One of my PhD supervisors, Professor Sik Hung Ng, would hold regular research get-togethers for students and colleagues interested in language and social psychology. In one of these, my academic stablemate Mike Allen became quite agitated during a discussion about when “middle age” begins. Mike was a bit older than me and was taken aback by research suggesting that, in some cultures, “middle age” starts at 35 – a milestone that felt rather too close for him.
I can’t remember exactly which nation this applied to, but in my blurry recollection Ng was talking about China. So, when I dived into the research on perceptions of significant age-related transitions, I was gratified that people in China consistently say the shift from child to young adult, to adult, to middle age and older adult, happens earlier than in any other country I’ve found data on. Before you ask, I can’t find recent data from New Zealand.
When is middle age perceived to begin in China? Between about 31 and 40. Why the range? It depends on how old you are when you’re asked. Chinese 10-year-olds say about 31; 75-year-olds say about 40.
If you want to feel young, though, go to Spain. On the one hand, Spaniards tend to say young adulthood starts earlier than in most nations, but they’re well ahead in perception of middle age – between 50, if you’re a 10-year-old Spaniard, and the late-50s if you’re an octogenarian. Maybe it’s that Mediterranean diet.
I’m only half-joking. Average life expectancy in Spain was 83.2 in 2021, according to the most recent World Bank data I could find. That’s notably higher than the US (76.3 years), and let’s not talk about Russia (69.4). New Zealand doesn’t do so badly at 82.2, just pipped by Australia at 83.3. Which reminds me of the joke about research that shows skinny test animals live longer but they’re more willing to die …
Obviously, the course of an average life is a long period of time. Common wisdom suggests that as we get older, time feels as if it’s speeding up.
It’s not just common wisdom, perhaps unfortunately. There’s a fair amount of research that shows we perceive our days go by faster as we age, and this is mirrored in studies using shorter “temporal reproduction” tasks. Basically, I play you two beeps separated in time, and then I ask you to reproduce that sequence, either by pressing a button or saying when you think time’s up. Older people have a bias towards estimating shorter periods of time compared with young folk.
But there are also contexts in which time slows down. In the past month, I’ve seen two new studies that identify different contexts. One is the gym. Yes, it’s not just you who feels like time is creeping by on leg day. The other is nature.
Finnish researcher Richardo Correia tells us that people report an “expanded” sense of time when they head out into natural settings. For example, people feel that a walk in the countryside takes longer than exactly the same walk in the city.
There are a bunch of possible reasons for these age-related effects. One is that any particular slice of time will be a smaller proportion of an older person’s experience. While it’s not clear exactly how many memories we can hold, we do tend to “save” them in a more compressed format as we get older, and this may also contribute to time perception.
It doesn’t help that we tend to get more routinised as we age, and this can mean less novelty and new opportunities to make memories.
My prescription for today, then, is to get out into nature and go somewhere, or do something, new. Unless you want time to fly by.
