Our parents warned us about it, but it’s hard to understand until you experience it first hand: as you get older, time seems to fly. It catches you off guard, probably because it’s such a powerful and bizarre concept. You can’t add more time to the clock, but by understanding how this phenomenon works, you can at least try to make life seem like it’s passing by a little slower.
This interactive timeline sort of helps you visualize this concept (theorized by philosopher Paul Janet), but the basic idea is: we perceive time relative to the total time we’ve experienced life on the whole.The older we get, and the more of the world we’ve seen, we start to develop a routine. The days start to blend together, and time seems to pass us by.
Psychologist William James concluded as much in Principles of Psychology. He explained that, compared with childhood, adulthood has fewer new and memorable experiences. We often measure time by firsts—our first day our school, first kiss, first home, first child—when we run out of firsts, James says “the days and weeks smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.”When our memories are detailed, the moment seems to last longer. Here’s what Neuroscientist David Eagleman said in a profile in the New Yorker.
“This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said-why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass. “Time is this rubbery thing...it stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”
So when we get caught in dreaded autopilot mode, we’re racing through the day with no real detail of our surroundings. It’s like when you have a long commute to work—sometimes, you get to your destination with no real memory of even driving there