Quick summary: Time seems to speed up with age not because the brain is failing but because adulthood brings fewer new experiences and more repeated routine, which leaves fewer distinct memories to look back on. This has real implications for well-being, since a life that feels like it is slipping away unnoticed can quietly erode a sense of meaning and satisfaction over the years. The practical takeaway is that introducing small amounts of novelty and paying fuller attention to ordinary moments can restore a sense of time well spent, a simple, low cost habit that clinicians and public health messaging could usefully encourage alongside more traditional advice on mental health.

Most people notice it at some point, usually around the same time every year. You look at the calendar in December and wonder how it got there so quickly, when only a few months ago it was still January. Childhood summers used to stretch on for what felt like forever. Waiting for a birthday felt like an eternity. Now weeks seem to fold into one another, and entire seasons pass without leaving much of a mark.

The clock itself has not changed. A day is still 24 hours, whether you are seven or seventy. What changes is how we experience those hours, and, more importantly, how we remember them afterwards. The feeling that time is speeding up is not really about time at all. It is about memory, attention and the sheer proportion of new experience we allow into our lives as we get older.

Why childhood feels so long

A huge amount of childhood is made up of firsts. The first day at a new school, a new friendship, learning to ride a bicycle, a family holiday somewhere unfamiliar. Because these experiences are novel, the brain pays closer attention to them and tends to lay down richer, more distinctive memories. When you look back on a childhood summer, you are not really recalling ninety uniform days. You are recalling a string of specific, vivid moments, and that density of memory is part of what makes the period feel long in hindsight.

Adult life tends to work the other way round. Wake up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, sleep, and start again the next day. None of this is unpleasant, and routine has real benefits, but when many days look nearly identical, fewer individual moments stand out later. A month built almost entirely from repetition can end up compressed into a single, blurry memory, even though it took just as long to live through as a childhood month full of new experiences.

There is also a simpler mathematical explanation that psychologists have discussed for well over a century. When you are five, a single year is a fifth of your entire life, so it naturally feels enormous. By the time you are 50, that same 12 months is only a 50th of everything you have lived through, which makes it feel proportionally smaller. This does not mean time is literally accelerating. It simply means each year takes up a shrinking share of your total lived experience, which changes how significant it feels in comparison with everything that came before it.

Routine, attention, and the blur of ordinary months

Routine is not the enemy here. It helps us get through the day without exhausting ourselves making decisions about every small thing, and most people genuinely need a degree of structure to function well. The trouble starts when routine becomes so complete that one week is barely distinguishable from the next. Taking the same route to work, eating at the same few places, spending most weekends the same way; after a few months of that pattern, it can be genuinely difficult to recall which specific week anything actually happened in.

Attention plays a similar role, and it is worth being honest about how often our attention drifts even when we are technically present for something. It is possible to sit at a dinner table with people you love while quietly checking your phone under the table, or to visit somewhere beautiful while your mind stays fixed on a work problem you cannot switch off. The body is there, but very little of the experience is actually being registered. Moments we only half attend to rarely become memories worth keeping, so they tend to dissolve into the general fog of “that month” rather than standing out as anything in particular.

Can anything be done about it?

Nobody can slow down the clock, and there is no psychological trick that will genuinely make an hour longer. What can change is how rich a given stretch of time feels once you look back on it, and that turns out to be surprisingly within our control.

Introducing small amounts of novelty into ordinary life is one of the more reliable ways to do this. It does not need to involve expensive travel or dramatic life changes. A few smaller shifts can have a similar effect:

• Take a different route home occasionally, even if it is slightly longer.
• Visit a part of your own city or town you have never properly explored.
• Cook something you have never made before instead of the usual rotation.
• Start reading about a subject you know almost nothing about.
• Spend time with someone you have been meaning to catch up with for a while.

Each of these creates a distinct marker in memory. Instead of an entire month collapsing into a vague sense of “work and home,” a few specific days start to stand out on their own.

It is also worth being wary of how often meaningful things get postponed. “I will travel when things calm down,” “I will call them next month,” “I will finally start that hobby next year.” Life rarely arrives at a point where nothing else is competing for attention, so “someday” has a habit of quietly turning into several years. Fortunately, memorable moments do not require much money or planning. A long, unhurried conversation with someone you care about, a sunrise you actually stopped to watch, an evening spent properly present rather than half distracted; these ordinary moments are often the ones people remember most clearly years later.

None of this requires abandoning routine altogether. A useful approach is simply to interrupt it here and there: one new experience a week, one evening without a phone in reach, a quick note at the end of the day about whatever stood out. Small habits like these tend to make weeks feel more distinct from one another, even within a life that is still, for the most part, fairly structured.

It is probably not really time that is the problem

The uncomfortable feeling that life is moving too quickly is not really a complaint about time itself. It is more accurately a complaint about memory. When days become repetitive and attention stays divided, fewer moments remain clearly visible when we look back, and that is what makes months and years seem to vanish faster than they should.

An hour will always be sixty minutes, and nothing changes that. What we do have some say over is what we put into those minutes, and how much of it we are actually present for while it is happening.

Mohammed Cohen is a Jewish supporter of Israel. Am Yisrael Cha.