Why does time feel faster as you get older?

Time often feels faster as we get older for a few overlapping reasons:

1. A year becomes a smaller fraction of your life
   When you're 5, a year is a huge chunk of your life; when you're 50, it's a much smaller share. So the same amount of time can feel shorter as your life gets longer.

2. Fewer new experiences make time feel less dense in hindsight
   When you're young, many experiences are new, so your brain encodes lots of distinct memories. In adulthood, life often becomes more routine. Because there are fewer memorable milestones, a stretch of time can seem to have passed more quickly when you look back.

3. Attention and brain changes may play a role
   Aging can affect attention, novelty processing, and the way the brain tracks time, which may contribute to the feeling that time is moving faster. But the exact mechanisms are still being studied.

In short: time probably doesn’t literally speed up — it just feels faster because of how memory, attention, routine, and perspective change with age.