The creepy feeling everyone recognizes
You know the moment: you say, “It’s only just been January,” and suddenly it’s already December. As if someone secretly turned on the speed dial. The strange thing is: this isn’t a rare complaint from “busy people.” Many adults report that the years seem to subjectively pass faster as they get older, even when their days are still just as full.
But why does it feel that way? And more importantly: what is fact, and what is a persistent myth?
Two kinds of time that overlap
Our brain processes time in at least two ways:
- The time you feel while something is happening (prospective time): a queue can seem endless.
- The time you feel when you look back (retrospective time): an entire month can seem to fly by “in a flash.”
Researchers also make this distinction in experiments, because these two kinds of time are not controlled by exactly the same mental processes. Once you see this, the “fast-forward” experience suddenly makes more sense: often, it’s not about your sense of time in the moment, but about how your brain reconstructs a period afterward.
The movie in your head gets fewer “scenes”
One of the most exciting recent clues comes from brain research in which people watched a short film in a scanner. The research examined how the brain breaks a story into separate pieces (as if your internal editor constantly says “new scene”). In that study, the researchers observed that older participants, on average, had fewer and longer stable “neural states” during the same clip. Simply put: the brain made fewer “cuts.” And fewer cuts can mean fewer separate events to refer to later, making the same time span feel more compact in retrospect.
This ties in with a broader scientific idea: if your brain registers fewer separate events, it can feel like there was less “in it” afterward.
The thief is called routine, and it works silently
Why does your life have fewer “moments of clarity” as you get older?
A prime suspect is predictability. New experiences are rich in detail: new routes, sights, smells, little surprises. Routine, on the other hand, is processed more efficiently: less attention, fewer striking details, fewer “anchors” in your memory.
And here’s the rub: retrospective time relies heavily on memory and context. If a period in retrospect contains few clear memory anchors, it can feel shorter. Ideas around “fewer new experiences” also appear in scientific discussions of the phenomenon that time accelerates with age.
The role of dopamine: reward and time are neighbors in your brain
Time perception is not separate from motivation and reward. A major review describes that time perception and reward processing are intertwined, and that dopamine systems play a key role in this.
Important to be clear: this doesn’t mean that “less dopamine” automatically causes “faster ageing.” It does mean that the biology linking reward, attention, and timing is a plausible piece of the puzzle, and that age-related changes in neurochemistry can play a role.
Can you slow down fast-forward again?
You can’t really slow down time. But you can increase the ingredients that yield more “scenes” afterward.
Researchers writing about “event segmentation” and memory implicitly suggest the same mechanism: clearer boundaries and distinctive details make experiences easier to organize in memory. And novelty helps with that.
Don’t think about grand bucket lists. Think about small brain hacks that actually align with how memories are formed:
- taking a new route
- making an unfamiliar dish
- really reorganizing a day
- learning a new skill in tiny steps
Not because “mindfulness is magic,” but because it gives your brain more distinctive data to retrieve later.
