One answer to what you can try (to slow down the perception of time increase with age) might lie in understanding why we have a perception that time passes quicker as we get older (and yes ofc I personally notice it, too, and I just passed 64)...
Fortunately, I don't have to write it up in my own words, these 3 'answers' I found on Reddit do a fairly good job...
"It is due to something called Weber's law.
"Weber's law—the observation that the ability to perceive changes in magnitudes of stimuli is proportional to the magnitude."
For example:. I give you a 5oz weight and a 10oz weight and ask you to hold one in each hand. Then I ask you to tell me which is heavier. Just by lifting them you can easily tell which is heavier.
Then I give you a 50oz weight and a 55oz weight. You will have a harder time telling the difference, even though the change (5oz) is the same in both situations.
The same applies to distance. You can easily tell the difference between a five foot tower and a ten foot tower but if looking at a 105 foot tower and a 110 foot tower you would have a harder time noticing the difference.
This phenomenon can be observed with all forms of measurement and grows exponentially with the measurement size. Aka magnitude.
The same works with time. As some others have noted, the longer you live the greater magnitude of time you have experienced/observed. And the harder it is to perceive the changes."
***********************************
"My simple take is this. When we are younger there are more memorable moments in each day or week. This is due to there being so little experience with all the things that happen in regular life. As we age the days become full of things that are "normal" everyday things and not really noticed or maybe more importantly, remembered at all. Now as we look back on the past few weeks or months there are significantly less "memorable" moments. Making that time period seem to have taken less time and therefore happened quicker. It's also been shown that when trying to count out a minute in their head, young people get to a minute faster than reality and older people get there after a minute has gone by. 53 seconds and 67 seconds respectively. I don't have much of a guess for this other than patience or more experience with the notion that a second is a little longer than you think."
***********************************
"Two main factors:
The older you get, the same amount of time is a smaller and smaller % of your total experience and memories. When you're 10, a year is 10% of your whole life so far. Thinking back on the last year will be a big chunk of your whole lifetime. When you're 50, a year is only 2% of your life and memories so it feels smaller. Every year is a smaller chunk of your life than it used to be.
Adult life tends to have less major changes and memorable events that help provide more markers of time in childhood. As a kid you're rapidly gaining and losing friends, going to at least a few different schools, maybe playing sports on different teams or being in plays or taking lessons of some sort. This year you're tall enough to ride a carnival ride you couldn't last year. This month you have a crush on someone, 6 months later you're dating someone else. All these life changes help the months and years feel "different" from each other and you remember them as more separate and the time feels longer. As an adult, if you have the same job and friends and spouse for 10+ years, it's all more alike and blends together in your memory. There's just more memorable changes and differences to recall from age 5-15 than from 50-60, so remembering all those separate events makes the time feel "bigger" in your perception."
************************************************************************************
If you take these as valid reasons, then it follows that attempting to increase the volume of more memorable experiences we have (in our day-to-day lives as we age) might have the effect of 'slowing' down our perception of the passage of time.
There are problems with this ofc. A generalization - but we tend to gravitate more towards routine and 'just' passing time as we get older (as I type, I've 'realised' that's what I'm doing, I'm doing 'stuff' all the time that I've done a thousand times before - mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge, getting the shopping, walking the dog, scanning the races, etc etc)
And I'll/we'll always come back to that, too. Because it's life, stuff we have to do. Going off and doing something like visiting somewhere you've never been before doesn't seem to make much difference because after you've done it, the 'normality' is beckoning and you (have to, usually) return to it.
Money plays a part (at least for some of us, possibly many), as does the ageing process itself and the fact we can't do what we used to (or can't risk it, kind of the same thing).
My theory is that there are chemical changes in the brain with age (there are probably medical studies somewhere that confirm or deny this, haven't looked) that contribute (possibly along with the 'reasons' above) to an increased perception of fast time passage. If so, why those changes take place is a question. Why would the evolutionary process create this? Was it there all along anyway? Is it just a natural process that brain cells (or a specific region of the brain) go through simply because they're heading the 'wrong' way? ie they're degenerating.
Theoretically, there should be a reason for all this. Evolution 'happened' (to us) in order (I assume) to give the greatest chances of survival. It would be great to understand what that reason is. But this is out of reach, partly because we don't know the end game anyway. How far has evolution got to go till it reaches the pinnacle?
Crikey, this is getting a bit deep! I need to go and make a cup of green tea and clean up the kitchen! Then mow the grass before it rains!
