Why Time Goes Faster As You Get Older

Close your eyes. Remember yourself as a child, playing with your friends, stressing out about spelling tests at school, coming home to snacks on the table, and asking for help with your homework. What do you feel? Maybe you're suspended in a time when things felt new, fun, and exciting.

Now think of similar activities as an adult: getting ready for bed, reading a book, having dinner with friends. These moments don't seem as interesting or exciting as they did when you were a child. When we think back on our childhood, it feels like it lasted a lifetime, but now it's like we're passengers in our own life, with time merely passing us by. Time flies, and unfortunately for us humans, evolution never gave us wings.

This feeling, where time seems to go faster when we're experiencing it but feels much longer when we remember it, is called the holiday paradox, coined by psychology writer Claudia Hammond. The holiday paradox refers to the idea that when we go on vacation, a week, or even two weeks, seems to go by so quickly that we can barely believe that we had a vacation at all. Yet when the vacation is over, and we look back on it, it feels like it was much longer than just one week.

Scientists believe that one of the reasons for this is that when we're on vacation, we have lots of new experiences in a short period. You go scuba diving for the first time, you see art, you eat interesting food. These events are outside your daily routine. Then you return to your ordinary life marked by routine workdays and weekends. The stimulation of that vacation seems long gone, and when you look back on it, it feels like so much happened. It feels like so much time went by, and even though when you were there, it felt incredibly short.

Our experience of time changes depending on what we're doing and how we feel about those experiences. That's why you hear things like "time flies when you're having fun." I'm sure you've experienced it before too. Your favorite musician's concert is over in the blink of an eye, and at the end of a great first date, you realize you've been talking for hours, yet the conversation still feels incredibly short.

This happens because when we're immersed in an activity, we're not checking our watch to see the minutes ticking by. So, we lose track of time, making it seem like time is going much faster than normal. Immersion is the key word here because time doesn't only go faster when we're doing something exciting or something we'd love to do.

How many times have you told yourself you'd only spend 10 minutes on TikTok, only to look up from your phone three hours later and see that the sun has gone down? Exactly! It's because of how immersive the app experience is. It keeps you busy and makes you forget about time.

These differences in perception make the holiday paradox both relatable and confusing. To help us understand the phenomenon better, we need to look at how people think about their childhood. In a 2005 survey, 499 participants between the ages of 14 to 94 were asked about the pace at which they felt their lives were moving. When asked about shorter durations like weeks and months, all the way up to a year, the participants' perception of time didn't appear to increase with age.

However, when asked about longer durations, the older people were, the faster they felt like their lives were moving. People over 40 in particular felt like time went by slowly in childhood, then accelerated through their teenage years and into early adulthood, and then after that, time just flew by.

But why? Why do we feel time goes faster the older we get? Our brain has a limited storage capacity, and so to keep things running smoothly, our brain encodes new experiences into memory. It tends to skip over the more repetitive events in our lives. The more memories we have, the more things we can look back on.

When we're thinking retrospectively, the more things we can remember about a period of time, the longer we feel that time period was. Think about your time in college or in high school. You remember most of that period of your life because you were absorbing so much information that your brain was forced to slow down to take it all in.