I can’t believe it’s November already.
I seem to say some version of that every year, usually around the time the shops start preparing for Christmas. January still feels like a fairly recent conversation, summer seems to have come and gone in a hurry, and suddenly we’re discussing holiday plans again.
The strange thing is that individual days don’t necessarily feel short.
An afternoon waiting for an appointment can last an eternity. A rainy Sunday with no particular plans may seem to have more hours than you know what to do with. Yet step back and consider the whole year, and the months appear to have folded into one another.
How can time move slowly while we’re living it, then seem to have passed so quickly when we look back?
And why does that feeling become so familiar as we get older?
There’s a popular explanation you may have heard. When you’re ten, one year represents a tenth of your life. When you’re seventy, it’s a much smaller fraction. So, the theory goes, each year naturally seems shorter.
It’s a wonderfully tidy idea. The trouble is that it doesn’t tell us much about how people actually experience time. We don’t appear to carry around a running calculation of what percentage of our lives the current year represents.
The research offers a more interesting picture.
Does time really speed up with age?
In 2005, researchers Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff asked 499 people, ranging in age from 14 to 94, about their experience of time.
Their results broadly supported the familiar impression that time passes more quickly as people grow older. But there was a catch: the relationships between age and perceptions of time were relatively modest. Age accounted for no more than about 10 percent of the differences in participants’ answers.
That leaves an enormous amount of variation unexplained.
Some younger people feel that their lives are racing by, while some older people don’t. Even the same person may find that one month disappears and the next seems unusually long.
A later study by Steve Janssen, Makiko Naka and William Friedman makes the story more intriguing.
The researchers asked 868 people how quickly the previous week, month, year and ten years seemed to have passed. They found no significant age-related difference in the shorter intervals. The age effect appeared only when participants looked back over ten years.
What did matter for the shorter intervals was something more immediate: time pressure.
People who felt pressed for time tended to report that recent weeks, months and years had passed quickly. I find that particularly interesting because we tend to associate this feeling with getting older, even though someone juggling work and family may experience it just as strongly as a person who has been retired for a decade.
None of this means aging has no effect on our experience of time. The studies don’t settle that question. But they make one point difficult to ignore: the feeling that time is accelerating isn’t simply a matter of turning another year older.
It also has something to do with how we experience our days and what remains in memory afterward.
We have two different experiences of time
Imagine spending an afternoon with someone whose company you enjoy.
You settle into a conversation, wander from one subject to another, perhaps have lunch and then another cup of coffee. At some point you glance at the clock and discover that three hours have passed.
You might say, quite sincerely, that you have no idea where the time went.
Now imagine an afternoon spent watching the clock because you’re waiting for something unpleasant. Three hours is still three hours, but it can feel very different.
Psychologists distinguish between judging time while it’s passing and estimating its duration afterward. Researchers often call these prospective and retrospective judgments.
When we’re absorbed in an activity, we may pay little attention to the clock. When we’re waiting, the minutes can become conspicuous.
Looking back is a different task because we can’t replay every minute of an afternoon, much less every day of a year. Instead, we reconstruct the period from whatever remains available in memory.
A holiday, a family gathering, the arrival of a new neighbor, a medical appointment, a good book or an unexpectedly enjoyable evening can give a stretch of time a recognizable shape.
Other days are harder to retrieve individually. They may have been satisfying, productive or perfectly pleasant, but they simply don’t stand out as separate episodes when we remember them.
That doesn’t mean ordinary days are less valuable. Familiar routines give us comfort, stability and the freedom not to make hundreds of decisions every day. There is a great deal to be said for a life in which you know where the coffee is, which chair you like and who you’ll see on Thursday afternoon.
But the time we live through and the time we reconstruct from memory aren’t quite the same thing.
If a year seems to have disappeared, is there anything we can do to make the next one feel more substantial when we look back?
There’s no scientifically proven trick for making time move more slowly. But research into memory offers a few clues, and they lead to some practical experiments worth trying.
In the rest of this article, we’ll explore why some months are easier to remember than others, then try a simple ten-minute review and a practical way to give the month ahead a few meaningful landmarks. No packed calendar or elaborate journaling routine required.
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