Why Life Feels Faster Every Year
▶ Watch on YouTube (and subscribe)As a kid, a single summer felt endless. As an adult, entire years slip past before you've noticed. Nothing about time has changed. The way your brain measures it has.
One big reason is proportion. When you're five, one year is 20% of your entire life — enormous. When you're fifty, that same year is 2%. Each new year is a smaller and smaller slice of everything you've lived, so it feels shorter by comparison. This is the proportional theory of time.
The other reason is novelty. Your brain measures time by how many new memories it lays down. Childhood is wall-to-wall firsts, so it records densely and stretches long in hindsight. Adult life runs on routine — same commute, same rooms — and routine barely gets recorded, so whole stretches compress into nothing.
Which points to the only real fix: to slow time down, feed your brain new things. Novel places, skills, and routines lay down fresh memories — and a rich month in hindsight always feels longer than an empty year.
