Imagine a woman, well into her seventh decade of life but still mentally sharp, taking her grandson on his first walk along the beloved beach where she has lived for years. The little boy hears the roar of the surf, the screech of seagulls; he sees sand and sand castles, families under beach umbrellas, toddlers scampering away from the incoming tide, a carpet of tiny shells and garlands of shiny brown seaweed; he smells the briny, metallic air. To him, many things happened. The grandmother, in contrast, experiences these details much less distinctly. This means that for her, just one thing happened: another beach walk.
The difference between the grandmother’s and the boy’s subjective experiences of the identical physical experience offers a tantalizing clue to something that explorers of the human condition, from novelists to psychologists, have puzzled over: why our sense of the passage of time speeds up as we age. You’ve almost certainly experienced it. How can I have been working here for 10 years, when it feels like employee orientation was only yesterday? you ask. Where did the summer go? you wonder. And in your darker moments, Where did my life go? You don’t need to be as old as our beach-walking grandmother to feel this; the perception that time is accelerating creeps in well before middle age.
Scientists have identified many reasons for this, but one that has come to the fore recently has both the feel of truth and, even better, offers a hint that mindfulness might help counter the sense that life is slipping away, like the sand in an hourglass whose neck has inexplicably widened.
The Melting-Pot of Memory
The new idea is this. As we get older, we “chunk” the experiences we’ve had into broad categories, bundling individual moments into larger, more generic groups in our minds. The grandson’s beach walk, in his memory, consisted of dozens of vivid, individual experiences. To the grandmother, these experiences are so familiar that they get filed as a single one: “beach walk.”
Similarly, with age we group experiences into broad chunks such as “work” or “family” or “fun outings,” psychologist Mark Landau of the University of Kansas and his colleagues argued in a 2018 study. As a result, to an older person, “fewer things seem to have occurred in a given period, so it seems to have passed faster, in retrospect,” they wrote.
The mindfulness connection? It may be possible to use mindfulness meditation, or even casual applications of that way of observing thoughts and experiences, to heighten awareness of them in a way that keeps the passage of time from accelerating.
Our perception of how quickly time passes varies according to numerous factors, some as changeable as emotion.
A little background: Our perception of how quickly time passes varies according to numerous factors, some as changeable as emotion—as per the adage “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Dozens of studies have found that positive mood and high arousal seem to make time seem to pass more quickly in the moment. In contrast, if you are in pain then the two hours until your next Tylenol feels like it is passing with the speed of cold molasses. If a dreaded event is approaching—your speech is in half an hour!—the time seems to speed by. Depression makes time seem to pass more slowly, as do boredom and doing physically or cognitively undemanding tasks. In those situations, the brain has spare capacity “to focus attention on the passing of time,” psychologist Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University told me, “and a greater-than-average level of attention to time may result in the sensation of it passing more slowly.”
During the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, Ogden asked 604 participants in the UK about their sense of time’s passage. Older people, and those on whom the social isolation was especially hard, said time seemed to drag over the course of a day or week. That reflects boredom: When we have nothing to do and feel generally miserable, the hours stretch out interminably— Will this day never end?
That older people in this study experienced time as passing slowly was somewhat surprising, however, since “older people will often make statements which suggest that time passes more quickly as you age—for example, ‘Christmas comes around more quickly each year,’” Ogden said. But because lockdown curtailed socializing and normal day-to-day activities, she said, “it’s possible that the loss of their freedom, coupled with less ability to engage with technology to maintain social relations, left the elderly more vulnerable to experiencing time passing slowly.”
Others in Ogden’s study felt time fly. “People who were younger, more satisfied with their social interactions, busier, and less stressed were more likely to experience time passing more quickly,” she said. “These factors [increase] our level of physiological arousal, [which] makes time pass more quickly.”If, however, we ask people in the winter of 2021 to reflect on time’s passage over the previous 12 months, their retrospective judgment might differ from their in-the-moment perception. “Retrospective judgments are heavily influenced by the amount of memory content from the time in question,” Ogden said. With few distinct memories, “we feel like less time happened. Lockdown has been boring, we haven’t been able to do things, and we may have formed fewer memories than normal. We may therefore look back on this period as feeling ‘short.’”
Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?
Which brings us full circle to why many of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves asking w