When I was ten, the six-week summer holiday seemed to last approximately three years.

Christmas took forever to arrive. Birthdays were separated by geological eras. Even a Friday afternoon at school could feel longer than the construction of the Great Wall of China.

Now?

I put the Christmas decorations away, make a cup of tea, and somebody tells me it’s November again.

So, why does time go faster as you get older?

First, the reassuring news: it doesn’t.

A minute still contains 60 seconds. Scientists haven’t discovered that Tuesday is quietly stealing hours from Wednesday.

What’s changing is our perception of time.

Your Brain Isn’t a Clock

Researchers have been studying time perception for decades, and the evidence is fascinating.

One study involving 233 healthy people asked participants to mentally estimate 120 seconds. Those aged 15–29 averaged about 115 seconds. Those aged 50–89 averaged just under 87 seconds.

In other words, the older group’s mental estimate was considerably shorter.

But that’s only part of the story.

Another large study involving adults aged 16 to 80 found surprisingly small age differences in how quickly people felt time was passing, except when they looked back over the previous ten years.

So age alone doesn’t explain everything.

Routine, attention, memory, and how busy we feel may all contribute.

Remember When Everything Was New?

Think about childhood.

Your first day at school. First bicycle. First holiday. First kiss. First job.

Life was overflowing with firsts.

By adulthood, Tuesday can look suspiciously like Monday.

Get up. Breakfast. Work. Shopping. TV. Bed.

Repeat until someone puts the Christmas decorations up again.

New and distinctive experiences can add more landmarks to our memories. Long stretches of routine, by comparison, can blur together when we look backward.

Perhaps that’s why a childhood summer can occupy an enormous mansion in our memory while the whole of last February appears to have been mislaid.

A Quick Midway Thought

If you enjoy articles that question the way we automatically live, think, and make decisions, have a browse around the rest of the blog. That’s really what this site is about: occasionally stopping long enough to ask, “Hang on. Why am I doing this?”

Can We Make Life Feel Slower?

We can’t actually slow time.

Unless Einstein missed something rather important.

But we can make our lives less repetitive.

Visit somewhere you’ve never been.

Learn something completely new.

Take a different route.

Talk to someone new.

Book the trip.

Try the restaurant.

Start the project you’ve been talking about since 2019.

You don’t have to spend your seventies bungee jumping through the Amazon rainforest simply to make Tuesday memorable.

The point is to keep giving your brain something new to notice.

Because perhaps the real problem isn’t that life speeds up as we get older.

It could be that routine makes life disappear without leaving enough footprints behind.

And if that’s even partly true, the answer isn’t to worry about how quickly the years are passing.

It’s to put more life into them.

P.S. If you’re ready to stop living according to somebody else’s rules and start creating life on your own terms, take a look at The Legacy Code by Keith Everett. It’s about breaking old conditioning, reclaiming your personal power, and deciding what you want the next chapter of your life to look like.

P.P.S. If you’re fascinated by manifestation, synchronicity, the power of thought, and the teachings of Florence Scovel Shinn, visit my Florence Scovel Shinn YouTube channel, where we bring Florence’s timeless ideas into the modern world.