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You hear a song on the radio and work out it is twelve years old. Not two. Twelve.
Or someone shows you a photo and you think it was taken a couple of summers back, and it turns out to be six.
Nothing is wrong. Nobody has died. You have just had that quiet, slightly cold feeling that a piece of your life went past while you were busy doing something else.
And then the question arrives, the one almost everybody asks sooner or later: why does time go faster as you get older?
There is a famous answer, and you have almost certainly heard it. It sounds right. It has been repeated for well over a century. And out of all the explanations on offer, it is the one the evidence fits worst.
Why Does Time Go Faster As You Get Older? The Popular Answer
The popular answer is about proportion.
When you are five, one year is a fifth of everything you have ever known. When you are fifty, that same year is one fiftieth. The year has not changed length. Its share of your life has shrunk. So it feels like less. The idea is usually credited to the French philosopher Paul Janet, writing in the late 1800s.
It is tidy. It explains the feeling. And it makes one very clear prediction that anybody can go and check.
If this is really the reason, the feeling should keep getting stronger for your entire life. Seventy should feel faster than fifty. Ninety should feel faster than seventy. It should never stop speeding up, right to the end.
That is not what people report.
What People Actually Say When You Ask Them
In 2005, two researchers at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff, put the question to 499 people aged between 14 and 94 and published the results in Psychological Reports.
Three things came out of it, and every one of them is more interesting than the proportional answer.
First, the link between age and the feeling was weak. Nearly everybody said time was going quickly. The teenagers said it too.
Second, it depended entirely on the size of the chunk you asked about. When people were asked how fast the last hour went, or the last week, or the last month, age made no difference at all. A seventy-year-old’s week felt about the same speed as a twenty-year-old’s week. Only when people were asked about the last ten years did the answers climb with age.
Third, that climb stopped. It rose until roughly age 50, then flattened out and stayed flat into people’s nineties.
Sit with that third one, because it quietly takes the popular answer apart. If each year felt shorter simply because it was a smaller slice of a longer life, there could be no ceiling — the feeling would have to keep accelerating forever. Instead it rises, reaches something around the middle of life, and settles down.
So it is not really your days that have sped up. Your days feel much as they always did. It is your decades that have gone thin.
There was one more finding in that study worth holding on to. The people most likely to pick statements about time pressure — the sense that time is rushing past and you cannot get everything done — were those between 20 and 59.
That is not an age effect. That is a life-stage effect. Those are the years with small children in them, and work, and people who need looking after. Which is worth knowing, because unlike your birthday, some of that is negotiable.
What Makes a Stretch of Life Feel Long
Here is where it starts to be useful.
Your sense of how long a past period was does not come off a clock. It comes from how much of it you can get back.
A week with four distinct things in it is a thick week in memory. A week of seven near-identical days is one day with a multiplier on it. You lived all seven. You only kept one.
A small version of this can be watched in a lab. Show someone a run of identical images and then slip a different one in among them, and people judge the odd one out as having stayed on the screen longer than it actually did. It is called the oddball effect.
The explanation put forward by David Eagleman and Vani Pariyadath is almost mechanical. When the brain meets the same thing over and over, its response gets weaker each time — repetition suppression. The new image gets the full-strength response. And a bigger response reads, somehow, as more time.
Two honest caveats, because this particular finding gets oversold. The effect is smaller than the first reports suggested: early estimates put the stretch at something like 30 to 50 percent, and later work brought it down nearer 10 percent. And it is a laboratory effect measured in fractions of a second. Nobody has shown it scales up to explain a decade.
But there is a second clue, pointing the same direction, and it is one of the few things in this whole field that almost nobody argues about.
Why You Remember Being Young So Clearly
Ask people of any age to list the memories of their life and they do not spread them out evenly. There is a bulge. Far more memories come from roughly ages 15 to 25 than from any other stretch of comparable length, before or after. Researchers call it the reminiscence bump, and it shows up over and over.
The obvious explanation is novelty. Those are the years of firsts. First job, first time leaving home, first love, first funeral, first time standing somewhere nobody knew your name. Lots of firsts means lots of memories, so that decade looms enormous in the rear-view mirror while your thirties went past in a blur.
That is probably part of it. But there is a finding that complicates it, and it is the most interesting thing in any of this.
Researchers including Akira O’Connor, Chris Moulin and Clare Rathbone went looking for whether the bump is really just about new experience. They tested recognition of films and songs from that period — including ones people said they did not even like. If the bump were purely a matter of novelty and exposure, the disliked ones should have shown it too. They did not. Films and songs from ages 15 to 25 that people had no fondness for were recognised no better than ones from any other time of life.
What came through strongly instead was the material bound up with who the person had decided they were.
Which shifts the answer, slightly but importantly. It may not be newness as such that makes time thick. It may be newness that meant something. The year you moved to another country stays. The year you watched a great deal of television you did not really choose does not — and that is probably the real reason comfort viewing evaporates from memory, something worth a look in why you keep rewatching the same show.
It also explains why the obvious fix does not work. People hear “novelty” and think they need to book something expensive and far away. But a holiday is one memory. A changed Tuesday, repeated, is fifty.
The Oldest Answer Did Not Ask For More Time
If all of this points anywhere practical, it points here: the trouble is not how many years you have left. It is that the ones you are currently living are not landing.
Which makes one very old line about this oddly modern.
There is an ancient prayer about how short life is — exactly the sort of thing you would expect to finish by asking for more of it. It does not. It asks to be taught to count the days instead. Not to be handed extra ones. To learn how to number the ones that are already there.
That is a strange thing to ask God for, until you set it next to everything above. Counting something means attending to it. You cannot number a day you never noticed. Whoever wrote that had no lab, no survey of 499 people, and no theory of repetition suppression — and arrived more or less where the data arrives.
Make of it what you like. It is a very old piece of noticing, and nobody has improved on it much since.
A good place to start: The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day is a short guide to noticing the ordinary moments you are already living — which, as it turns out, is the whole problem this article is about. Get the free guide. Free.
Five Things That Actually Thicken a Week
None of these costs money, and none of them needs spare hours you do not have. That matters, because most advice on this subject quietly assumes both.
Change one fixed thing, not your whole life. Pick a single thing you do on autopilot and do it differently. A different route to work. Cooking something you have never cooked. Sitting in a different chair to eat. It sounds trivially small. It is supposed to be — small is what you will actually keep doing, and the research points at frequency of novelty, not size of novelty.
Aim at the flat stretch, not the weekend. Your weekends and your celebrations already have markers on them. The part of your life that is vanishing is the middle of the week. That is where a change is worth the most, and it is the last place anybody thinks to put one.
Tell one person what you did today. Out loud, to an actual human, even briefly. Saying a thing is a way of going back and fetching it, and anything you fetch once you are more likely to find again. It is also free, and it is good for the other person too.
Write one line a day. Not how you felt. One concrete thing that happened — who you spoke to, what the weather did, what went wrong. A notebook, the back of an envelope, the notes app on a cheap phone. Do it for a month and read it back, and a month you would have sworn was empty turns out to have had thirty days in it.
Treat the time pressure as the real enemy. This was the strongest thing in the 2005 data and the easiest thing to skip past. The feeling of time racing tracked how rushed people were, not how old they were. One commitment dropped, one hour defended, one thing you say no to — that may buy back more of your sense of time than any amount of noticing.
And if you want the plain arithmetic of it, our free How Many Days Have I Been Alive? calculator will tell you exactly how many days you have had so far. It takes about ten seconds and it is a surprisingly difficult number to look at calmly.
A Question Worth Sitting With
The years are not actually moving. That much is settled. What is moving is how much of each one you keep.
Which means the feeling you get when a photo turns out to be six years old is not really a message about your age. It is a message about your Tuesdays.
And there is a related trap worth knowing about, because it is the same machinery running backwards: the reason the past often seems better than the present has almost nothing to do with the past being better, as we dug into in why you feel like life was better before.
So here is the question, and you do not have to have read every word above to answer it. Which do you think does more damage to a year — doing nothing new in it, or being too rushed to notice the things you did? The 2005 study found rushed people felt time fly regardless of age, so there is a real case for the second. Tell me which one you would pick in the comments, and why.
Share This
- The popular answer for why time speeds up as you age (each year is a smaller fraction of your life) makes a prediction you can test: the feeling should accelerate forever. It doesn’t. It plateaus around 50. Which means the answer is wrong: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-does-time-go-faster-as-you-get-older/
- “A week with four distinct things in it is a thick week in memory. A week of seven identical days is one day with a multiplier on it.” Best thing I’ve read on where the years go: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-does-time-go-faster-as-you-get-older/
- Turns out it isn’t your days that speed up as you get older — ask people and a 70-year-old’s week feels the same as a 20-year-old’s. It’s your decades that go thin. And a holiday is one memory, but a changed Tuesday is fifty: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/personal-growth-and-life-skills/why-does-time-go-faster-as-you-get-older/
Questions People Are Asking
Why does time go faster as you get older?
The most repeated explanation is the proportional one, usually credited to the French philosopher Paul Janet in the late 1800s: one year is a fifth of a five-year-old’s life but only a fiftieth of a fifty-year-old’s, so it represents a smaller share and feels shorter. That explanation makes a prediction that does not hold up. A 2005 study by Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, which surveyed 499 people aged 14 to 94 and was published in Psychological Reports, found the sense of time accelerating rose with age only up to around 50 and then stayed flat into people’s nineties. If proportion were the cause, the feeling would keep accelerating for life. A better-supported account is about memory: the perceived length of a past period depends on how much distinct detail can be recalled from it, so routine, repetitive periods compress while periods full of new and personally meaningful experience stay long.
Does time really speed up, or does it just feel that way?
It only feels that way, and the feeling is specific to long intervals rather than short ones. In the 2005 Wittmann and Lehnhoff survey, when people were asked how quickly the last hour, the last week or the last month had passed, there was no difference by age at all — a seventy-year-old rated a week much as a twenty-year-old did. The age difference appeared only on the question about the last ten years. The practical reading is that individual days do not feel faster as a person ages; it is the retrospective view of long stretches that compresses, which is a memory effect rather than a change in time perception itself.
Why do I remember my teens and twenties better than last year?
This is a well-documented pattern called the reminiscence bump: people of all ages recall disproportionately many autobiographical memories from roughly ages 15 to 25. That it happens is one of the least disputed findings in memory research; why it happens is still debated. The intuitive explanation is that those years contain an unusual density of first-time experiences. However, research including work by Akira O’Connor, Chris Moulin and Clare Rathbone found that films and songs from that age range which people did not like were recognised no better than material from other periods, which argues against novelty and exposure alone being the cause and in favour of the bump being tied to the period when a person’s identity was forming.
How do I make time slow down and stop losing years?
Because the sense of a period’s length depends on how much of it can be recalled, the aim is to make ordinary weeks produce more distinct memories rather than to find more time. Practical steps that require no money and little time: change one habitual thing regularly rather than making one large change once, since frequency of novelty matters more than scale; place those changes in ordinary midweek days rather than weekends and holidays, which already carry memorable markers; describe the day out loud to another person, as recalling an event makes it easier to recall again; and write one concrete line about each day, which creates a record that counters the impression of an empty month. Reducing time pressure also matters — in the 2005 Munich data, people aged 20 to 59 were the most likely to endorse statements about time rushing past, suggesting the feeling tracks how rushed a life is as much as how long it has been going.
Does the feeling that time is speeding up ever stop?
The survey evidence suggests it levels off rather than continuing indefinitely. In the 2005 Wittmann and Lehnhoff study of 499 people aged 14 to 94, ratings of how quickly the previous ten years had passed increased with age up to approximately age 50, then remained roughly stable through the following decades into the nineties. This plateau is one of the main reasons the proportional explanation is doubted, since that account predicts continuous acceleration across the whole lifespan. It is worth noting this comes from people rating their own experience at one point in time rather than from following the same individuals across their lives.
