Food for thought: why time flies, and how to slow it down

We had a family reunion at Myrtle Beach this past weekend. Four generations of us in one hotel, from my grandparents down to my little cousins who still need help getting out of the car. I spent most of the trip just watching everyone, and one thing kept standing out.

Every time I talked to the older people in my family, the things they were looking forward to were far away. A trip next year. Retirement. A grandkid's graduation that's still years away. My little cousins were the exact opposite. On the drive down, my youngest cousin Alex lost his Power Ranger toy somewhere in the car and cried about it like the world was ending, because as far as he was concerned it was. Their whole world was whatever sat right in front of them. Same family, same weekend, completely opposite relationship to time, and it lined up almost exactly with age.

That's what got me started. It reminded me of a conversation I had at lunch a few weeks earlier where one of the interns said high school felt like it lasted forever and college just vanished. The whole table agreed before she finished the sentence. I spent half of the drive to the reunion thinking about this, and when I got home I read everything I could find. There are two explanations for why time speeds up as you get older. One is tidy and a little shallow. The other one may change how you think about time altogether.

The tidy answer

A French philosopher named Paul Janet wrote this one down in 1897. Every year you live is a smaller slice of the life you've already lived. At one year old, a year is your entire existence. At five, it's a fifth of it. At fifty, a single year is one fiftieth, so of course it feels like it evaporates. The clock never changes. Your sense of the fraction does.

There's an uncomfortable number hiding in that idea. Depending on how you run the math, you've already lived through about half of your felt life by your late teens or early twenties. Not half your years. Half of the part your brain registers as living, gone before you feel like your life has properly started.

It's a clean theory and it has survived for over a century. But it always left me unsatisfied, because it describes the shape of the problem without touching the cause. It tells you the years shrink. It never explains why they feel so empty on the way down.

The answer that actually explains it

The second one does. Your brain doesn't measure a stretch of time by the clock. It measures it by how many new memories are packed inside it. Novelty gets recorded. Repetition gets thrown out.

The clearest proof of this is something the psychologist Claudia Hammond calls the holiday paradox. In an ordinary two weeks of normal life, your brain files away somewhere around six to nine experiences worth keeping. Spend a week somewhere brand new and that same count jumps to six to nine a day. That's why one week in an unfamiliar city can feel longer in memory than the two routine months on either side of it. Identical hours on the clock. Wildly different amounts of memory recorded.

It also explains why childhood feels enormous when you look back on it. When you're a kid, everything is the first time. First time on a bike, first ocean, first day at a school where you don't know a single person. Your brain is recording nonstop because none of it is familiar yet. One childhood summer is thousands of new memories thick. A routine adult year might hold a couple dozen. So the summer feels vast and the year disappears, even though the calendar spent the same number of days on each.

Once you see it that way, the empty feeling stops being a mystery. The years aren't shorter. They're just emptier of the one thing your brain uses to measure them.

The part I can't stop thinking about

Here's where the reunion comes back, because I think there's a second effect stacked on top of the first one, and it's the piece I haven't really seen anyone else write about.

When you're a little kid, two things are true at the same time. Time is already moving as slowly as it will ever move for you. And everything you care about is right in front of you. You're not planning five years ahead. You can't even picture being twenty. I got to observe this first-hand when one of my little cousins spent forty-five minutes desperate to watch the TV in the back of the truck, waiting on the next stop so someone could get it working. To him, forty-five minutes was its own kind of forever.

For my older relatives it had flipped, and it had flipped in both directions at once. Time was moving faster for them, and their excitement had moved further out, onto things months or years away. That's the trap. When the thing you're waiting for is far off, you spend the whole stretch in front of it living in the anticipation, and all those weeks in between collapse, because you were never really inside them. Then the day finally arrives and it often feels strangely ordinary, because the anticipation, which was the part actually generating the excitement, just switched off. There's even a name for that specific letdown. Psychologists call it the arrival fallacy.

So it compounds. The days are already getting shorter, and you spend more and more of them staring at a horizon instead of standing where you are. I do this constantly. For example, I spent last summer half-waiting on going back to campus in the fall, and then felt cheated when the summer went by fast. It took me until now to realize that last summer went by fast partly because I wasn't fully in it.

Why this is good news

Here's the part that made me want to write about this instead of just feeling bad about it.

If time sped up because of a fixed clock ticking somewhere inside you, you'd be stuck with it. But the memory explanation is the one with the most evidence behind it, and it comes with a lever. Novelty. New input. If your years feel short because they've run low on new memories, you can put new memories back into them.

That doesn't mean quitting your life and flying around the world. It's smaller and more repeatable than that. Learn something you're bad at. Take a road you've never driven. Put your full attention on the person in front of you instead of the plan behind them. Every time you do something genuinely new, your brain flips the recorder back on, and that stretch of time gets its weight back.

I know "slow down and be present" reads like a magnet on a fridge. That's exactly why it meant something to find real research sitting underneath it. It isn't a vibe. Novelty makes a period of time feel measurably longer in the rearview. Staying curious on purpose isn't only a nice way to live. It might be the one real lever we have for making a life feel longer from the inside.

Anyway. The intern was right. High school did feel longer than college, not because it was, but because it was newer. My little cousins have more time than anyone else on that trip, and none of them know it. And the summer I'm standing in right now is going to feel short if I spend the whole thing waiting for the fall.

So I'm going to try to actually be here for it.