Why time flies so quickly as we get older?

How old can we get?
How much time we have? (Senescence)

Whats the oldest age can a person get? Well the world record for the world's longest living people belongs to Jeanne Calment, a french women who lived to be 122.

Right now, at this very moment, there are only 6 people alive who were born in the 1800's, those 6 different people have lived in 3 different centuries, but, as our medical knowledge expands, our understanding of our biology improves, — people are living longer and longer.

In fact, scientist believe that based on statistics, the first person who will ever live to be 150 has already been born. It could be one of you! But according to the math, its probably someone who was born 3 years ago.

Here's the thing, as the humans get older, the likelihood of them dying increases, but there are some types of animals that have what is called Negligible Senescence also known as biological immortality, and these types of animals have never been observe to actually age. Animals like the hydra can only die because of accidents, disease or predators.

The world's oldest living individual tree  has clocked in at more than 4,600 years old. It's called the Methuselah tree, and it exists somewhere in this forest. Government official won't actually release its exact location to protect it from vandalism, but its out there.

The lifespan of an organism can be longer than that if you include Clonal Colonies.

These quaking pines all look like individual trees, but they are actually all clones of one genetic code. They all share a common root system, and the root system continues to make more trees, meaning that these trees are all part of the same organism.

Experts had calculated based on the root system, that this one male quaking pine has been around
for at least 80,000 years. They nicknamed it "Pando".

But let's get back to humans, and rather than talking what time is, let's talk about how time feels.

Intense moments of your life are remembered as lasting much longer than that were relatively dull.
Psychologists say that the reason for this, is that our brains, takes deeper and richer memories of events that are novel, or events that intense than ones that aren't.

When  your experiences are intense and novel, your not remembering more things about it, but you are making more copies, rather than just making normal memories.

During stress the amygdala gets involves and also remembers things.Many people believe that is why intense moments are remembered as lasting longer. This phenomenon becomes quite mind blowing in a macro scale.

Think about it this way, when you are a 1 year old baby, 1 year represents 100% of your life, but when you turn 2 years old, that second year was only half of your life, and the next year, you live through as a third of your life, and by the time you turn 80, 1 year represents only an 80th of your life.

These percentages are important because they may explain why your childhood feels like it took so long, but as you get older the years seem to fly by. You have more novel experiences when you are young, — you first learn a language, you first see your mother, you fist learn to walk, you have your first kiss. These are deeply and richly remembered by your brain, and so later on, it feels as it took longer to happen.



Now here's what's really mind-blowing.
Let's take a graphical representation of percentage of your life that each successive year is.
1st year = 100%
2nd year = 50%
3ed year = 33%
up to 80 years old = 1.25%

Using this representation, under this model, when you turn 80 years old, and look back at your life, the point that feeks like the middle, isn't your 40's, — it's your 20's!

The good news here is that the more novel things you do, and things you see, places you visit,  and
people you meet, the slower time feels, and the more rich it feels.

So go out there and do something cool, do something weird, do something new!