I don't think I perceive time in the same way as you do. I have to qualify that statement with an "I don't think" because of course I don't actually know how you perceive time - or anything else for that matter. Consciousness is subjective and your experience of perception may differ from mine. Even further, I can't prove that you or anything else is even conscious at all, but many things other than myself seem to function in a way that suggests consciousness, so I'll make my assumptions and then behave accordingly.
But I think I already got off track. I don't think I perceive time in the same way as you do, or as many other living things do for that matter. Things may appear to usually proceed at a more-or-less steady pace, one second at a time, except of course, when you're stuck in traffic and time seems to slow down some, or if you're in a car skidding on ice and then time suddenly slows way down. But most of the time, time proceeds fairly steadily.
I imagine that some other things sense a different rate to the passage of time than we do. Take a housefly - buzzing around the kitchen at a speed too quick for me to catch it with my hands - or even hit with a swatter. I can't not imagine that time for that fly goes slower - how else could it process all that information about what it's flying around so quickly, when it needs to veer left or veer right to avoid this obstacle or that and all without crashing into a wall? And given that it only has a 24- or 48-hour life span and each hour represents a greater proportion of its life than a year does of mine - time must be far slower for a housefly than it is for a human.
As I get older, years pass faster. While a year once represented a full one-tenth of my life (i.e., when I was 10), a year now represents a mere 1/64th of my life. I see an old friend and realize we haven't talked in over a year, but to me it feels like "just yesterday."
So I don't think of time as a fixed rate at all anymore. Sometimes it feels like it goes slowly and sometimes it seems to scream right past me. And not only is a year not what it used to be, but I'm about ready to take on decades (should I last so long). No, time is not a fixed-rate thing, and scientists confirm this with speed-of-light experiments and clocks circling the earth on jet planes.
We often think of time as something outside of us. It's like we're floating in a stream of time, which inexorably takes us forward into the future. But science has shown us that the stream, if it even exists, is hardly constant and is full of eddies and rapids, stagnant stretches and cascading waterfalls.
I don't think there's a stream at all. Time doesn't "appear" to go slower or faster depending on age and activity - time is exactly as you perceive it. When time seems to go slowly, it is slow, and when it seems faster, it is faster. Our conscious minds create time and we're not floating is some external stream of time - time is what we make it. We are not in time; time is in us.
One night in Portland, Oregon, while I was at a club (The Doug Fir Lounge) waiting for the show to start, an earnest-seeming young man near me was writing furiously in a journal. I had to ask what he was writing about, and we got to talking about his metaphysical ideas of quantum particles and Heisenberg uncertainty. He seemed to be having some sort of break-through experience and was trying to record all the revelations flooding into his mind (I live for these chance encounters). I suspect Adderall and amphetamines may have had a role in his experience. During our conversation, I got to state the line above ("We are not in time; time is in us") and Spencer Krug of the band Moonface (also Wolf Parade, but it was a Moonface show that night), who was setting up for their set on the stage near us, was within earshot and asked me what I had just said.
"We are not in time; time is in us," I repeated.
I'll never forget what musician Spencer Krug of the band Moonface (also Wolf Parade) then said to me in reply:
"Whatever."
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