Why Does Time Feel Faster the Older We Get?
I have a question.
Actually, I had a question.
Now I have approximately seventeen questions, several theories, and a mild existential crisis.
So naturally, Iâm bringing all of you with me.
Welcome to Down the Rabbit Holeâthe place where I wonder about something completely normal, look it up, and somehow resurface several hours later knowing entirely too much about it.
For our first rabbit hole, I wanted to start with something I think almost everyone has said at some point:
Where the hell did the time go?
My niece just turned four.
FOUR.
And I swear she was born approximately six months ago.
She was three months premature and so tiny when she was born that she was barely bigger than the palm of my hand.
Now?
Sheâs more than half my height.
And apparently four years have passed while I wasnât paying attention.
Rude.
So that got me thinking.
When I was a kid, a year felt like an eternity.
Summer vacation might as well have lasted seventeen years.
Waiting for Christmas?
Absolute torture.
Thirty minutes until we left the house?
Might as well tell me weâre never leaving.
Now I blink and somehow another month has passed.
I swear I was just writing July on things.
Itâs August.
Soon itâll be Halloween.
Then Christmas.
Then somebody will say, âCan you believe itâs 2027?â
And I will become violent.
SoâŚ
Why does time seem to move faster the older we get?
Down the rabbit hole I went.
đłď¸ First of all: apparently, weâre not imagining it.
Which was comforting for approximately three seconds.
Researchers have actually asked people of different ages how quickly time seems to pass.
One study surveyed nearly 500 people between the ages of 14 and 94. When people thought about shorter stretchesâa week, a month, even a yearâage didnât make as much difference as you might expect.
But when they looked back across decades, something changed.
Older adults were more likely to describe time as having sped up, particularly compared with childhood.
So the clock isnât secretly getting faster.
Obviously.
But our experience of our lives can make it feel that way.
And one explanation involves something incredibly boring:
Routine.
đłď¸ Your brain apparently hates reruns.
Think about being a kid.
Everything was new.
Your first day of school.
Your first sleepover.
Learning to ride a bike.
Your first best friend.
Your first roller coaster.
The first time you stayed up until midnight.
The first time you went somewhere without your parents.
Even ordinary things were discoveries because you hadnât done them a thousand times yet.
Now think about an average adult Tuesday.
Wake up.
Get ready.
Go to work.
Come home.
Make dinner.
Watch something.
Scroll your phone.
Go to bed.
Repeat.
When days contain similar events, our memories can essentially compress them together. Research has found that routine periods tend to be remembered as having passed more quickly than periods containing less-routine experiences.
Which explains something weird about time:
A boring day can feel incredibly long while youâre living itâŚand incredibly short when you look back on it.
Meanwhile, a vacation can fly by while youâre actually there but feel surprisingly large in your memory afterward because there are so many distinct moments attached to it. Researchers sometimes describe this kind of mismatch between experienced time and remembered time as the holiday paradox.
Basically:
Your brain doesnât remember your life like a clock.
It remembers events.
And apparently that distinction matters a lot.
đłď¸ Which means childhood cheated.
This is where my existential crisis really started.
As children, we are constantly creating memories because weâre constantly encountering things we havenât experienced before.
As adults?
Weâve seen some shit.
đ
The hundredth drive to work isnât particularly noteworthy.
Neither is the 900th load of laundry.
Your brain doesnât need a beautifully detailed autobiographical memory of every Tuesday afternoon you spent folding towels.
So similar experiences get bundled together.
Looking backward, there are fewer distinctive memory markers separating one stretch of time from another.
And suddenly:
Where the fuck did August go?
Psychologists have been thinking about this idea for a very long time. Modern research still considers routine and memory important possibilities for why parts of life seem compressed in hindsightâalthough newer reviews point out that there probably isnât one neat explanation for the whole phenomenon. Our judgments about how quickly life passed can also involve attention, emotion, expectations, nostalgia, satisfaction, and what a period of our life meant to us.
So unfortunately I cannot tell you:
âScientists solved time. Itâs this one thing.â
They did not.
Rude again.
đłď¸ Wait. What about the whole âa year is a smaller percentage of your lifeâ thing?
Youâve probably heard this explanation.
When youâre four years old, one year is one-fourth of your entire life.
When youâre 20, itâs one-twentieth.
When youâre 50, itâs one-fiftieth.
Therefore, each year feels shorter because it represents a progressively smaller percentage of everything youâve experienced.
It sounds wonderfully logical.
And it may be an intuitive way to describe what aging feels like.
But psychologyâs actual explanation of long-term time perception is much messier than that simple fraction.
There isnât currently one universally accepted formula that explains why life seems to accelerate. A recent review of the research basically concludes that multiple mechanisms may contribute, and the evidence for some popular explanations is still incomplete.
Which I actually find more interesting.
Because apparently our brains donât measure our lives with a ruler.
They measure them with memory.
Meaning.
Emotion.
Change.
Expectation.
And probably several other things weâre still figuring out.
đłď¸ SoâŚcan we slow it back down?
Not the clock.
Unfortunately, I have not discovered immortality during Rabbit Hole #1.
Give me time.
đ
But if routine contributes to that feeling of years collapsing into one another, then adding novelty and distinct experiences to our lives may give memory more landmarks to hold onto.
That doesnât mean you need to travel the world or jump out of an airplane every Thursday.
It can be tiny.
Take a different route somewhere.
Try a restaurant youâve never been to.
Learn something.
Cook something youâve never made.
Go somewhere youâve never been in your own town.
Listen to a different kind of music.
Take pictures.
đ
Actually pay attention to something you normally walk past.
Do something that makes your brain go:
Oh. This is new.
Research on unique experiences suggests they can create richer episodic memories and change how a period of time is remembered.
And suddenly this rabbit hole has accidentally collided with something Iâve already been trying to do:
look closer.
Notice things.
Remember them.
Maybe we canât make time move slower.
But perhaps we can give ourselves more reasons to remember where it went.
And now Iâm sitting here thinking about my niece again.
Four years.
I remember when she was impossibly tiny.
And now she talks constantly, has opinions about everything, makes me cupcakes, cuddles with me, runs around my house, and occasionally calls inanimate objects âmother fuckers.â
đĽ˛đ
Maybe those four years didnât disappear.
Maybe theyâre just stored differently than they felt while I was living them.
And maybe thatâs why watching children grow is such a strange way of measuring time.
You donât notice it happening every day.
Then one day you look at them and realize an entire version of them is already gone.
The baby became a toddler.
The toddler became a little kid.
And somehow, while you were busy living your ordinary Tuesdays, years happened.
Well.
This was supposed to be a fun little question.
Now Iâm staring into the void.
Excellent.
I came here wondering why childhood summers seemed to last forever.
I am leaving with an existential crisis and the sudden urge to make my life slightly less repetitive.
Rabbit hole successfully entered. đđłď¸
Until next time,
â Destiny
P.S. What completely random question should I fall down the rabbit hole with next?
Sources & Further Reading
For this one, Iâd put a small sources section at the bottomânot nearly as elaborate as History After Dark, but enough that readers can follow the research if they want. The strongest ones are the peer-reviewed study on routine and remembered duration, the recent Frontiers in Psychology review of âlife tempoâ judgments, and the Scientific American explainer on why time seems to speed up with age.
destinylaharris 
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