By Daniel, ESL Educator & Everyday Curiosities Writer
Think about the last real trip you took. A week somewhere new, with strange streets and unfamiliar food. While you were there, the days raced past. Then you came home, and when you looked back, that week felt huge, as if you had been away for a month.
Now think about an ordinary week at work. It probably dragged on Tuesday afternoon, but by the next Friday you could hardly remember any of it.
The psychology writer Claudia Hammond calls this the holiday paradox: a good holiday flies by while you’re living it, but feels long when you remember it. In her 2012 book Time Warped, she uses it to explain something much bigger, the feeling that our years speed up as we get older.
Quick answer: Your sense of a long stretch of time, like a year or a decade, depends mostly on memory. New experiences leave many clear memories, and routine leaves few, so busy, repetitive adult years can feel shorter when we look back. But the age effect is smaller than most people think, and feeling rushed may matter at least as much as age.
Your brain keeps two kinds of time
Psychologists separate two ways of judging time. A prospective judgment happens while you’re in the middle of something and paying attention to time: “How long have I been waiting?” A retrospective judgment happens afterward, when you look back and ask, “How long did that take?”
In 1997, the psychologists Block and Zakay combined the results of 20 experiments in a meta-analysis (a study of many studies). They found that the two kinds of judgment behave differently, and concluded that prospective judgments depend mainly on attention, while retrospective ones depend mainly on memory.
That explains the holiday paradox. On the trip, you’re too busy to watch the clock. Afterward, your memory is full of new pictures, so the week feels long. The work week is the opposite: you notice time while you’re in it, but it leaves almost nothing behind.
Does time really speed up with age? Less than you’d expect
Most people are sure that time runs faster for older adults in every way. The research is more careful than that.
In 2005, Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff asked 499 people, aged 14 to 94, how fast time seemed to pass. For short periods, like a week, a month or a year, age made little difference. Only for the last ten years did older people say time had gone faster. Overall, age explained only a small part of the answers.
In 2010, the psychologists Friedman and Janssen found a similar pattern in New Zealand and the Netherlands. Older and younger adults rated time’s speed about the same, except for the past decade, and even that effect was small. In their larger online study, the feeling of being busy and rushed explained more about how fast time felt than age did. The researchers also suggested that the popular belief itself, “time flies when you get older,” might shape how people answer.
So yes, many people feel their recent years have flown by, but the effect is mostly about long stretches seen from a distance.
The “one year is a smaller slice” idea
You may have heard an older explanation. In 1877, the French philosopher Paul Janet wrote a short article in the journal Revue philosophique suggesting that we judge a length of time compared with the life we have already lived. For a five-year-old, one year is 20% of their whole life. For a fifty-year-old, it’s just 2%.
It’s a neat idea, and William James later discussed it in his famous Principles of Psychology. But it is a mathematical picture, not a tested explanation. It also doesn’t fit the findings above very well: if every year were truly a smaller slice, older people should feel weeks and months speeding up too, and in the surveys they mostly don’t.
Why routine makes the years shrink
Another explanation, which goes back to William James in 1890, is about novelty and memory. Childhood and early adulthood are full of firsts: first school, first job, first apartment. Each one leaves strong, separate memories. Hammond points out that people tend to remember experiences from their late teens and early twenties especially vividly, partly because that period is so full of new things.
Later, life often settles into routine. In Felt Time, Wittmann describes how subjective time speeds up as routine increases. In an interview, he put it simply: “The less vivid your memories, the faster time will seem to have passed.” When one week looks just like the last, your memory stores them almost as one.
This is still debated. Friedman and Janssen’s results raise a problem: if fewer memories were the whole story, we would expect age differences for shorter periods too, and they found very few. Memory is probably a big part of the answer, but not all of it.
One small thing to try
You can’t stop the calendar, but you can give your memory more to hold. Wittmann suggests getting “out of autopilot mode.” Take a different route to work. Cook one new dish this week. Start a small project with clear steps. On your next holiday, plan something special for the first and last full days, which he says people often forget.
Then, a month from now, look back and see if those weeks feel a little longer.
Useful words from this story
- paradox: a situation that seems impossible or contradictory but is true
- drag on: to continue for what feels like too long
- look back (on): to think about something that happened in the past
- routine: the usual things you do in the same way, day after day
- on autopilot: doing something without really thinking about it
You might also like: Why Does Waiting Feel Longer Than Doing? and Why Do We Remember Some Moments Clearly and Forget Others Completely?
A Note from Daniel
I wrote this for anyone who has at any time paused during a busy week, month, or year and wondered where all the time went. While research on how we experience time is still developing, one thing is clear: our sense of time depends more on memory, attention, and new experiences than on the clock. I hope this story inspires you to slow down, pay closer attention, and find a bit more wonder in your daily life.
Sources
- Block, R. A., & Zakay, D. (1997). “Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: A meta-analytic review.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(2), 184–197. doi.org
- Zakay, D., & Block, R. A. (2004). “Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: an executive-control perspective.” Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, 64, 319–328. montana.edu
- Wittmann, M., & Lehnhoff, S. (2005). “Age effects in perception of time.” Psychological Reports, 97(3), 921–935. journals.sagepub.com
- “Doubt cast on the maxim that time goes faster as you get older” (on Friedman & Janssen, 2010, Acta Psychologica). BPS Research Digest. bps.org.uk
- “Why Does Time Fly as We Get Older?” Scientific American (blog network). scientificamerican.com
- Broadway, J. M., & Sandoval, B. “Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?” Scientific American Mind, 2016. scientificamerican.com
- Popova, M. “Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception” (on Claudia Hammond’s book). The Marginalian, 2013. themarginalian.org
- Wittmann, M. Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time. MIT Press, 2016. goodreads.com
- “Marc Wittmann, PhD” (interview on why time speeds up). Bottom Line Inc. bottomlineinc.com
- Janet, P. (1877). “Une illusion d’optique interne.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 3, 497–502 (as cited in “On Soft Mathematical Models of Subjective Time Acceleration with Age,” arXiv, 2023). arxiv.org
Stay curious, and the ordinary will start to speak. — Daniel