Ask anyone over thirty and they will tell you the years have started moving. Childhood summers lasted geological ages. Now a whole year disappears somewhere between one Diwali and the next.
One explanation is proportional: at five, a year is a fifth of everything you have lived. At fifty, it is a fiftieth. Each year is a smaller slice of the whole.
The better explanation is about memory density. Your brain does not measure elapsed time directly — when you look back, it estimates duration from how much distinct material it stored. Childhood is crammed with firsts, and firsts get encoded in detail. Adult life runs on routine, and routine compresses. A year of near-identical Tuesdays leaves very little to file.
This has a practical implication that is more hopeful than it sounds. You cannot slow the clock, but you can raise the density. Novelty is what your brain records — a new route home, an unfamiliar city, a skill you are visibly bad at, a conversation with someone outside your usual circle.
Time does not actually accelerate. We simply stop giving it anything to hold on to.
