There’s something strange that happens as you get older.
Summer used to feel enormous.
A school year felt like an eternity. Waiting two weeks for Christmas seemed almost unbearable. Even a single Saturday could feel like a significant piece of your life.
Then somewhere along the way, the calendar seems to hit the gas.
January becomes April. You blink and summer is over. Christmas decorations go back into storage and somehow you’re pulling them out again before it feels like you ever really put them away.
You start saying things your parents used to say:
“Where did the year go?”
So why does time feel faster as you get older?
The interesting answer is that time itself obviously isn’t changing. A minute at 50 contains exactly as many seconds as a minute at 10.
What changes is how your brain experiences, records, and remembers those minutes.
And once you understand that, there may actually be a few things you can do to make life feel a little longer.
Time probably feels faster as we get older because of a combination of:
Researchers have repeatedly found that people tend to describe longer periods—particularly the previous decade—as passing faster as they get older. But the effect isn’t nearly as straightforward as people often assume.
In fact, studies looking at people during ordinary daily activities have found relatively small differences between younger and older adults in how quickly the present moment seems to pass.
That distinction matters.
It may not be that Tuesday afternoon literally feels dramatically faster when you’re 55 than when you’re 25.
It may be that when you look back, the last five years seem to have disappeared.
We tend to imagine memory as a recording.
It isn’t.
Your brain doesn’t continuously record every second of your life and store it somewhere like video footage.
Instead, it creates memories around events, changes, emotions, people, places, discoveries, and experiences that seem significant enough to remember.
Think about a week’s vacation somewhere you’ve never been.
You might remember:
The airport.
The first view from the hotel.
A restaurant you discovered.
Getting lost.
A hike.
A conversation.
A storm.
A spectacular sunset.
The strange little coffee shop you found on the third morning.
You come home after seven days with dozens of distinct memories.
Now compare that with seven ordinary days at home.
Wake up.
Coffee.
Drive to work.
Work.
Drive home.
Dinner.
Television.
Bed.
Repeat.
Objectively, both weeks lasted exactly 168 hours.
But when you look backward, they can seem completely different in length.
The vacation contains dozens of psychological landmarks.
The routine week may get compressed into one generalized memory:
“I worked all week.”
That difference may be one of the biggest clues to why entire years seem to shrink as we age.
Think about how much novelty exists during childhood and young adulthood.
Your first day of school.
Your first best friend.
Your first overnight trip.
Your first kiss.
Learning to drive.
Your first job.
Graduation.
Leaving home.
Your first apartment.
Your first serious relationship.
Your first real paycheck.
Maybe marriage.
Maybe becoming a parent.
Life during those years is filled with new situations that require your brain to pay attention. That same flood of novelty may also help explain [why we gradually stop asking “why” as we get older]—the world simply stops feeling as unfamiliar as it once did.
Even ordinary experiences are new because you haven’t experienced enough of the world for them to become ordinary yet.
By middle age, you’ve probably done many of those things hundreds or thousands of times.
Driving 30 miles doesn’t create much of a memory.
Checking into another hotel may not.
Another Monday morning certainly doesn’t.
Your brain becomes extraordinarily efficient at recognizing familiar situations.
That’s useful for functioning.
But it may be terrible for making life feel long.
Scientists are still working out exactly how aging, memory, and subjective time interact.
A 2026 study involving adults ages 20 to 91 provides an especially interesting piece of the puzzle. Researchers again found that older adults tended to perceive the previous decade as having passed faster.
But the simple explanation that older people just had fewer autobiographical memories didn’t hold up.
Instead, the ability to encode new information into memory was associated with differences in perceived time passage.
That adds an important nuance.
The answer may not simply be:
“Do more things so you have more memories.”
It may be that the process of encountering, noticing, learning, and encoding something new changes the structure of our remembered lives.
Novelty forces attention.
Attention creates detail.
Detail creates memory.
And memory gives the past texture.
Paying attention to ordinary moments also reconnects us with something adults tend to lose: a sense of wonder. When we actually notice what is around us instead of rushing through it, an ordinary day can become far more memorable.
Routine is one of life’s great contradictions.
We need it.
Routine lets us function efficiently. It helps us exercise regularly, maintain careers, manage households, raise families, save money, and accomplish long-term goals.
But too much routine can make huge sections of life nearly indistinguishable from one another.
Imagine working at the same place for ten years.
If every year follows roughly the same rhythm, your brain doesn’t need to create a completely separate memory for every commute, meeting, grocery trip, or Tuesday night dinner.
The experiences overlap.
Ten years of thousands of individual days can become:
“The years when I worked there.”
This is one reason adulthood can feel increasingly compressed.
Not because nothing happened.
But because much of what happened was familiar.
Sometimes boredom itself may be telling us that too much of life has slipped into repetition. As we explored in What If Boredom Is a Signal, Not a Problem?, boredom may be less of a defect and more of a prompt to explore, create, or change direction.
There’s another explanation you’ve probably heard.
When you’re five years old, one year represents 20% of your entire life.
When you’re 50, one year represents only 2%.
Therefore, the theory goes, each year feels progressively shorter relative to everything you’ve already experienced.
It’s a fascinating idea.
And mathematically, the percentages are obviously true.
But we should be careful about presenting it as established neuroscience.
Researchers have proposed several mathematical models attempting to explain the apparent acceleration of time with age, including proportional models. The evidence hasn’t established one simple mathematical rule that explains our experience of time.
I still think the idea is useful as a metaphor.
A year simply doesn’t occupy the same psychological territory at 50 that it did at five.
But our brains are considerably more complicated than a fraction.
There’s another factor that becomes increasingly common during adulthood:
time pressure.
Work.
Bills.
Appointments.
Children.
Projects.
House maintenance.
Emails.
Deadlines.
Family obligations.
Errands.
Then somehow you need to exercise, maintain friendships, sleep eight hours, drink enough water, eat healthy food, plan retirement, and remember the dentist appointment you scheduled six months ago.
Researchers studying subjective time have found that time pressure may help explain why people report life passing quickly.
That makes intuitive sense.
When you’re constantly focused on the next obligation, you don’t spend much time mentally standing still.
Monday becomes a race toward Friday.
January becomes a race toward a deadline in March.
Spring becomes preparation for summer.
And eventually you realize you’ve spent much of the year trying to get to the next thing.
Maybe you should evaluate the potential of simplifying your life.
One of the strangest things about time perception is that experienced time and remembered time can behave almost oppositely.
Sit in a waiting room with nothing to do for an hour.
The hour may feel painfully slow.
Ask yourself six months later about that hour and it has practically disappeared from your memory.
Now spend an incredible day exploring a new city.
The day may fly by while you’re experiencing it.
But six months later, it can seem enormous because you remember dozens of individual moments.
That’s the paradox.
And if I’m choosing between the two, I’ll take the second one.
This may also explain one of the most common childhood memories:
Summer used to last forever.
Part of that was probably because our sense of duration was different.
But think about what childhood summers contained.
Swimming.
Camping.
Bike rides.
Friends.
Trips.
Exploring woods.
Staying somewhere new.
Learning things.
Getting into trouble.
Doing things for the first time.
There weren’t necessarily more hours.
There were more distinct moments inside those hours.
Adult summers can become:
Work Monday through Friday.
Mow the grass Saturday.
Do errands Sunday.
Repeat 12 times.
Suddenly it’s September.
There is another part of aging that’s uncomfortable but probably important.
At some point, our perspective changes from:
How long have I been alive?
to:
How much time might I have left?
Research into subjective time suggests that awareness of a limited future may influence how older adults experience everyday activities and the passage of time.
I don’t necessarily think that’s depressing.
It can actually clarify things.
At 20, wasting a year doesn’t feel particularly expensive.
At 50, it does.
The currency hasn’t changed.
You simply understand its value better.
We can’t change chronological time.
And I’m not particularly interested in making a boring Tuesday afternoon feel like it lasts 17 hours.
What I’d rather do is make a year feel bigger when I look back at it.
That means creating more psychological landmarks.
It doesn’t need to be climbing Everest.
Take a different trail.
Learn to cook something difficult.
Sleep outside.
Visit a town you’ve never explored.
Take a woodworking class.
Grow mushrooms.
Learn to surf.
Try pottery.
Go somewhere without knowing exactly what you’ll do when you arrive.
Novelty doesn’t have to be expensive or dramatic.
It simply needs to interrupt familiarity.
We spend years perfecting routines and then wonder why all the weeks look alike.
Take a different route home occasionally.
Go somewhere on a Wednesday night.
Move your workout outside.
Eat breakfast somewhere you’ve never been.
Spend a weekend without your normal schedule.
Small disruptions make days more distinguishable.
Consumption tends to blur together.
Creation leaves landmarks.
Build something.
Write something.
Plant something.
Start a business.
Restore an old piece of furniture.
Learn an instrument.
Cook a complicated meal.
Create a garden.
The finished object becomes evidence that a particular period of your life existed.
Learning is almost the opposite of autopilot.
When you’re a beginner, you have to pay attention.
Everything is unfamiliar.
You make mistakes.
You improve.
You notice details that an experienced person ignores.
In other words, learning recreates some of the conditions that made childhood feel enormous.
Being terrible at something new may actually be good for you.
Not necessarily with your phone.
Occasionally stop during an ordinary but meaningful moment and consciously notice it.
Where are you?
Who’s with you?
What does the air feel like?
What’s happening around you?
You don’t need to turn life into a mindfulness exercise.
Just occasionally recognize:
I’m going to want to remember this.
That tiny act of attention can turn an ordinary experience into a marker in your life.
One of my favorite filters for deciding whether something is worth doing is simple:
Will this probably make a good story someday?
Not every day needs to be an adventure.
That would become exhausting—and eventually adventures would become routine too.
But life probably needs enough unusual days that the years don’t collapse into one continuous Monday.
I’ve thought about this differently as I’ve gotten older.
Maybe trying to make time move slowly isn’t really the goal.
Five minutes waiting for a dentist can move incredibly slowly.
That doesn’t make it valuable.
Maybe what we actually want is a life that feels dense.
A life with enough experiences, relationships, challenges, mistakes, discoveries, places, projects, and stories that when we look backward, there’s something there.
I can’t stop another year from passing.
Neither can you.
But perhaps we have more control over whether that year becomes one blurry memory or a collection of moments we can still see years later.
The clock isn’t going to slow down.
So maybe the answer is to stop giving it so many identical days.
When we were young, life continuously delivered novelty to us whether we asked for it or not.
Growing older changes that.
Eventually, if we want new experiences, we have to choose them.
We have to leave the comfortable restaurant.
Take the unfamiliar trail.
Learn something we’re bad at.
Travel somewhere new.
Talk to someone different.
Build something that might fail.
Say yes occasionally when staying home would be easier.
Maybe that’s one of the hidden responsibilities of getting older.
Nobody is going to make our world feel new for us anymore.
We have to do some of that ourselves.
And if doing so can make the years feel just a little less like they’re disappearing?
That seems like a pretty good reason to keep trying new things.
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