As you become older, your sense of time is much different. On a large scale, 1 month is 1/24 of a 2 year old’s age, while for somebody who’s 40, it’s 1/480 of their age. Time seems to run faster as you have been on the Earth for much longer, and I would guess that applies for small units of time too, like minutes and seconds. As a kid, you think that an hour is ages, but as you grow up an hour seems to go by much quicker, even though time still ticks as it always does on Earth.

You, being older now, count slower as time feels like it goes by relatively quicker. Counting “Mississippis”, “hippopotamus”, etc. are guesstimates at best and aren’t accurate measurements, being affected by how you believe time is paced. Obviously you could try to say it super quickly (when playing hide and seek as kids, me and my siblings used to do this) or ridiculously slowly, but you don’t as you have a general understanding of how long a second should be, and this idea of a second changes as you grow up!

How high are you?

Am I talking more slowly? No, it must be time that’s wrong.

You’re old now and you can’t say mississippi quite as effectively anymore

The counting systems were always bullshit. Different people and at different times have wildly different speech tempo. What you can do is trying to find your rhythm by actually saying a word repeatedly as fast as you can without mispronouncing and counting how often you can do that in a minute; That’ll give you a fairly accurate measure you can use.

They’re not wrong but they are inaccurate and unreliable. Clocks, on the other hand, are pretty accurate and reliable, and atomic clocks even moreso, and most digital clocks are now synchronized to the atomic clock standards in some form using the internet or wireless. The definition of time is quite accurately standardized to an extremely high level of precision and has been for a very long time. The human brain is not standardized like this and hopefully will never be because that’s a gross and scary idea.

The definition of a length of time has been maintained with levels of precision that have increased dramatically since ancient times, but at no point in the last, oh, say, at least 1000 years, has the measurement of time changed by anywhere close to 25%.

The antikythera mechanism is believed to be at least 2,000 years old and was able to calculate the passage of time and the motion of the planets far more accurately than Mississippis ever could hope to. The passage of time has not changed the accuracy of that device, only our understanding of the motion of the planets has, and again that’s a human brain problem not a time or motion of the planets problem.

If time was faster or slower, you wouldn’t notice anything. Because time is an expression of causality, and if causality is either faster or slower, it would go for everything, including you, your phone, your watch and everything else.
If time was slower or faster, there would be no way to detect it.

But we do have an inner clock, and that clock slows down as we age, making things feel/seem faster.
Many animals have way more accurate inner clocks than humans, for instance cats can tell the time of day very accurately, and are known to have daily routines on the clock, also disregarding sunlight and owner behavior.
Most animals also have a way more accurate perception of speed of events, and will often seem to react only in the last second, but will very rarely fail. This can be seen with for instance pigeons in traffic. That will only move at the last moment when cars or scooters or bicycles approach.

So whatever number of seconds it takes a person to count Mississippis or run 100 meter, is purely subjective, and in no way a reliable measure of time.

I specifically remember counting chunks of time as long as 15 minutes and not being off by a minute.

I can almost guarantee that memory is not accurate. the human inner watch is simply not that accurate, even with tricks to aid it.
I personally have a somewhat similar memory, of being able to tell the clock very accurately by the position of the sun. But the truth is I probably tricked myself, and when I got it wrong I discarded it, and only remembered the accurate ones. Classic confirmation bias, that we should all be aware of that we are all victims to now and then.

The point of those kind of estimation methods is not so you’ll agree with a clock, it’s so you’ll agree with yourself if you do it twice. Using a “foot” as a literal measuring unit isn’t so dumb if only one person is measuring.

In cooking, what a “cup” is in volume can vary by like 30% from cook to cook and depending on environmental factors. But if you’re the same cook, working in the same environment, your method will work every time.

It’s all relative.

wink

A whole lot of people just seem to have absolutely no sense of timing/rhythm.

A really weird place I’ve noticed that is at my work as a 911 dispatcher.

Once in a while we have to give CPR instructions over the phone, and a big part of that is counting with the caller to make sure they’re doing the chest compressions fast enough (100-120 beats per minute)

I was in band back in high school, I can keep that sort of rhythm in my sleep (though my throat starts getting pretty dry depending on how long it takes responders to arrive and take over)

But a handful of my coworkers really struggle with it, they count too fast or too slow, speed up and slow down, it’s a little terrifying to be honest.

The ones who do manage to keep good time have mostly had at least some music training, or are at least keeping an eye on the seconds counting by on the clock on our computer to keep time.

I just tried counting Mississippis with my eyes closed and a timer going, and I nailed it within a second. But I think I definitely went a little faster for the first 19 and then slowed down a little after that because there’s just less syllables in the numbers until you hit that point, and more after it.

Once you hit a certain age, every week goes by faster than the previous one.

I’ve always counted too slowly using this method. I think my general cadence is slower than average, as I tend to walk more slowly than most people, in spite of being tall. Also, I need to slow down fast talkers on YouTube, like Louis Rossmann. I imagine he’d get through 45 mississippis in 30 seconds.

because you don’t use that for more than single digits or teens

it’s used to slow you down with using monosyllable digits. once you go above twenty, you drop it becaues the digits start becoming 3 or 4 syllables.

i never heard it being used beyond the count of ten. like, you use it as a kid when counting, but i don’t see why an adult would ever do it. i know how long a second is.

I always found that ineffective and also somewhat childish. I just count the seconds, that way I’m usually off only 2-3 per minute.

That would make time 25% slower… 33%?..
But no. People just probably talk 25% faster now