Why Does Time Go Faster As You Get Older?

Hi friend,

Why do some days feel like years and some years feel like days?

As we get older, life feels like it's moving faster and faster. We look back on a year and can't really remember where it went.

Months start to pass like minutes, and we begin to feel so helpless against the passage of time that it almost seems as if we're an observer of our lives, not a participant any more. The answer to slowing down time is simpler than you might think.

The first thing to know is that no matter how boring the Zoom call, exciting the holiday or old you are, time always passes at exactly the same rate for you. You have the same number of hours in the day as you ever have, and they’re always moving at the same pace.

One second is one second, always. So if this is the case, why do we feel like time changes speed? Well, there is a difference between Present Time and Remembered Time. You experience time differently in the moment versus when you recall it. Your Present Time will always remain at the same speed but your Remembered Time can vary widely.

So when we say that time is speeding up, we don’t mean it ACTUALLY passed more quickly, but that it seems to have passed more quickly when we recall it. It’s not “that week went so quickly” but “I don’t recall what I did during that week.”

Memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and re-experiencing our time. We remember our time with respect to what we were doing, where it was, who we were with and the emotions we had.

So here's the first key insight - the more memories you have from a past experience, the more that experience gets expanded in time.

Think back to a holiday you went on 5 years ago. Even though it was a long time ago, you’ll probably still be able to recall a lot of details, making it seem like it lasted for longer and time moved more slowly for that week.

So if time is memory and we want more time, then what we really want is more memories. But this still doesn’t explain why our recollection of time speeds up with age, until you consider why memories are made...

Your brain is lazy. It wants to do as little work as possible and conserve as much energy as it can. This is why it likes routines, habits and thought patterns because once it’s done that thing a few times, it needs to think less and less about doing it again.

The thing is - when you’re young, almost EVERYTHING is new information. This is the first time you’ve been to the park, or school, or swam in the big pool, or kissed a girl, or been on a boat... Your brain is constantly recording.

This is the most important lesson to know about slowing down time. Your subjective experience of time is based on your memories, and the best way to ensure that your brain remembers what you’re doing is with two things - novelty & intensity.

When something new or intense happens, your brain doesn’t know what it needs to remember, so it just holds onto all of it. It’s never encountered this before, so it doesn’t know if it will need this information in future. Therefore, it starts recording what’s happening.

This is why holidays are such a good example to show how time and memories are linked because there’s lots of new things AND lots of intensity happening.

This is the Holiday Paradox - time flies while you’re having fun, but feels long in retrospect. As we age, our adult life gets into routines, where we do the same actions day after day after day, we drive the same route to work, speak to the same people and even think the same thoughts.

We allow ourselves to become dominated by monotonous routines, paths of least resistance and habituated thought patterns.

TLDR: routines compress time.

Novelty Saturation Theory is the idea that as we age, we experience fewer new things, so our brain stops encoding as many detailed memories, which makes time feel like it’s passing faster.

And this is the uncomfortable truth. As we get older, days move quickly because we can’t remember them, and we don’t remember our days because we haven’t done anything memorable with them. Our days are forgettable, therefore we forget them.

Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life. So, in order to slow time down, you MUST give your brain a reason to pay attention. Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences, that will later be memorable. This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things. Even if you've never wanted to try salsa dancing or yoga or an open mic comedy night, saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel, and potentially intense memories.

Sure it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out, but you know that you won’t recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix, whereas you'll have tons of new memories if you go and do something new. Which in retrospect, makes time pass more slowly.

Allow yourself to be immersed in the things you spend your time doing, regularly plan new experiences, talk to different people, say yes to adventures wherever you can, walk the dog on a new route, visit a different town, eat at a new cafe.

These are all memory investments, that future you will be able to draw dividends from. Each day you can ask yourself “What did I do today that will stand out in my memory?” - the more you can answer this clearly, the slower your time will move.

Eventually you are going to be looking back on your life, the choice is between viewing a beautiful varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see, or a grey monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of TikTok dances and Netflix series.

If you make your life memorable, you will remember it.


Until Next Monday
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill