# Measuring the Subjective Passage of Time: A Sociophysics Modeling

## TL;DR

This paper uses a sociophysics model to explain how people subjectively experience the passage of time, showing that time feels faster as we age.

## Contribution

A novel sociophysics model is introduced to quantify subjective time perception, incorporating ritualized socialization and power law adjustments.

## Key findings

- Time perception accelerates with age, aligning with common subjective experiences.
- Ritualized socialization transitions individuals from an infinite to a finite perception of future time.
- A power law adjustment effectively mitigates the shrinking perception of time.

## Abstract

A simple model is built to evaluate quantitatively the individual feeling of the passage of time using a sociophysics approach. Given an objective unit of time like the year, I introduce an individualized mirror-subjective counterpart, which is inversely proportional to the number of objective units of time already experienced by a person. An associated duration of time is then calculated. Past and future individual horizons are also defined together with a subjective speed of time. Furthermore, I rescale the subjective unit of time by activating additional clocks connected to ritualized socializations, which mark and shape the specific times of an individual throughout their life. The model shows that without any ritual socialization, an individual perceives their anticipated life as infinite via a “soft” infinity. The past horizon is also perceived at infinity but with a “hard” infinity. However, the price for the first ritualized socialization is to exit eternity in terms of the anticipated future with the simultaneous reward of experiencing a finite moment of infinity analogous to that related to birth. I then extend the model using a power law of the number of past objective units of time to mitigate the phenomenon of shrinking of time. The findings are sound and recover common feelings about the passage of time over a lifetime. In particular, the fact that time passes more quickly with aging with a concomitant slowing down of the speed of time.