Why Childhood Summers Felt Longer Than Your Whole Year Now

Think about last summer. Then think about a summer when you were nine. One has about four things in it. The other feels as if it lasted a year.

Both were the same length. Knowing that has never made the feeling go away for anybody. Almost everybody over 30 reports it, and surveys in many countries give the same answer.

So it is not nostalgia. It is a mechanism.

The popular explanation is too small

The usual explanation is that each year is a smaller fraction of your life. At five, a year is a fifth of everything. At 50, it is a fiftieth.

It is tidy, and it fails on the details.

• The speeding up is not smooth. People report it arriving in their twenties and thirties and then levelling off.
• It predicts that a year at 70 feels far shorter than a year at 50. People in their seventies describe roughly what people in their fifties do.
• It predicts that adult time never drags. Anybody who has sat through a long meeting knows that it does.

You do not perceive years

There is no organ for feeling elapsed time. You estimate it afterwards from how much you can remember.

A period with many separate memories reads as long. A period with few reads as short. That is why a month of illness can vanish and a weekend abroad can feel enormous.

What gets stored is novelty. The first time you do something is kept. The 400th time is not. You do not remember your commute. You remember the one where something happened.

A year at nine is almost all first times. A year at 40 usually has the same house, the same route, the same people and the same food.

The year did not go faster. It left less to measure it with.

Two clocks

A good holiday goes by in a blink and then feels weeks long when you look back. A dull week at a desk crawls and then collapses to nothing.

Those are two different clocks.

• In the moment, time is judged by how much attention you pay to it. Bored people check the clock. Absorbed people never do.
• In hindsight, time is judged by how much you can retrieve. The holiday was full of new things. The desk week was not.

Both clocks are working. They measure different things.

Why it starts in your thirties

Ask people for their most vivid memories and they cluster between about 15 and 30. This is called the reminiscence bump.

Those years were not more important. They were first: first job, first move, first serious relationship, first bill. It is why the songs from then still feel as if they were written about you.

After that, most lives become repetitive. That is not a criticism. Stability is what almost everybody is working towards. It is also low in markers.

Two smaller causes

The body's clock slows a little. Asked to count one minute without a watch, younger people tend to stop early and older people late. A slow inner clock makes the outside world seem fast.

Attention is used up. You need spare attention to notice time passing. An adult with a job and a family has very little. And an adult with a phone is never bored, which removes the one state in which time gets noticed.

What you can do

The obvious reading is "do more". That is not quite it. Doing more of the same lays down no new markers. A busy year can be almost empty.

What gets stored is novelty, and it can be small:

• a different route
• a place you have not been
• a skill you are bad at

Being bad at something works because difficulty forces attention, and attention decides whether anything is stored.

The short answer

You cannot slow the year down while you are in it. You can leave more of it behind you. That is worth knowing at 40 and not at 80.