Remember when summers lasted forever? You’d ride your bike until the streetlights came on, eat three popsicles before lunch, and still feel like the day had room left over.
Now? You put the Christmas lights away, blink twice, and Costco already has them back on display.
Psychologists have a fancy name for this: the time perception paradox. Translation? The older you get, the faster time feels like it’s flying.
Here’s why:
The math is stacked against you. When you were 10, a year was a tenth of your life. That’s huge. At 60, it’s less than 2%. Suddenly, a whole year feels like a weekend trip.
Routines blur the days. As kids, everything was new. New school, new friends, new “adventures” (a.k.a. bad ideas involving tree forts). All those firsts marked time. As adults, our days often look like copy-paste. Your brain doesn’t bother filing away the reruns.
Memory cheats. The brain counts experiences, not hours. The fewer fresh experiences, the shorter life feels in hindsight.
So what’s the solutio…
