Why Time Seems To Move Faster As We Get Older

Think about the last few months. It probably feels like January was only recently here. Yet somehow, several months have passed. This feeling becomes especially strange when you remember childhood, when a school holiday could seem to last forever.

New Experiences Can Stretch Our Memories

One explanation has to do with novelty. When you are young, a huge number of experiences are new. First days at school, new friends, unfamiliar places, holidays and countless small discoveries give your brain plenty of information to process.

Novel experiences tend to attract more attention and create distinctive memories. When you look back, those memories can make a period feel richer and longer because there are more individual events separating one moment from another.

Routine Can Make Years Blur Together

Adult life often contains a lot more repetition. You may wake up, travel to work, perform familiar tasks, come home and repeat something similar the next day. The individual days can feel perfectly normal while you are living them, but they may be harder to distinguish when you look back.

That is one reason a year filled with routine can seem to have vanished. It was not actually shorter. Your memory may simply have fewer unusual landmarks to separate one part of the year from another.

Our Sense Of Time Is Not A Clock

There is also the relative proportion of life involved. One year represents a much larger chunk of experience for a five-year-old than it does for someone who has already lived several decades. This has been proposed as another reason time can feel increasingly compressed with age.

Interestingly, time can still feel incredibly slow while you are living through something difficult, boring or highly anticipated. Looking back later can produce an entirely different impression. Our immediate experience of time and our memory of it are not always the same. Maybe that is why childhood summers felt so long. So much of the world was still new.