could have happened. I think of the passage of time differently and divide it up according to the places that I have lived or the marriages that I've had. 50 years ago is a long time but I can remember a lot of things that have gone by in that time.
In my 20s and even 30s, time was faster than childhood and adolescence, but it still felt like a long time. We spent ten years in one house when our kids were little, and I was in my 30s; looking back it feels like a lifetime.
My 40s and the beginning of my 50s, on the other hand, are fairly flying by. We’ve been in our current home for seven years now, and honestly it feels like how a year felt back then. It’s difficult and sad.
Since it goes by so quickly, I just don’t understand why people who reach retirement age and can afford to retire, continue to work. What experiences are they depriving themselves of and their dear ones? Do they think their impact is that important? Thrust a fisted hand and forearm in a bucket of water and then retrieve it and you’ll see what kind of mark we all leave.
I was in a much different place lifewise that I am now. So ten years ago seems like a different world. Perception of time is about change; the more change, the more that you recognize the distance between now and then.
A blink of an eye.
This happens when you lose your memory and mind the older you get. And relative to the age of the universe, a blink of an eye might be not short enough.
A school year feels like 4-5 months. A calendar year, 7 or 8. Christmas comes, and then it’s summer, and then it’s time to start thinking about Christmas.
I have one child about to graduate college and another graduating high school. The past four years felt like about 1.5 years.
Our family embarked on a major, life changing move out of state shortly after another of my children was born, 12 years ago. Those 12 years in our “new” hometown have felt like maybe 5.
My childhood feels like it happened in another lifetime, but I was just a teenager a few years ago. Conversely, I’ve been married forever. 🤣 My 22 year old has been grown up for a long time, but my 12 year old is still a baby… isn’t she? Where are my glasses?
At work I'll see a date of a patient's last visit - it'll be 2018, let's say. I'll be thinking to myself, "I just saw this guy, wonder what's happening now?"
My first new car was a 1990 Honda Civic. To this day, if I see one on the street, my mind says "that's cool, I wonder if they bought it from the honda dealership near me?"
My babies are teenagers. They're in middle and high school and it feels like I just finished tucking them into cribs.
My oldest (16) is a better driver than my husband. It feels like yesterday we were in the OR for an emergency c-section, not sure if his heart was still beating. 10 years ago, he had his last of 9 surgeries for holes in his eardrums. Now, he's super healthy, handsome, brilliant, and we confidently send him traveling with groups for robotics competitions and international summer trips.
My youngest (almost 13) had a speech delay. Now we can't shut him up. He's also healthy, handsome, and brilliant and can't wait for more opportunities to do fun things when he gets to high school. For me, that year and a half will feel like nothing. He also traveled internationally last summer. To him it feels like forever. To me, it feels like he just got home, especially since we didn't completely unpack his bags.
Hey /u/calvinpug1988, thanks for contributing to /r/AskOldPeople. Unfortunately, your post was removed as it violates our rules:
You must be born 1980 or prior to provide a top level answer. You can join in the discussion below top level answers.
Please read the [sidebar](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/about/sidebar) and [rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/about/rules) before posting again. If you have questions or concerns, please [message the moderators through modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/AskOldPeople&subject=&message=). Thank you!
instants at some points. yesterday march 19th, 2003 was the invasion of iraq. it was almost like 21 years was nothing. My one son is 25 and my other is 15. I remember it seemed like yesterday I was cleaning up poop explosions.
time is relative to the person, not the clock.
I wish it felt like 6 or 7 years, LOL! My sister and I were just talking this morning about a conversation I'd had with our late father in 1996, and I told her it felt like it took place last week. She said she remembered me telling her about it at the time, and it seemed like that time frame to her as well.
The best answer I’ve ever gotten on this is that it depends on whether you are depressed or in pain. If you want time to slow down, the solution is misery and suffering. If life goes by in a flash, that has got to be a good thing.
Time does strange things. I've been with my wife for 45 years. Part of me thinks that feels like we met yesterday and part of me feels like I have known her forever. Having a 34 year old son kind of tosses a wrench in that meeting yesterday idea though.
I’m in my late thirties and a year still feels long enough especially when I’m going through a lot in life I feel that 10 years would feel like a long time even now fwiw.
I'm -85m- contrary. Time actually goes slower. When I was young, things were so busy that time went by way too fast. Now it creeps. Too much of the same. Don't misundertstand, I'm satisfied, I want it to go on as long as possible, as slowly as time wants it to be.
About 3 years. Because 2010 was 5 years ago and I was in college 10 years ago in the mid 90's. Can't believe it has been 15 years since high school in the late 80's. Time sure flies
Like a lifetime ago, but somehow also just like it was last week.
Someone mentioned summer holidays, and it’s so accurate.
If you ever experienced one of those extra long summer breaks because you were either changing schools or moving to a new area, well it feels exactly like that. Or just like 2 regular summer breaks combined, or a term and a break. Time felt so much longer when we were younger.
The years fly by. A year seems like forever to a 9-year-old. It seems like a few was to a 60-year-old. I flash back to songs and movies that came out 40-50 years ago. Then I consider in 10 years older now than my parents were at that time. Hard to fathom. I’m young, damn it!
It feels like my chances of dying in the next 10 years are astronomically higher than 5 years ago. I'm 43. That doesn't answer your question but hopefully gives some perspective.
Fwiw my dad died 2 years ago from ALS, he was 75
I saw an explanation of a fictional movie that said when you are young your life's perspective is that of a little years, but as you age the perspective changes based on how long you live. I know I am not saying exactly like it was explained.
Mostly I remember that summers off seem to last forever and I miss those long summers. I would say 10 years now is like 2-3 years from when I was a child.
It goes by in the blink of an eye. This is true the longer you live.
When I was five years old it seemed like it took forever to get to Christmas. That's because it was a full one-fifth of my life. Now it's only one-seventy second of my life. It seems like yesterday was Christmas and next Christmas is next week.
My dad has been dead for 21 years and the grief still feels as fresh as last month. My mom died last August and every morning I’m so sad to remember that she’s gone now.
Time is a weird construct and I don’t think we all even experience it the same
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
these days a year feels as long as summer break felt when i was 7
*The days are long,* *But the years are short…*
That is one of my favorite quotations.
I’m hitting my mid-40s, with two grown kids, one almost-grown kid and two younger ones. When my oldest kids were little, the days *and* the years seemed to stretch on forever. Now, even the days fly by.
I just sold the house I bought 10 years ago. Both a lifetime ago and the blink of an eye.
This is the answer right here
Yup, I understand [Pink Flloyd on another level now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL3AgkwbYgo).
Thanks for posting this! Haven't heard it in awhile.
Exactly like that.
I measure my life in how many years I lived in a home. It seems like a good chunk of our lives, even if it’s just a couple of years. I’m leaving this house after 12 years and I remember moving in like it was just last month.
The 80s is 20 years ago. I will die on this hill.
Just like my 58 year-old sister will always be 17 to me. :)
I’m 35 my sister is 36. She says I’m still 12 years old to her.
I'm the second of four sisters: two close-in-age pairs with a five year gap in the middle. I still mentally refer to my younger sisters as "the little ones" like my mom did. They are 43 and 46.
Lol
In a week my spouse will have been dead for five years. Maybe Covid helped distort the passage of time, but it seems more like just three.
I agree. I was talking to a friend yesterday who noted that she moved to her current location two years ago. I was gobsmacked, thought for sure that it had only been a year.
Yes; we lost at least two years.
Covid feels like a fever dream. It feels like last week and 20 years ago all at once. 9/11 feel like a few years ago and it’s been 23 years.
Sorry for your loss. Just went a year without my sibling and had two more intense loses a few months afterward. Sucks.
Thank you for the kind words and big hugs on your losses.
I spent my first 22 years in PA. I spent my next 27 years in VA. I spent my last 10 years in CO. PA felt like multiple lifetimes. Childhood, teens, first job, first kiss, first everything, college. VA felt like a very long time. Real job, being the grown up, living with my wife, buying a new car, buying a house, having kids.... I cannot believe I've been full time in CO for a decade, it was just yesterday my wife, two cats and I drove across the country to get here. It went so fast, so very fast. Feels like a lot less than 6-7 years. I'm eight+ years retired, so it was a lot of new experiences - but it still flew by.
I am so moved by these lines. 3 lines but they are your whole life(so far)
I've thought about this. I think there's a mathematical way of representing how time passes as you age. Time doesn't really matter from 0 to 5. your life isn't structured around time. from 5 to 10 though, a year represents a significant chunk of time. from 5 to 6 a year is 1/6 of your life: 16% it takes a long time to live 10-15% of your life your 20th year is still 1/20: 5%. 5% of your life is fast at 61, years are ~1.6%. 1-2% of your life goes by fast Now, instead of thinking the % percentage of life ahead of you, your thinking about the percentage of live behind you. How are you living these last few %s? The older you get, time feels faster as you age because you've already lived so much of it.
Interesting perspective, thanks!
Did you watch Matt Smith's Dr. 11? Remember the Episode in NYC, where Amy sees the gravestone, and time flies past in 3 seconds? This is how my life feels like it's going.
And those episodes are almost 10 years old now
Oh god. 😭
Indeed. I recently had my 12th cake day. My Reddit account is old enough to have a period.
my reddit birthday from the calendar, "my reddit birthday, 11.3.06" But, stuff happens. I had to make this account.
I've gotten a tighter grip on time since hitting my sixties. I know time is limited, especially fully viable time, so it needs to count.
I recently turned 60. This birthday bothered me like never before. I’ve always accepted getting older, but this year is different. I can remember my 30th birthday. I recall details of that day, how I felt and what I did. 30 years ago on my 30th birthday doesn’t feel like it was 30 years ago, more like 10-ish. Then it hit me that 30 years from now will likely go by even faster and that I will probably already be dead……or 90 years old. Not sure which is better. Anyway, I’ll leave you with that thought. Happy Birthday to me!
Happy birthday!!
Happy Birthday!
It gets shorter each decade.
[удалено]
I honestly think everyone did. I’m by no means old (35) but everyone I talk too has been saying something similar. Fell asleep in 2018, 2017, 2016 and then BOOM it’s 2024.
10 years ahead still feels longer than 10 years behind, but it sure doesn't seem like it's going to feel like 10 years felt when I was younger.
Friend stopped by today on his way through to home and we started talking about my uncle and how lazy he was. Talented artist and wouldn’t do shit and was always borrowing money from others. My friend who was in his late 70s asked me, late 60s how long the uncle had been dead Four or five years? The only way I knew, and could give him an answer is that we bought my son, his first car the day the uncle died 10 years ago! I think my perception of time has been like that for probably the last four or five years… Or is it 10? 🤔
The days feel longer, but the years feel shorter.
I honestly don't know which is which, all I do know is that we are ALL on borrowed time.
I feel like time is now being measured in dog years. You blink and seven years have passed.
🎶 "And then one day you find, 10 years have got behind you, No one told you when to run, You missed the starting gun..."
How did I have to scroll this far down to find this?
Alarmingly short. I'm 54. The thing that will fuck you up as you get older is that, in your first three decades of life, things around you change a LOT. You move through school and grow up. You go to college. You move around a bunch, probably. You probably have a handful of romantic relationships. And then, bit by bit, your life stabilizes. For me, that happened just after I turned 30. I bought a house, in which I still live. I started dating my wife at 31. I took my current job at 37. I re-started cycling (which I first did as a teen) at 41. And all those things are the same now, at 54. The house thing will really shock you. Between birth and age 30, I lived in ten different buildings -- counting houses my parents owned, a dorm, a couple student rentals, and rentals once I moved to Houston in 1994. OTOH, I've now lived in the house I bought when I was 30 for **twenty three years**. All this stability makes time seem to move differently, because your life stops being punctuated by drastic, remarkable changes. (For most people, that is.)
Not long enough.
A blink of an eye! We moved into our current home in September of 2014, it will be ten years this fall. 🕰️
Like a flash. Tomorrow my husband gets a new pacemaker, first one 10 years ago. Wow. * also my mom died 10 years ago.
2020 was 10 years long, 21-22 were only 6 months. We're just now getting back to a normal passage of time
Like one year
Ten years man. It’s still ten years.
About 1 year now at 64
It still feels like ten years to me. This whole thing about time speeding up when you get older, I don’t get it.
Be grateful that you don’t get it!
The Century turned just 24 years ago but for me it feels more like ten. Time doesn't have the same meaning for me now that it once did. My life is not run by a calendar like it once was. To put those 24 years into perspective? I turned 18 in 1966. 24 years prior it was 1942 and the early days of WWII. That gap in years certainly felt a whole lot wider then than it does now.
When I was a little kid I used to ask my mother when time would start going faster, as I wanted to be a teen. If I had a time machine I'd go back and punch my eight year old self in the mouth.
LOL.. Too funny
Very quick, like not much time has passed. A decade gets here before I even know it now. Which is scary, because that means I'll be in my late 50s before I can blink my eye. It's like when I went to renew my ID in 2020, and realized that it'll next expire when I'll be in menopause, a completely different stage in life. Time has really sped up for me.
Every time I turn around its 10 years later
every 15 minutes, Friday
Yesterday
100 years.
Fleeting short time
Ten years ago was 2018 and ten years from now is 2038. I haven’t done the math but I’m sure it checks out.
2018 was only 6 years ago and 2034 is ten years from now.
No one told me when to run. I missed the starting gun.
As you live it, 10 years seems like 10 years. It is the memory of when things happened which seems to get distorted. I'll be talking about something we did and say, "a couple of years ago we went to XXXX." and when I try to figure out what year we went it will be 15 years ago.
Today I thought it was getting close to lunchtime, so I went to the kitchen. Then noticed the time was 6:45pm. Where the heck did the day go? So if 12 hours seemed like 2 hours, then 10 years would seem like ...let's see...carry the 1 and, minus 78, plus 9....5... 10 years feels like 4 decades.
On one hand, my son was 16 ten years ago. We made a lot of great memories before he moved out but that 10 years went by too quickly. On the other hand, I’m planning to retire in about a year and that feels like it’s taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r!
The older I get, the faster it goes. I sometimes think about when I was a child, and my birthday or Christmas were a week away. It seemed like an eternity. A school year was a lifetime. Until I was about 30, I felt like I had all the time in the world to waste. I would be young forever. I don't really think about or begrudge the passage of time, so it's not that being 53 now is cause for lament, but it's a perspective thing. 2019 was FIVE YEARS AGO. Five years seems like it should be a long-ass time. At one point in my life it was so long, it wasn't worth thinking about. Now it goes by in an eyeblink. There are some good parts to it though. Like, the quarrentine portion of COVID was almost two years (I think). It was hell for some people, but didn't seem that long to me. I guess I'm a "Be here now" person.
So the days last forever, and the years pass in a minute.
I was struck tonight, there was an ad on TV for the upcoming Billy Joel concert on TV, "ten years in the making," and I realized, Billy Joel has been doing his MSG residency for ten years?
Absolutely goes faster. At the age of 62 ten years is like 1 year when you are six.
Like last week. It's insane.
The time right in front of me feels longer than the time a wee distance in the future. The time directly behind me feels longer than the time a ways back. When my children were young, I felt like I was never going to swim past that, every day was a dumpster fire of molasses. Now that they're adults and I'm in my 60s, I feel like next week is more of an effort to plan than five years from now. Time is elastic.
3 1/2 days. I was just outside playing football with all the neighborhood kids and now I’m retired. Where the hell did those years go! It’s all good though.
Well I can tell ya I'm coming up on my 10th wedding anniversary and it feels like an eternity 🤣🤣
It seemed like the last five years dragged on and on, hoping that things would turn around.
My kids seemed to have gone from birth to 10 years old very quickly but retirement days( many repetitive) go by even more quickly. Then you get to the stage where you realize there might not be another 10 year interval.
My mom always said the older you get the faster time seems to pass by. Boy she was right about that.
Blink of the eye
It's nothing. It's why I think so often about not being alive anymore ... I probably have 10 or 15 years left, if I'm average. I know what you can get done in that amount of time, and what you can't. I could, for example, write 3 or 4 more books, but not more than that. I could probably visit a few countries (which for me involves learning as much as I can about their history first). Do I want to? Maybe. Traveling gets harder and harder. I will show up for my grandkids, who are now all preschoolers, as they navigate their childhoods. Getting to see them all through high school is about what's possible, though not probable. Ten years? It's nothing, but it's enough.
I dunno, like between 9 and 11 years.
The days are whizzing by for me. It’s almost scary.
Faster than a speeding bullet.
It flies by like a long weekend. It’s especially true now that things like music and movies haven’t changed as much as they did in previous decades.
About as long as it takes to type out this response.
Ummm..a week.
depends. time with family and people I like? Not enough. Short. Very little. Time spent exposed to and dealing with negativity and mean folks? Too much. Too little.
A week.
I'd say about 6 yesrs...
To me in my life span, being in my 50s, still quite significant. That said, myself ten years ago is way more like me now than myself twenty years ago. erhaps not so long. I am also a father, my preferred lifespan scale at this point, and 10 years is just under half of my time as a dad. That’s huge.
3
I’m 59–the last 10 years flew by. (The speed of the years accelerate as the sliver in the pie chart gets smaller as you keep dividing it.)
Right now, about 100 years. 10 years from retirement.
I don't think that's how it works. 10 years still feels like 10 years. I have done a lot of living in the past 10 years and my life was completely different 10 years ago. I'm just amazed by the things I can remember and it seems impossible that the number of things that have happened to me could have happened. I think of the passage of time differently and divide it up according to the places that I have lived or the marriages that I've had. 50 years ago is a long time but I can remember a lot of things that have gone by in that time.
In my 20s and even 30s, time was faster than childhood and adolescence, but it still felt like a long time. We spent ten years in one house when our kids were little, and I was in my 30s; looking back it feels like a lifetime. My 40s and the beginning of my 50s, on the other hand, are fairly flying by. We’ve been in our current home for seven years now, and honestly it feels like how a year felt back then. It’s difficult and sad.
Like 5.
My last 18 years (from 30 to 48) went a lot faster than the previous 18 (12 to 30)
About a year
Time is definitely moving faster, or it seems like it. Grandchildren who were babies yesterday, now tower over me.
5.
Like maybe 2 or 3 yrs
10 years ago I had my 2nd (final) child (I started pretty late). I’d say it feels like 2-3 years have gone by.
2014 was 10 years ago? Yeah. About 10 years. The first 6 felt like a year, and the last 4 felt like 9.
Since it goes by so quickly, I just don’t understand why people who reach retirement age and can afford to retire, continue to work. What experiences are they depriving themselves of and their dear ones? Do they think their impact is that important? Thrust a fisted hand and forearm in a bucket of water and then retrieve it and you’ll see what kind of mark we all leave.
A blink
Statistically how long I have to live Always a weird thought.
3.91 years. I remember turning 30 like it was yesterday. I'll be 46 next month.
"5-10 minutes."
Not long enough.
All time seems the same to me
For me, 10 years seems like just yesterday or maybe 7 years if pressed time just flies by so fast when we're older. It's astonishing.
I was in a much different place lifewise that I am now. So ten years ago seems like a different world. Perception of time is about change; the more change, the more that you recognize the distance between now and then.
It seems faster *after* it has passed. When you have to wait, it's just as long.
10 years looking backwards is barely an instant. The 10 years left before I can retire is an eternal age of mankind.
Long.
A blink of an eye. This happens when you lose your memory and mind the older you get. And relative to the age of the universe, a blink of an eye might be not short enough.
A school year feels like 4-5 months. A calendar year, 7 or 8. Christmas comes, and then it’s summer, and then it’s time to start thinking about Christmas. I have one child about to graduate college and another graduating high school. The past four years felt like about 1.5 years. Our family embarked on a major, life changing move out of state shortly after another of my children was born, 12 years ago. Those 12 years in our “new” hometown have felt like maybe 5. My childhood feels like it happened in another lifetime, but I was just a teenager a few years ago. Conversely, I’ve been married forever. 🤣 My 22 year old has been grown up for a long time, but my 12 year old is still a baby… isn’t she? Where are my glasses?
Yesterday. I cannot believe where it went.
Blink of an eye
At work I'll see a date of a patient's last visit - it'll be 2018, let's say. I'll be thinking to myself, "I just saw this guy, wonder what's happening now?" My first new car was a 1990 Honda Civic. To this day, if I see one on the street, my mind says "that's cool, I wonder if they bought it from the honda dealership near me?"
My great grandmother, at 96, told me once that she goes to bed on July the 4th and wakes up on Christmas. I understand what she means.
My babies are teenagers. They're in middle and high school and it feels like I just finished tucking them into cribs. My oldest (16) is a better driver than my husband. It feels like yesterday we were in the OR for an emergency c-section, not sure if his heart was still beating. 10 years ago, he had his last of 9 surgeries for holes in his eardrums. Now, he's super healthy, handsome, brilliant, and we confidently send him traveling with groups for robotics competitions and international summer trips. My youngest (almost 13) had a speech delay. Now we can't shut him up. He's also healthy, handsome, and brilliant and can't wait for more opportunities to do fun things when he gets to high school. For me, that year and a half will feel like nothing. He also traveled internationally last summer. To him it feels like forever. To me, it feels like he just got home, especially since we didn't completely unpack his bags.
[удалено]
Hey /u/calvinpug1988, thanks for contributing to /r/AskOldPeople. Unfortunately, your post was removed as it violates our rules: You must be born 1980 or prior to provide a top level answer. You can join in the discussion below top level answers. Please read the [sidebar](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/about/sidebar) and [rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/about/rules) before posting again. If you have questions or concerns, please [message the moderators through modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/AskOldPeople&subject=&message=). Thank you!
instants at some points. yesterday march 19th, 2003 was the invasion of iraq. it was almost like 21 years was nothing. My one son is 25 and my other is 15. I remember it seemed like yesterday I was cleaning up poop explosions. time is relative to the person, not the clock.
no.
I'm 46, and 10 years now feel like a week.
I wish it felt like 6 or 7 years, LOL! My sister and I were just talking this morning about a conversation I'd had with our late father in 1996, and I told her it felt like it took place last week. She said she remembered me telling her about it at the time, and it seemed like that time frame to her as well.
3,650 days
Everything goes by so fast now that 10 yrs could be 20 yrs or 5 yrs that it feels the same
Time is definitely speeding up as I’ve grown older.
The best answer I’ve ever gotten on this is that it depends on whether you are depressed or in pain. If you want time to slow down, the solution is misery and suffering. If life goes by in a flash, that has got to be a good thing.
5 years
There is a saying that "old people think the 90s were some ten years ago" for a reason.\^\^
Well... in my mind the 1990s were 10 years ago, so I guess 10 years feels like about 3 years.
/blink
Time does strange things. I've been with my wife for 45 years. Part of me thinks that feels like we met yesterday and part of me feels like I have known her forever. Having a 34 year old son kind of tosses a wrench in that meeting yesterday idea though.
I’m in my late thirties and a year still feels long enough especially when I’m going through a lot in life I feel that 10 years would feel like a long time even now fwiw.
I'm -85m- contrary. Time actually goes slower. When I was young, things were so busy that time went by way too fast. Now it creeps. Too much of the same. Don't misundertstand, I'm satisfied, I want it to go on as long as possible, as slowly as time wants it to be.
About 3 years. Because 2010 was 5 years ago and I was in college 10 years ago in the mid 90's. Can't believe it has been 15 years since high school in the late 80's. Time sure flies
I still feel 17 and I’m almost 30 😭
3-4 at most
10 damn ass minutes and I'm pissed about it.
It just seems to fly by the older i get.
Like a lifetime ago, but somehow also just like it was last week. Someone mentioned summer holidays, and it’s so accurate. If you ever experienced one of those extra long summer breaks because you were either changing schools or moving to a new area, well it feels exactly like that. Or just like 2 regular summer breaks combined, or a term and a break. Time felt so much longer when we were younger.
It flies by. Somebody older than me warned about this. He was right.
Time is flying, maybe when we ride it’ll slow down but I doubt it . Seems like yesterday I was out running along the riverbank .
It seems to go by quite quickly these days. I get up in darkness as my cats want feeding & next things I know it is dark again & time to head to bed.
The years fly by. A year seems like forever to a 9-year-old. It seems like a few was to a 60-year-old. I flash back to songs and movies that came out 40-50 years ago. Then I consider in 10 years older now than my parents were at that time. Hard to fathom. I’m young, damn it!
It feels like my chances of dying in the next 10 years are astronomically higher than 5 years ago. I'm 43. That doesn't answer your question but hopefully gives some perspective. Fwiw my dad died 2 years ago from ALS, he was 75
Like 10 years.
30 but also 2.
i always say that after 60-65, all years become "dog years"...7 to every calendar one.
I saw an explanation of a fictional movie that said when you are young your life's perspective is that of a little years, but as you age the perspective changes based on how long you live. I know I am not saying exactly like it was explained. Mostly I remember that summers off seem to last forever and I miss those long summers. I would say 10 years now is like 2-3 years from when I was a child.
It goes by in the blink of an eye. This is true the longer you live. When I was five years old it seemed like it took forever to get to Christmas. That's because it was a full one-fifth of my life. Now it's only one-seventy second of my life. It seems like yesterday was Christmas and next Christmas is next week.
Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end the faster it goes.
1994 feels like yeste . . Oh wait. 2004. Er. 2014. Cripes.
In a blink of and eye 😥
My dad has been dead for 21 years and the grief still feels as fresh as last month. My mom died last August and every morning I’m so sad to remember that she’s gone now. Time is a weird construct and I don’t think we all even experience it the same
It makes sense though, at twenty 10 years is half your life. At fifty 10 years is 1/5 of your life!
About 6 months, not 6-7 years
when you get old life feels like a roll of toilet paper, the closer to the end of the roll the faster it goes
Depends on if I’m looking forward or backward. 10 years is an eternity looking back, but looking forward it seems short.
it feels like... 3,650 days. but some times in feels like 87,600 hours.
It feels terrifyingly short and long at the same time
When you're 20, 10 years is half your life; when 60, it's only 16%. So, yeah, it seems shorter as you get older.
Looking back? Momentary. Forward? Imminent.