alt Hacker NewsIf childhood is half of subjective life, how should that change how we live?
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> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
"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...
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 :)) )
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.
Is there a citation or source for this? Or is this just the authors idea?
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?
beautiful read
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.
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
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.
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/
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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)