Why Time Feels Faster As You Get Older, And What Researchers Think Is Behind It

For millions of Americans, childhood summers feel endless because they’re packed with new experiences, while adult years blur because routine leaves nothing to remember. Researchers have actually tried to figure out why this happens, and the results complicate it more than they confirm it.

Why Does A Year Feel Shorter As People Age?

The oldest explanation is pure arithmetic. French philosopher Paul Janet proposed in 1877 that the subjective length of a period shrinks in proportion to total age, so a year feels like one-twentieth of a life to a 20-year-old but only one-eightieth to an 80-year-old.

Researchers who have tried to formalize it describe it as a “soft mathematical model” that captures a pattern without explaining what produces it, and it can’t explain why some adults feel the acceleration more sharply.

Does Novelty Really Slow Down The Feeling Of Time?

Not reliably, according to the most direct test of that idea. The “holiday paradox” theory holds that unfamiliar experiences generate more memories, and more memories make a period feel longer in retrospect, while routine leaves fewer markers and feels compressed later.

A study in the journal Memory & Cognition tested this in 120 people aged 20 to 91, asking them to judge how fast the past decade and past year had passed and comparing those judgments to the number and vividness of their memories.

The researchers confirmed that older adults do perceive the past decade as passing faster than younger adults do, but found no significant link between that sense of speed and how many memories people reported, or how vivid those memories were. Older participants actually reported more vivid, meaningful recollections than younger ones, the opposite of what the routine-erases-memory idea would predict.

What did correlate with a faster sense of time was reduced cognitive functioning, specifically a lower ability to form new memories as measured by delayed recall, leading the study’s authors to conclude that age-related decline in encoding new memories, rather than a thinner store of old ones, is the more likely factor. That’s an observational finding across a wide age range, not a controlled experiment, so it narrows the novelty theory without eliminating it.

Could The Real Cause Be Physical, Not Psychological?

Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, argued in a 2019 paper in the journal European Review that the brain’s slowing ability to process visual images could be the mechanism: as nerve networks mature, they grow larger, forcing signals to travel longer paths, and he pointed to declining saccadic frequency as evidence.

Coverage of the paper has been more cautious than the response to the other two theories, since it is a single-author analysis rather than a controlled test of lived time perception.

What Does The Evidence Actually Support?

Not a unified answer, but a narrower and more useful one. The three theories disagree on basic terms: whether the acceleration is fixed by age alone, tied to cognitive function, or rooted in eye and neural hardware.

What the Memory & Cognition study’s 120 participants suggest is that staying cognitively engaged enough to keep forming new memories may matter more than chasing novelty. Janet’s math still describes the pattern without explaining it, and Bejan’s hypothesis remains a single paper awaiting replication. There’s no settled fix here, only a genuine ongoing scientific disagreement.