Why Do We Feel Time Slip Away As We Age?

Imagine you are five years old. One year is half of your entire life! It feels like an eternity because it takes up so much space in your story. When you become thirty, one year is only a small slice of your cake. That makes time feel faster.

When you were little, almost everything was new. A trip to the park, learning to ride a bike, the first day of school. Your brain had to work hard to record all these new memories. Because it recorded so much detail, looking back at those times feels long.

As an adult, you do many things on autopilot. You drive the same route to work. You eat similar meals. Your brain stops writing down every tiny detail because it knows what will happen. When you look back, those weeks seem to vanish because they weren't very different from each other.