Why Time Goes Faster as You Get Older

Everyone over thirty says the same thing and nobody under twelve believes it. The years are speeding up. A childhood summer was an era with distinct provinces in it; a recent year is a smear that apparently contained a Christmas. It is such a universal complaint that it is tempting to dismiss it as sentimentality, but it is not sentimental. It is a fairly well understood consequence of how memory encodes time, and once you know the mechanism you can do something about it.

The first part is proportional. At six, a year is a sixth of everything you have ever experienced. At forty-five, it is a forty-fifth. The same span of calendar is a shrinking fraction of the whole, and the mind appears to keep at least some of its accounts in ratios rather than absolutes. That explains part of it, but not the strange asymmetry everyone reports: that the years feel fast while they are happening and short when you look back, which is a different complaint entirely.

The second part is the real culprit, and it is about novelty. We do not remember time. We remember events, and then we infer the passage of time from how many distinct events we can recall in a period. Childhood is dense with firsts — first sea, first bicycle, first funeral, first time you understood a joke an adult made. Every one of those gets its own file. A well-established adult life, by contrast, is largely composed of repetitions, and the mind is ruthlessly efficient about repetitions: it does not file the four hundredth identical Tuesday separately. It appends it to a folder marked Tuesdays. A year with three memorable events in it is, on retrieval, roughly three events long, no matter how many mornings it actually contained.

This is why a fortnight in an unfamiliar country feels longer in memory than the two months before it, even though it exhausted you at the time. It is not that holidays are magical. It is that unfamiliar places force novelty at a rate your ordinary life does not, and every unfamiliar thing gets its own file. The same effect is available at home to anyone willing to be slightly inconvenienced: a new route, a new skill, an unfamiliar room, a conversation with someone whose views you do not already know.

There is a colder implication, which is that comfort and speed are the same purchase. A life optimised for smoothness — same commute, same six meals, same four opinions, same people — is a life that will compress. That is not an argument for chaos. It is an argument for building deliberate irregularity into an otherwise settled life, because settledness is precisely what the encoding system reads as nothing happened.

There is one more practice worth mentioning, which costs nothing. People who keep even a minimal record — three lines a day, a photograph, a note of who they saw — consistently report that their years feel longer. Part of this is that writing forces you to notice, which creates the file in the first place. Part of it is that the record lets you retrieve the ordinary days that the mind would otherwise have merged into the folder. You cannot slow time down. You can, quite reliably, take better notes on it, and it turns out that a well-remembered year and a long year are, from the inside, indistinguishable.