Where Did the Time Go? Why Life feels so fast-paced now

You open Instagram to watch just another reel for five minutes. The next time you see the time, an hour has passed! This is something that happens to all of us very often. Time feels faster. With each minute feeling like seconds passing by in an instant. This could be attributed to nostalgia for the peace in the older days or even poor time management. However, the explanation goes deeper and lies in how we, as a collective generation, perceive and experience time.

One of the most well-researched reasons why time seems to pass by more quickly with age is the novelty effect. In childhood and adolescence, life is filled with first experiences. First school, first friendships, first heartbreaks, first achievements. The brain pays close attention to new experiences, laying down rich, detailed memories. As we age, though, our adult routines take over, from commutes, meetings, and monotonous conversations. According to neurology, routine requires less conscious processing, which means fewer distinct memory markers. So when we look back, a year filled with repetition appears shorter than a year filled with new experiences, even if both lasted the same number of days. Time over here did not speed up. Memory simply compressed it.

Attention is also a factor that plays a crucial role in subjective time perception. Research shows that when our attention is fragmented (low) by scrolling through reels, multitasking with personal tasks, or constant notifications, we experience sometihing called temporal disappearance. When attention is hijacked, the brain stops tracking time explicitly. This is why immersive activities like drawing or cooking hours feel like minutes. Additionally, digital spaces, designed to capture and hold attention, intensify this effect. As a result, we remain constantly occupied but not truly engaged, causing large parts of the day to blur together and making time feel as though it has slipped away unnoticed. Scrolling through reels, looking at the Instagram feed, liking and scrolling to different posts are all examples of this. 

Emotion also plays an important role in how we experience time. Strong core emotions such as fear, excitement, or awe can make moments feel slower while they are happening, but more expansive when we actually try to remember them later. For instance, a stressful situation may feel as though it lasts forever in the moment, yet remains clearly etched in memory long after the incident. In contrast, emotionally neutral or repetitive routines that are mundane tend to pass quickly and leave very little trace in the brain. As adults, we often value efficiency and stability, which can unintentionally reduce emotional variation in daily life. With fewer emotionally extreme moments, the brain records fewer details, causing long stretches of time to feel shorter in hindsight.

This brings me to the million-dollar question: If time feels as though it is speeding up, can we slow it down psychologically? While we cannot physically manage to alter the clock, what we can do is to change how we experience our days. Being more present in small, everyday moments helps us stay aware of time instead of letting it slip by unnoticed. Also, adding and incorporating tiny changes in our routines, such as adding one new thing or just breaking a habit for a day, can all help to recall better, hence allow time to imprint in our memory. Even though we cannot create more hours in a day, we can make the time we have feel fuller, richer, and more lasting.