• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, July 16, 2024

Last week, I got an email congratulating me on being on LinkedIn for 20 years.

My first inclination was that it couldn’t be that long. But when I did the mental math, I realized it was right.  I first signed up in 2004. LinkedIn had just started two years before, in 2002.

LinkedIn would have been my first try at a social platform. I couldn’t see the point of MySpace, which started in 2003. And I was still a couple years away from even being aware Facebook existed. It started in 2004, but it was still known as TheFacebook. It wouldn’t become open to the public until 2006, two years later, after it dropped “The.”

So, 20 years pretty much marks the sum span of my involvement with social media.

Twenty years is a significant chunk of time. Depending on your genetics, it’s probably between a quarter and a fifth of your life. A lot can happen in 20 years. But we don’t process time the same way as we get older. 20 years when you’re 18 seems like a lot bigger chunk of time than it does when you’re in your 60s.

I always mark these things in my far-off distant youth by my grad year, which was 1979. If I use that as the starting point, rolling back 20 years would take me all the way to 1959, a year that seemed prehistoric to me when I was a teenager. That was a time of sock hops, funny cars with tail fins, and Frankie Avalon. These things all belonged to a different world than the one I knew in 1979. Ancient Rome couldn’t have been further removed from my reality.

Yet, that same span of time lies between me and the first time I set up my profile on LinkedIn. And that seems just like yesterday to me. This all got me wondering: Do we process time differently as we age? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Time is time -- but the perception of time is all in our heads.

The reason why we feel time “flies” as we get older was explained in a paper published by Professor Adrian Bejan. In it, he states, “The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs. The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age, because of several physical features that change with age:… body size, pathways degradation, etc.”

So, it’s not that time is moving faster, it’s just that our brain is processing it slower. If our perception of time is made up of mental snapshots of what is happening around us, we simply become slower at taking the snapshots as we get older. We notice less of what’s happening around us. I suspect it’s a combination of slower brains and perhaps not wanting to embrace a changing world quite as readily as we did when we were young.

Maybe we don’t notice change because we don’t want things to change.

If we were using a more objective yardstick (speaking of which, when was the last time you actually used a yardstick?), I’m guessing the world changed at least as much between 2004 and 2024 as it did between 1959 and 1979. If I were 18 years old today, I’m guessing that Britney Spears, “The Lord of the Rings” and the last episode of the first incarnation of “Frasier” would seem as ancient to me as a young Elvis, “Ben-Hur” and “The Danny Thomas Show” seemed to me then.

To me, the first list of things seems like they were just yesterday. Which is probably why it comes as a bit of a shock to see a picture of Britney Spears today. She doesn’t look like the 22-year-old we remember, which we mistakenly remember as being just a few years ago. But Britney is 42 now, and as a 42-year-old, she’s held up pretty well.

And, now that I think of it, so has LinkedIn. I still have my profile, and I still use it.