There was a time when an hour felt like an eternity. As children, we could sit on the floor waiting for a birthday party to start, staring at the clock, convinced the hands had stalled just to torture us. Summers stretched endlessly, school days crawled, and the idea of “next year” felt impossibly far away.
Somewhere along the way, though, the pace shifted. Now, entire seasons seem to slip past before we’ve fully noticed them. Weeks blur into months, months into years, and we find ourselves asking, almost daily. How did time pass so fast? This sensation isn’t imagined, and it isn’t simply nostalgia playing tricks on us. There is real science behind why time seems to accelerate as we age, and understanding it doesn’t make the feeling disappear, but it does make it feel a little more human.
One of the most straightforward explanations comes from something called” proportional time theory.” When you are five years old, one year represents a staggering 20 percent of your entire life. It’s monumental. When you are fifty, that same year is only two percent. Each unit of time becomes a smaller fraction of the whole. Without realizing it, our brains measure time relative to what we’ve already lived, and the math quietly works against us.
But biology and math alone don’t fully explain why yesterday feels close while decades feel strangely compressed. The real culprit lies in how our brains process novelty.
When we are young, nearly everything is new. First days of school, first friendships, first heartbreaks, first jobs, first homes. Our brains are busy recording, cataloging, and storing enormous amounts of information. I’ve always suspected that our brains are like computers, storing every experience we have. New experiences require more mental energy, and that energy leaves behind dense, detailed memories. When we look back on childhood, those memories are rich and layered, making that period feel long and expansive.
As we age, life naturally becomes more routine. We drive familiar roads, shop at the same stores, and follow similar daily routines. The brain, efficient as it is, stops recording every detail. It doesn’t need to. Familiarity allows it to run on autopilot, conserving energy. The result? Perhaps fewer distinct memories are formed, and when we look back, the time feels compressed, as though it passed more quickly than it actually did.
This is why vacations often feel long while we’re on them, yet astonishingly short once they’re over. New sights, sounds, and experiences stretch our perception of time in the moment and expand it in memory. Routine, on the other hand, shrinks it.
There’s also the matter of internal clocks. As we age, our metabolism and neural processing speed gradually slow. Some scientists believe this subtly alters how we perceive time passing in the moment. Think of it like watching a film at a slightly faster playback speed; everything still happens, but it feels quicker, less weighted.
Emotion plays its part as well. Stress, responsibility, and constant mental load dominate much of adult life. When our minds are preoccupied with planning, worrying, and managing, the present moment doesn’t fully register. We are physically present, but mentally elsewhere. Time, unnoticed, slips through the cracks.
And then there is memory itself, which is far from a perfect recorder. Our brains don’t store time like a calendar; they store it like a scrapbook. (Yet, Tom has a memory that easily stores experiences in particular and distinct time frames). Moments with intense emotion, surprise, or meaning get larger pages. Ordinary days get small ones, or none at all. When we flip back through the years, the pages feel fewer, even though the days were all there.
This is perhaps why aging can feel unsettling. It isn’t just that time is passing; it’s that we’re aware of it in a new way. The future feels closer, the past more crowded, and the present more fragile.
Yet there’s a quiet comfort in knowing this experience is universal. It isn’t that we’re failing to hold onto time; it’s that our brains are doing exactly what they were designed to do. The trick, if there is one, lies in gently resisting autopilot.
Scientists suggest that intentionally introducing novelty, learning new skills, traveling, changing routines, and even taking different walking routes can slow our perception of time, not by stopping the clock, but by thickening the memory. The more vividly we live, the longer life feels in hindsight.
Perhaps that’s why travel feels so meaningful to us. Each new place stretches time open again, if only briefly, reminding us of how expansive life can feel when we pay attention.
Time may move faster as we age, but it hasn’t abandoned us. It’s still there, waiting to be noticed, asking only that we stay curious enough to meet it where it is, one ordinary, extraordinary moment at a time.
Be well.
Photo from ten years ago today, January 20, 2016:
That was truly one of my favorite posts. Thanks for sharing
Bob, thank you! We are glad you enjoyed it.
Much love,
Jess & Tom