This post is not about whether time is speeding up or not. I believe it is and lots and lots of other people would agree. This post is about why it might be happening.
Let's take video games. Video games run at certain framerate. If the game runs at, say, 60 fps, then each second contains 60 separate frames. Now, let's say that character makes a move that takes a certain amount of time. For example, jump. Let's say that jumping in this game takes a bit more than a second. So, at 60 fps a jump would take about 80 frames. At, say, 100 fps the same jump would take about 140 frames or so.
Higher framerates mean that every action, every event uses up more individual moments (frames) than lower ones. Or, in other words, each individual frame is less eventful than on lower framerates. Keep in mind, that objective time stays the same. That jump still takes a bit more than a second regardless of framerate. Even if framerate is ridiculously low, like 5 frames per second, it still takes the same amount of objective time. It's just that each of those 5 frames will contain more events, more advancements than on higher framerate.
I guess, by now you can see where I'm going with this. Our time is speeding up because the actual framerate of our reality (simulation?) is lower than it used to be. The framerate of our simulation is slowing down. Or you could also say that the server our reality is running on is starting to lag and that is the reason why our perceptive time is speeding up. Coincidentally this indirectly proves that we are indeed living in a simulation.
Crazy shit, I know... It's just an idea I had yesterday and decided to write it up. It explains and ties together several phenomena quite neatly and nicely. What do you think?
It’s not. The brain records information logarithmically. As a three-year-old, a tear of your life is 33% of your life. As a thirty-year-old, a year of your life is 0.033% of your life. The subjective reference frame of your experiential memory causes your perception to change. All external measurements of time show no change.
(Reposting my answer to other comment from this thread.)
(1) A lot of people of different generations are noticing time speeding up. Not just boomers, not just millenials... Every generation notices this. If it would be due to age, only boomers would notice this and, come to think of it, I've seen very few boomers talking about this.
(2) If it would be simply due to age, then we would hear the same from even older generations before 2015, which is absolutely not the case. Our grandparents and our grandgrandparents would talk about it, it would be written about in old books and so on. Actually, what we witness is completely opposite. Old age was considered a time of peace and calm and you won't find any of this time speeding up crap in there.
(3) If it would be only because of proportionality, then the very rate of time speeding up would actually slow down (because each year lived makes increasingly smaller part of your life) which, again, is not the case. Not only time itself is speeding up, but the acceleration rate is speeding up as well.
So, no, it is not due to age. I understand completely your proportionality argument, but I do not buy it. It is a kind of a low hanging fruit.
Utter nonsense. We have entire folk stories and sayings based on the perceived speed of the passage of time.
I do not know of any. Also, I was born way before 2000 and this time running fast was not a thing back then. Older people were the most slow living and not hurrying anywhere people on earth.
Guess you’ve never had any fun, then.
Yes. It's also why they say the universe is expanding and why it, at some point, was expanding faster than today's speed of light.
The fundamental forces are diminishing over time.
I can't say that I know why, but I have feelings.
Hmm, if we buy into the simulation argument, maybe it is due to increasing complexity? As the system becomes more and more complex, it starts to lag. At first it's barely noticeable, but the more it struggles to compute and process our reality, the more noticeable it becomes. Our reality becomes janky, a lot of events are being simulated simultaneously... the system looses its fluidity...
Uni (one) verse (to turn)...one cannot expand; it remains singular. Turning against one another by holding the beginning and end of singularity together like ouroboros contracts anyone within, while making everything else feel like expansion.
There's only one foundational force (motion) for each mind (momentum) and body (matter) within...few suggest pluralism to tempt impotency among many who ignore the force within for forces without.
Knowledge moves forwards (motion); feelings tempt one from one side to the other (emotion)...ignoring motion for emotion establishes a conflict like can vs can't.
No, it isn't "framerates", it's gravity. Gravity makes time pass more slowly. This effect is called "gravitational time dilation." The stronger the gravity pull of an object, the slower time ticks for anything near it. Albert Einstein proved this idea in his theory of general relativity.
Second, our galaxy, the Milky Way, features a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A, which contains about four million times the mass of our sun and sits roughly 26,000 light-years away from Earth.
Third, our galaxy moves through space, driven (or pulled) by the gravitational pull of nearby galaxy groups and massive clusters, all of which are also being pulled by Sagittarius A.
So, the position of our universe in the galaxy and it's rate of speed and "gravitational time dilation" relative to Sagittarius A are affecting our perception of time. Earth can still rotate around the sun for the same 24-hours in "Earth time" while still being affected by gravitational time dilation.
"Framerates." C'mon, man.
I know about physics and gravitational time dilation. That is not what I'm talking about. Also, I'm not entirely sure that theory of relativity is not a total bullcrap, but that is a discussion for another time.
Besides, time is not slowing down. It is speeding up. And I'm not talking about long timespans in tens or hundreds of thousands of years (which would be required for gravitational time dilation to take place). I'm talking about very short timespan. About 10 years or so. Time is speeding up very noticeably since about 2015 or so. And no, it is not change of perception due to aging or because of phones and social media (as reddit bots are very quick to explain this phenomena).
This right here is one of the possible explanations of that. Which ties together very nicely with simulation theory and if we indeed are living in a simulation then obviously all of the physics are simulated as well which makes all your explanation kind of moot.
On a similar note, regardless whether we are indeed living in a simulation or not, I do kind of doubt that matter is even real. I do think that it is entirely possible that consciousness is primary and all the matter around us is being constructed (thought of) by that consciousness. Modern physics, of course, take a totally different approach stating that matter is primary and all consciousness is being created in the matter by shooting neurons back and forth in our brains or whatever.
Prove it. Because it has been resoundingly proven otherwise.
Easily.
(1) A lot of people of different generations are noticing time speeding up. Not just boomers, not just millenials... Every generation notices this. If it would be due to age, only boomers would notice this and, come to think of it, I've seen very few boomers talking about this.
(2) If it would be simply due to age, then we would hear the same from even older generations before 2015, which is absolutely not the case. Our grandparents and our grandgrandparents would talk about it, it would be written about in old books and so on. Actually, what we witness is completely opposite. Old age was considered a time of peace and calm and you won't find any of this time speeding up crap in there.
(3) If it would be only because of proportionality, then the very rate of time speeding up would actually slow down (because each year lived makes increasingly smaller part of your life) which, again, is not the case. Not only time itself is speeding up, but the acceleration rate is speeding up as well.
So, no, it is not due to age. I understand completely your proportionality argument, but I do not buy it. It is a kind of a low hanging fruit.
Framing ones mind by rating (framerate) or mentally holding onto a measure like weight (gravity) represent different descriptions for the same self inflicted burden.
Aka DI (to divide) LAT (to extend) ION (action)...action divides into reaction while allowing the extension and restriction thereof by free will of choice...few suggest time (length) and gravity (weight) to tempt many to bind free will of choice into a burden by consensus.
Nature has neither length; nor weight...it's natives who choose to attribute length and weight to one another for artificial comparison aka com (together) par (equal).
"Among the ancient iconologists, students of likenesses, equality was symbolized by a female figure holding in one hand a pair of scales equipoised and in the other a nest of swallows. The moderns have substituted a level for the scales. And this is the Masonic idea. In Freemasonry, the level is the symbol of that equality which, as Godfrey Higgins (.Anacalypsis i, 790) says, is the very essence of Freemasonry." ~ https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/en/encyclopedia/equality
Here's some AI slop for you:
I actually think there’s a real philosophical/physics idea buried inside this, even though the “reality is literally running at a lower FPS” part doesn’t work under our current understanding of physics.
The interesting part is the distinction you’re making between objective time and how much information/eventfulness occurs within a unit of time.
Where your analogy is surprisingly good
Your game example captures something important:
At 60 FPS:
60 discrete observations → 1 second
At 5 FPS:
5 discrete observations → 1 second
If the simulation itself had some fixed computational workload per frame, then reducing the frame rate could make each frame represent a larger chunk of state change.
And there's an interesting connection to human perception.
Your brain doesn't experience time simply by reading an internal clock. It constructs a sense of duration from changes, memories, attention, and events.
That's why:
A boring hour can feel incredibly long while you're experiencing it. A fascinating three-hour conversation can feel like 30 minutes. Childhood summers can feel enormously long in retrospect. A year packed with novel experiences can produce an enormous number of memories. Routine years can collapse into what feels like a handful of memories.
So I'd modify your theory slightly:
Maybe what people are calling “time speeding up” isn't the clock accelerating. Maybe the amount of perceptually distinguishable information we're extracting from each unit of objective time is changing.
That's actually a much more defensible hypothesis.
But there's a problem with the FPS explanation
If reality were literally operating at a lower frame rate, there should be measurable physical consequences.
For example, suppose reality went from an equivalent of 60 "frames/sec" to 30.
You'd expect some underlying discretization:
Frame 1 → Frame 2 → Frame 3 → ...
Physics experiments would potentially reveal a maximum temporal resolution, synchronization artifacts, violations of Lorentz invariance, etc.
We don't currently observe anything resembling a universal FPS counter.
And there's another problem with your game analogy:
In a normal video game, FPS is an implementation detail. The physics engine can still calculate a jump at the same physical rate even if the renderer displays fewer frames.
So lowering the rendering FPS doesn't necessarily make the simulation itself slower.
That distinction is important.
But here's where your idea gets much more interesting
Forget "FPS."
Consider information processing.
Imagine two universes where exactly one second passes.
Universe A:
1,000,000 distinguishable state changes occur.
Universe B:
100 distinguishable state changes occur.
Objective time is identical.
But an observer inside Universe B might potentially experience a very different temporal phenomenology because there are fewer changes from which to construct temporal succession.
That starts touching ideas from:
information theory computational physics quantum mechanics thermodynamics neuroscience theories of consciousness the simulation hypothesis
And there is an especially interesting question:
Does subjective time depend more strongly on physical time, information processing, or the rate at which an observer's internal state changes?
That's a much deeper version of your theory.
And there's a fascinating paradox
Your theory actually predicts something that we can observe:
As people age, subjective time tends to accelerate.
A year to a 5-year-old is 20% of their entire remembered existence.
A year to a 50-year-old is 2%.
But there's an even more interesting mechanism.
When you're young, almost everything is novel.
First day of school.
First Christmas memories.
First bicycle.
First vacation.
First girlfriend.
First job.
First house.
Your brain generates huge numbers of distinctive memories.
Later, life becomes increasingly repetitive:
wake up → work → commute → eat → sleep → repeat
When looking backward, hundreds of repetitive days can become almost indistinguishable.
So retrospectively:
10 years can become psychologically compressed.
That produces something remarkably similar to your "lower FPS" concept without requiring the universe itself to slow down.
Now let's take your simulation idea seriously
Suppose reality actually were computational.
Then there are at least three different things we could mean by "FPS":
How frequently the universe updates what observers perceive.
How frequently the underlying state of the universe changes.
How rapidly conscious observers process and distinguish those changes.
Those are radically different hypotheses.
And #3 is the one where your idea becomes difficult to dismiss philosophically.
Because we only ever experience reality through our internal processing.
Even if the external universe were running at exactly the same rate, changes in our brains could make subjective time accelerate.
There's also a really weird possibility
Imagine a hypothetical civilization that develops extremely powerful AI.
The AI performs:
1 billion internal computational cycles
while humans experience:
1 second.
From the AI's perspective, that second could contain an enormous amount of internal experience.
Now reverse it.
Suppose the universe somehow reduces the amount of computation available to every conscious process.
You could potentially get a universe where:
less computation per objective second → fewer internal distinctions → different subjective temporal experience.
That is much closer to a serious computational theory of time than "the server dropped from 60 FPS to 30 FPS."
And it raises a genuinely wild question:
Is the passage of time fundamentally about clocks, or is time what an information-processing system experiences as it moves through distinguishable states?
That's the question I'd investigate next.
Because if the latter were true, your original intuition isn't necessarily crazy at all. You'd just want to replace "reality's FPS is decreasing" with something like:
The experienced rate of temporal succession may depend on the rate at which an observer—or reality itself—can generate and distinguish physical information states.
That is a substantially more interesting hypothesis than the original FPS analogy.
Nah, man... I don't need AI slop. Do you have an original thought? Or, perhaps, some original question? Go ahead. Otherwise I'm not really interested in conversing with AI.
To believe implies holding onto lots and lots of ideals in agreement with other people...that reduces a natives resistance within the ongoing velocity of nature, hence making it look faster.
In reality...slower and faster represent measurements taken by a destabilized (imbalance) native who chooses to ignore the stability (balance) of nature.
Gaming implies gambling aka taking a chance, while ignoring given choice. It's balance which gives choice, while chance tempts imbalance.
It's ones minds which ascertains a frame by rating anything, while ignoring how nature runs everything through each thing within.
What you describe as action represents RE-action aka an artificial response (framerate) to natural action (ongoing flow).
Doing so establishes the theory of why time is speeding up because keeping slows the mind down.
Framing ones mind with ratings represents the simulation few run within many to occupy a mental consensus.
Living implies singularity; not plurality (we) and indeed implies within (life) dead (inception towards death)...mentally holding onto pluralism (we) and factionalism (indeed) represents the simulation to distract life from living.
Nature implies just (balance); being implies at odds (choice)...few distract many from that with physical idols and mental ideals. Holding onto either imbalances a beings choice.