Why does time speed up as you age?
Time feels faster with age mainly because routine creates fewer new memories to mark the passage of time. Novelty stretches time; repetition compresses it. The popular “each year is a smaller proportion of your life” explanation is intuitive but does not fit the evidence well on its own.
The proportional theory
To a five-year-old, a single year is a fifth of their whole life — vast. To a fifty-year-old, that same year is one-fiftieth — a sliver. Because we seem to judge durations relative to how much we've already lived, each passing year feels proportionally smaller, and therefore quicker.
The novelty-and-memory theory
We also gauge how long a stretch of time was by how many memories it left. Childhood and early adulthood are dense with firsts — new places, people, skills — and those firsts get richly encoded, so the period feels long in hindsight. Routine adult life lays down fewer distinct memories, so months blur and vanish. This is why a novel week on holiday feels longer than a familiar month at home.
A childhood summer was wall-to-wall novelty — new everything. Your memory stamped it densely, so it reads as long. The compression isn't time changing; it's your memory recording less.
How to slow time down
- Seek novelty — new routes, skills, places, people. Fresh experiences lay down more memory.
- Be present. Attention thickens experience; autopilot thins it.
- Break routines — even small variations give the mind something to encode.
Time speeds up with age mainly because routine leaves fewer new memories to mark it — the popular “each year is a smaller share of your life” account does not fit the evidence well on its own — novelty is what stretches time back out.
Related
Being present is the antidote — the same attention explored in mind techniques and felt in the Laboratory.
Frequently asked
Why does time feel faster as you get older?
Why did summers feel so long as a child?
Can you actually slow down your sense of time?
Sources & further reading
- The proportional account (Paul Janet, 1897) — a year is 20% of a five-year-old’s life but 2% of a fifty-year-old’s — is intuitive but does not fit the data well on its own, because it ignores attention, novelty and emotion. Proportionality & its critics (Baylor College of Medicine) ↗
- The better-supported account is retrospective: prospective time (judging a minute right now) barely changes with age — the acceleration is almost entirely in hindsight. A 2026 study in Memory & Cognition found it is the encoding of new information, not the amount of autobiographical memory, that predicts the effect — and the authors’ original hypothesis was disproven by their own data. Wittmann, researcher commentary on the 2026 study ↗
Educational, not advice. Sourcing marked for verification at the pre-launch trust pass.