Time goes by so quickly

I definitely think our perception of time changes with age.  To the point where I think time accelerates the older you get.  I remember when I was a kid and I would get summer holidays from school.  We would finish first week of June and start back first week of September.  Those 3 months lasted an eternity.  You could do so much in that time.  You could sleep late, get up and still have a whole day to do whatever you wanted.

I spent hours with mates and hours playing on my consoles and my computer.  We spent hours playing games in the streets.  The one thing there wasn't a lack of was time.

I'm older now and while I do have a lot more obligations in life, I do still have more or less the same amount of time when I get a break as I did when I was younger.  It doesn't feel the same however, time runs out quicker, and everything you do ends too soon.   It's been 7 months of this year so far and that has flown by in the blink of an eye.  3 months lasted an eternity as a kid but now it passes like a week or two felt back then.

There are times when our perception of time elongates and we feel like time is dilating - "A microwave minute is longer than a normal minute" - when we are waiting for something.  That scrutiny of time seems to affect how quickly it passes.

I know some people will be thinking this is all in the mind, but what if it's not?  The Heisenberg uncertainty principle causes some peculiar behaviour, it states that the more precisely you observe momentum the more erratic position will become and vice versa, as demonstrated by the beam of light between two pieces of card experiment - the more you narrow the card the light projection gets smaller and smaller until it starts to expand contravening intuition.


What if a similar principle applies to time itself, what if time itself dilates the more precisely you observe it?  The inverse would be true that the less you observe time the faster it would become.  We know the saying, "time flies when you're having fun" and consider it a behavioural quirk but what if there is an effect being caused by a principle of physics we have not yet defined?  What if time really does accelerate the less attention you pay to it?  You climb into bed at night and you fall asleep and you wake the next day, you feel like only just few moments passed, what if that really were true and time accelerated while you slept?  If this was true and we knew it then how could we use that to our advantage?