I know that time flies no matter how old you are, but which decade of life did you feel went by the fastest?

I’m only 40, and I suspect things are accelerating. My 20s seemed to disappear 10 times faster than my teens. My 30s were gone 20 times faster than my 20s. My 60s will likely fly by in a mere 3 hours.

@tom_g I’m afraid you are so right, that is what I have felt too, the 20s and 30s were like a dream flashing by and I guess the rest will go by even faster!

I think it does depend on what is happening in your life, @ZEPHYRA. For me, my 40s seem to have gone by the fastest so far.

At 72, life is a blur. It seems to me that time accelerates exponentially.

I haven’t even experienced two whole decades yet, so I guess I don’t have much to say. Sometimes I feel like I have lived forever, sometimes I feel like I have never lived.

I’m only 41. My 20s seemed to last a lot longer than my 30s. I want to enjoy every bit of my 40s that I can, so hopefully they won’t go by as quickly.

I’m only 64. Several decades ago, I noticed this phenomenon and came to the conclusion that it works like this: When I was 20 years old, and I looked back at the previous ten years, it covered 50% of my life (not accounting for how much conscious memory one has of infancy, etc.). Now, in my sixties, the same ten year recall would account for only approximately 16% of my life. I think we perceive time and memory in proportion to our age.

This is one of my favorite life-lessons stories:

“The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the basement shack with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning, turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it…

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind, he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whoever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles”.

I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say. “Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. Too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital.”

He continued, “Let me tell you something Tom, something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.” “Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900 which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime.

Now stick with me Tom, I’m getting to the important part.”

“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.”

Finish reading here:

http://www.landofmarbles.com/marbles-1000marbles.html

My youth and twenties seemed to move agonizingly slow, and those were difficult decades in my life. I’m not out of my thirties yet, but I’m close to it, and the last near decade of my life seemed to move much faster than my childhood, teen years and twenties did.

The times when my children and grandchildren were between birth and 10 years old went by (and are going by now) so fast, followed by the slowest times, their teen years.

My twenties, when my children were young.

0–10, seeing as though I only recall the last 4yrs of that particular decade anyway.
I know I must have been alive & stuff, my momma told me as much, but not a single recollection of those first 6yrs. Although i’m betting pissing in my pants featured heavily.

When we were little, a week was a long time, summer was a long time, from birthday to birthday and Christmas to Christmas was a long time. They are all short times now, and getting shorter.

Definitely not the first two decades of my life! But time seems to be passing more quickly, both because the rate of acceleration keeps accelerating, and because I am much happier now. Depression makes time almost stand still.

@Bill1939 Exactly my observation! Now a week is equivalent to 3 days!

The period of my life when I forgot to be mindful and smell the roses.