Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past

"He gives a very poetically formulated answer, founded in everyday experience, to how memory processes define your subjective time over longer time scales. If at Christmas you think: ‘wow, it’s Christmas again already! This year has passed so quickly,’ well, that is a classic adult perception of time. It rushes past so quickly as compared to all our memories of summer vacation at school. It was nearly eternity between each summer at school. Now, even if you go for two weeks on vacation, comparably it also passes quickly. “In childhood and youth, everything has this impression of novelty” The answer to this is related to memory. We get more and more routine in our lives. In childhood and youth, everything has this impression of novelty. Everything happens for the fist time: the first kiss, the first time drinking a beer in a pub, the first time going on vacation without parents. Everything from a developmental psychology standpoint is important because we have to learn to be adults, and we develop. Just imagine one year of development for a 14-year-old: there are so many changes going on, biologically and psychologically. Or think about a 12-year-old who’s still a child and a 15-year-old who is nearly an adult. There are just three years in between. Now compare three years in your life between 41 and 44. It all becomes more routine and we can’t escape this routine mode of perception. Even if you’re going to an exotic country you’ve never been to before, it might be the thirteenth time that you’ve been to a new country. So you won’t have these experiences of novelty you had in childhood and young adulthood. As you move away from your parents, study and find new friends, find a partner, marry, have your first child, and so on, and so on. This all has an effect on memory because everything that is new has a saliency, and all experiences lose this sense of saliency and then are not recorded thoroughly in memory anymore. If you look back, because subjective time retrospectively depends on your memory entries, you have less that you’ve recorded because less was exciting, less was novel, and so it feels as if time passed more quickly."