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Ask HN: How do you slow down time?

4 points by rocky_raccoon ↗ HN
As I get older, time seems to go by faster and faster.

When I was in school, a semester seemed like an eternity. Now that I've settled into a career and have established some consistency in my life, the years have started to blur more and more. I have trouble delineating between what happened in 2018 vs. 2017, for example. 2014 seems like it was just yesterday.

What causes this to happen? What do you do to combat it?

3 comments

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seren
The perception of time depends highly of what you are doing.

You could separate easily semester because you probably took totally different courses so they were easy to distinguish, now that you have settled and that you are doing mostly the same things every semester, all is blurred. This is totally normal and how the brain works.

One solution would be to change job every semester, but it might not be the ideal solution for other reasons.

zemnl
> The perception of time depends highly of what you are doing.

I totally agree.

Maybe changing job every semester is a bit overkill, but just trying different things and doing new experiences could help. Traveling, visiting new places could be useful, or trying new hobbies/courses. Really anything worth remembering that goes out of your routine is what you need, I think.

dmitryminkovsky
I've had this same problem, specifically with regard to the pace of communication now that all communication is instant. So I created an email platform that sends and receives messages once a day: https://www.pony.gg/. I am in the process of launching it now. Would greatly appreciate feedback.

More broadly, I've read about this issue a few times here on HN as well:

https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=1455706

and a few other links I'm not.

EDIT: found working link