Half Your Life Is Over By The Age Of Seven

10 Simple Charts That Will Change The Way You See The World

Posted on Sep 3 2015 - 12:50pm by Nick

 

 

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Our world is built on assumptions. At any given time, we each have a number of basic ideas ticking in our subconscious: where we stand in the world, what our social class is, how much longer we have left to live, and so on. But every now and then, someone comes along with a simple, easy-to-understand chart which blows those assumptions wide open. Think you know the world around you? Think again.

Half Your Life Is Over By The Age Of Seven

Remember going on summer break when you were a kid? Remember how long those few weeks seemed to last? For most of us, that time away from school probably felt like an eternity. In a certain way, it really was.

Way back in 1897, Paul Janet theorized that we measure the passage of time as a proportion of our total life span. So a year feels like a long time when you’re eight, because it’s 12.5 percent of your entire life. By contrast, when you’re 35, it’s a mere 2.86 percent, which is why time seems to speed up as you get older. Mathematically, this raises some interesting points. For example, your summer vacation at age 18 should feel as long as your entire 76th year. Even crazier, half your life should feel like it’s over by the time you reach age seven.

According to this chart by Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener, our perception of time is focused heavily on our earlier years. So much so that just reaching our eighth birthday should feel like slogging it all the way to middle age. If you account for the fact that most of us don’t remember our first three years, then the perceived midpoint of our lives should still be around age 18—a full 61 years before most of us will actually cop it.

Not everyone agrees this is a fair way to measure our experience of time. Still, there’s no denying that things appear to speed up as you get older, which is why everyone acts so surprised when they hit 40. In their heads, they’re still just out of college.

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