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As I sit here, contemplating the fact that we’re about to enter the year of our lord 2025, I feel a bone-deep weariness settle upon my ageing frame. Perhaps it’s hitting that quarter-century mark, but the very notion of “2025” – twenty twenty-five! – sounds absurd. It can’t possibly be a real year, happening in real time – it’s the stuff of time-travelling tales; films set in a space-age future; dystopian novels that paint a bleak picture of societal breakdown in decades to come. It can’t possibly be happening now.
Yet the calendar doesn’t lie. It is about to turn 2025, whether I believe it temporally possible or not. The passage of time seems to be playing pesky tricks – for surely the pandemic was a mere couple of years ago? The London Olympics were five years ago, weren’t they? And the millennium was a decade ago, tops – I’m certain of it…
It’s not just me who experiences the sensation of the years shooting by at an ever-increasing pace the older I get. While Albert Einstein popularised the concept that time is relative – an hour spent with someone you fancy passes in a moment, a moment spent with your hand on a burning hot plate stretches out endlessly – research consistently shows that our perception of how quickly time passes really does speed up as we get older. According to a recent study by Liverpool John Moores University, the vast majority of people in the UK felt like Christmas approached more rapidly every year, for example, while people in Iraq felt like Ramadan came sooner.
“Physical time is not mind time,” as mechanical engineering professor and author of Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies, Adrian Bejan, puts it. “The time that you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.”
One side of the equation in explaining this phenomenon is physiological. Remember as a kid when the summer holidays felt elastic, a never-ending wad of chewing gum that kept on extending as hours melted away on lazy afternoons? There’s an actual science behind that. “The brain receives fewer images than it was trained to receive when young,” argues Bejan. He theorises that the rate at which we process visual information slows down as we age; as the size and complexity of the networks of neurons in our brains increase, the electrical signals must travel greater distances, leading to slower signal processing. The result? We perceive fewer “frames-per-second” as we get older, and therefore time feels like it’s passing quicker. It’s like a flipbook – the fewer the number of pictures, the quicker you flick to the end.
“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth,” he said. “It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”
Plus, the less time we’ve experienced, the greater a proportion of our lives a set period of time actually is. For a four-year-old, a year is a much bigger percentage of their overall lifespan thus far than it is for a 40-year-old – so no wonder it feels longer and more significant.
While there’s not much we can do about these physiological elements, there are other important factors at play that we do have some control over. Another reason that time feels longer when we’re younger is that the brain is programmed to hang on to new experiences, says Bejan – and when we’re young, we’re having new experiences all the time. There’s so much for a child encountering the world afresh to absorb and digest each day. After all, in the beginning, everything we do is the first time we’ve ever done it.
The older we get, the more likely it is that we’re clocking up fewer and fewer new experiences with each year that passes. This is partly because, naturally, the more stuff we experience, the less new stuff there is to experience. But part of it is due to human nature; with age, we can become increasingly stuck in old habits, overly comfortable with the familiar and unwilling to pursue novelty or challenge ourselves to step into the unknown. Even trying a new food can feel like a bridge too far.
If we’re doing the same things week-in, week-out though, we’re not presenting our brains with anything juicy or remarkable to hang on to. With few fresh memories made, weeks blend into months, blend into years, with little to differentiate them. Time has, to all intents and purposes, sped up.
Conversely, when we remember a period packed with events, it “makes it seem like time stretches out… and it feels very long”, according to Cindy Lustig, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
Routine is the enemy of expanding your time; shifting things up, whether it’s simply walking a new way to the shop, dabbling in a new hobby or branching out and listening to a different kind of music, could be the key to elongating each year rather than looking back on an increasingly ill-defined blur.
“Slow it down a little more, force yourself to do new things to get away from the routine,” says Bejan. “Treat yourself to surprises. Do unusual things. Have you heard a good joke? Tell me! Do you have a new idea? Do something. Make something. Say something.”
And then there’s that dreaded word: “mindfulness”. If time is all a matter of perspective, then ensuring we spend some of it living in the moment – and being intentionally present in the present – is fundamental to living the longest life we can in the time we’ve got. “None of us know how much time we have, but, interestingly, we do actually have a lot of control over how we experience that time,” as Lustig says.
Constantly dwelling on past mistakes or fretting over future potential problems guarantees you’re missing out on the most important bit of your life so far: right here, right now.
