Too Busy!

When I was working I used to meet retired people who kept telling me how busy they were.   They would list all the things they had done in a day and I would think "so...????? I do that plus work". So I made a resolution, when I retired, not to be 'busy'.  I spent my first year of retirement refusing to join anything or take up a hobby and the result was that I sat around doing nothing and getting depressed.


  Gradually I became  involved in things which interested me - Oral History Interviews for the local Historical Society and volunteering at the Aged Care Facility, book clubs, Writing Groups  plus of course garden, family, reading, writing.


Now I'm  'busy' - I frequently find I haven't got time to do something I really want to do or time to do nothing.  This lack of time got me wondering if it really is true that time passes  more quickly when you are older.

Apparently not! Recent research involving people aged 18 - 80 across two continents  showed almost no difference in their perception of time, the only slight difference and it wasn't considered a significant one, was in the perception of how quickly the last ten years had gone by, there older people felt it had gone past much more quickly.

So why do older people feel that for them time passes more quickly? One researcher suggests that people report what they think they are expected to feel but the more likely explanation is that they forget just how busy they were when they were young!   Also time does fly when you feel rushed and can't get things done. Now that makes a lot of sense to me, as we get older it often takes us longer to get organised and longer to to finish a task hence the feeling of being rushed.

But perhaps  the other explanation is simply that everyone feels more rushed nowadays!