Why Does Time Go Faster as You Get Older? What Time Perception Research Says

A childhood summer lasted forever. A year in your forties is gone in a blink. Nearly everyone notices it, and psychology has spent more than a century trying to explain why time goes by so fast as we age.

Time perception doesn’t work like a clock.

It works, above all, like a memory.

And that difference explains much of why time seems to go faster as you get older.

What William James wrote in 1890

In the chapter on the perception of time in The Principles of Psychology, James put it bluntly:

The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.

William James, The Principles of Psychology

He was precise about it: the days, the months and the years do shrink; whether the hours do is doubtful; the minutes and seconds seem to stay the same.

He also reported the fashionable explanation of his day, from the French philosopher Paul Janet:

• The apparent length of a year would be proportional to the life already lived.
• At 10, a year is a tenth of your whole existence.
• At 50, it’s a fiftieth.

James wasn’t convinced.

Janet’s rule, he said, described the effect without explaining it.

Why time flies: the memory explanation

James offered a different account, and it is still the one most often cited.

When you’re young, almost everything is a first: the first trip, the first job, the first move.

Each experience leaves its own mark.

With the years, more and more of life turns into automatic routine, and then, in James’s words, “the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

Think of it this way: a year without novelty is an empty suitcase.

It weighs almost nothing when memory lifts it.

Remembered time isn’t measured in hours.

It’s measured in how many distinct things got stored.

The holiday paradox

That leads to one of James’s sharpest observations, a retrospective paradox:

• A time filled with varied experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back.
• An empty stretch does the opposite: it drags while you live it and shrivels in memory.

His examples:

• A week of travel and sightseeing may take up as much room in memory as three weeks.
• A month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a single day.
• Anton, a character in Karl von Holtei’s novel Die Vagabunden, returns to his village after seven years that feel “more like seventy,” so much has happened. And yet, looking at the church tower, he feels he has hardly been gone a week.

In 2012, British broadcaster Claudia Hammond popularized a name for this in Time Warped: the holiday paradox.

Vacations fly by while they last and stretch out when you remember them.

Boredom: when time watches itself

The flip side is boredom, which James also analyzed.

It arises when a stretch of time is so empty of content that attention settles on the passage of time itself.

Waiting one minute with your eyes shut feels endless.

And “a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity.”

While you’re in it, boring time is heavy.

In memory, it vanishes.

The present lasts a few seconds, not an instant

James added an idea that is still alive in research: the specious present, a term he borrowed from E. R. Clay.

The “now” we experience isn’t a point with no width.

It’s a small window a few seconds long.

The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.

A few numbers he gathered from the laboratories of his day:

• Wundt: about 12 impressions could be grasped as a single unit.
• Dietze: up to about 12 seconds of filled time could be taken in at once.
• Exner: two clicks can be heard as two when separated by only about 1/500 of a second.

What if we perceived faster? Von Baer’s thought experiment

James also recalls a playful calculation by the naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer.

Von Baer imagined two opposite creatures:

• One that noticed a thousand times more events per second than we do: to it, the sun would stand still in the sky and living things would move so slowly they’d have to be inferred, not seen.
• One that noticed a thousand times fewer: winters and summers would feel like quarters of an hour, mushrooms would pop up like instant creations, and the sun would scour across the sky like a meteor.

Herbert Spencer added that a gnat’s wings beat thousands of times a second.

For a gnat, perhaps, a second is long.

The idea has a modern echo.

In 2019, Duke engineer Adrian Bejan argued in European Review that the aging brain takes in fewer “mental images” per unit of time, which is why days feel shorter.

It’s a speculative hypothesis, built on physical arguments rather than direct psychological experiments.

On firmer ground is the oddball effect: Tse and colleagues (2004) showed that a rare stimulus in a sequence feels longer than the common ones even when it lasts exactly as long, an effect they traced to attention.

Does time really go faster as you get older? What James couldn’t know

Here modern time perception research complicates the popular story.

• Wittmann and Lehnhoff (2005) surveyed 499 people aged 14 to 94. The feeling of time speeding up did rise with age, but the effects were small to moderate: at most 10% of the variance.
• Friedman and Janssen (2010), with 1,865 adults in two countries, found very small age differences, except when people rated how fast the last ten years had gone.
• In the same work, feeling rushed mattered more than age: people under more time pressure felt time passing faster, whatever their age.

What James got right: remembered time depends on how many distinct memories there are, and that is still the core of the story.

What he couldn’t see: that people of every age say time flies, and that the pace of life counts as much as the calendar.

How each of us leans toward past, present or future, described in the past-positive perspective, colors that feeling too.

The time perspective quiz lets you see your own pattern. And if you’re curious how the change of seasons tugs at the inner clock, the end of summer has its own story.

Sources

• Bejan, A. (2019). Why the days seem shorter as we get older. European Review, 27(2), 187-194. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798718000741
• Friedman, W. J., & Janssen, S. M. J. (2010). Aging and the speed of time. Acta Psychologica, 134(2), 130-141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.01.004
• Hammond, C. (2012). Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. Canongate.
• James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company.
• Tse, P. U., Intriligator, J., Rivest, J., & Cavanagh, P. (2004). Attention and the subjective expansion of time. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(7), 1171-1189. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196844
• Wittmann, M., & Lehnhoff, S. (2005). Age effects in perception of time. Psychological Reports, 97(3), 921-935. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.97.3.921-935