Why Time Feels Faster as We Age

The Perceptional Relativity of Time

The feeling that time moves faster as we grow older is universal among humanity. “Every day is getting shorter”… “Last year flew by”… “Ten years ago feels like yesterday”… “Life seems to slip away”… Who hasn’t used such phrases to express that quiet despair before the excruciating inevitability of an ever-accelerating journey toward our own end?

So widespread is this feeling that it has even inspired a few bizarre conspiracy theories, claiming that *they*—whoever “they” happen to be—have secretly manipulated time using advanced technology for unknown purposes.

Follies aside, why do we all swear that time moves faster, even though our rational minds tell us it doesn’t? The answer, I believe, lies in what I call the perceptional relativity of time.

Not Einstein’s Relativity, But a Psychological One

This concept has nothing to do with Einstein’s theories of special or general relativity, which describe how time actually slows down under high speeds or strong gravitational forces. Those belong to physics. On Earth, where our speed and gravity remain constant, these effects have no bearing on how we perceive time.

The perceptional relativity of time, instead, belongs to the realm of psychology—specifically, the study of time perception (also called chronoception). This field examines how humans and animals perceive time subjectively, based on mental, physiological, and environmental factors.

The most familiar example is emotional: when we’re happy, time seems to fly; when we’re suffering, it crawls.

Why Time Seems to Accelerate with Age

This phenomenon—the apparent acceleration of time with age—has long been recognized and debated within psychology. Several theories try to explain it.

Some propose biochemical reasons, such as declining dopamine levels in the aging brain. Others focus on neurology: as we age, our experiences become less novel and more routine, causing our brains to register fewer new memories. The result is that large stretches of time pass “unnoticed.”

You can probably recall your first day at school, your first time seeing the sea, your first kiss, or your first major success or failure—all vividly. But you likely don’t remember most of the countless ordinary days that followed. Routine compresses time; novelty expands it.

While these theories explain part of the story, I believe the most fundamental cause lies deeper: in the perceptional relativity of time itself.

We Measure Everything by Comparison

Humans can only evaluate things by comparison. Nothing is inherently big or small, long or short, heavy or light, warm or cold, bright or dark—unless it’s compared to something else.

If you grow up in a small village, your first visit to a provincial capital feels overwhelming; if you grow up in a major city, the same town feels tiny. A Hercules beetle is both huge (compared to insects) and tiny (compared to mammals).

Time works the same way. Thirty minutes is short for a film but long for a trailer. A century is an eternity to a human, yet insignificant to the universe.

When we try to evaluate any quantity objectively, we instinctively use ourselves as the reference point. “Big” means bigger than us; “heavy” means heavier than what we can lift; “cold” means below our body temperature; “dark” means dimmer than what our eyes can adjust to.

Our Lifespan as a Temporal Reference

Time, however, is more abstract. The only constant reference we have for it is the total time we’ve lived so far.

Just as the subjective value of one dollar differs between a child with ten dollars and an adult with a hundred thousand, the subjective value of a day or a year depends on how much life we’ve already experienced.

When you’re ten years old, twenty years into the future represent twice your lifetime—a vast stretch of time. But when you’re forty, those same twenty years are only half your life, and thus feel significantly shorter.

This simple ratio explains why time seems to speed up as we age: each year becomes a smaller fraction of our total experience.

How Much Faster Does Time Feel?

By this logic, we can not only understand why time feels faster as we grow older but also how much faster it feels.

Your subjective perception of time is inversely proportional to your total lifetime. All else being equal, time feels roughly twice as fast every time your age doubles.

At age ten, a year feels long and eventful. By twenty, it feels half as long. By forty, half again. The clock itself never changes, but our perspective—our frame of reference—does.

Time, then, is not merely something that passes; it’s something we perceive through the lens of experience. It’s not the world that moves faster—it’s us who slow down, our memories thinning, our comparisons shifting, our moments blending together.

The perceptional relativity of time is not a trick of physics, but of consciousness itself.

✨ Thank you for reading my first article on Vocal Media! I hope you enjoyed this exploration of imagination and reality. If you liked it, please leave a ❤️ or share your thoughts in the comments — your feedback means a lot!