The years keep getting shorter

When I was a kid, a single summer felt like a geological era. Now I blink and it's December again. You've felt it too: the years are speeding up, and each one is shorter than the last.

For a long time I assumed this was just getting older — a fixed tax on being alive. It isn't. The speed-up is real, but the cause is more interesting, and more in your control, than it first looks.

Why a year shrinks

The oldest explanation is still the best starting point. In 1897 the philosopher Paul Janet pointed out something William James then made famous: each year feels shorter because it's a smaller slice of the life you've already lived. At five, a year is a fifth of everything you know. At fifty, it's a fiftieth. Proportionally, the same 365 days keeps getting thinner.

That's the maths. But maths alone doesn't explain the feeling — the sense that whole months evaporated without leaving a mark. For that you have to look at how the brain actually stores time.

Memory is what makes time long

We don't measure duration with a clock in our heads. We measure it in retrospect, by how much we remember. A stretch of life packed with new, distinct memories feels long when you look back on it. A stretch of repetition collapses into almost nothing.

This is the "holiday paradox." A week somewhere new feels enormous afterwards — first morning, strange streets, food you'd never tried — because your brain laid down a dense trail of fresh markers. Meanwhile the neuroscientist David Eagleman has shown how novelty stretches our sense of time in the moment too: the first time you do something, the brain writes it down in high resolution. The hundredth time, it barely bothers.

Routine is efficient. Your brain stops recording what it already knows. And a year you didn't record is a year that feels like it never happened.

The part nobody tells you: you stopped exploring

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. The reason adult years blur together isn't that life became repetitive on its own. It's that we slowly choose repetition.

Behavioural scientists describe life as a trade-off between explore and exploit. Explore means trying the unknown; exploit means cashing in on what you've already found works. Children are pure explorers — everything is the first time. As we age we tilt hard toward exploiting: the same route to work, the same handful of restaurants, the same opinions, the same music. Studies on personality bear this out — openness to experience tends to quietly decline across adulthood. Our taste in music often freezes by our early thirties. We stop sampling and start repeating.

It's not laziness. Exploiting is rational — it's lower risk and it pays reliable rewards. But it has a hidden cost the spreadsheet never shows you: a life of exploitation is a life your brain declines to record. You trade novelty for comfort, and time speeds up to collect the bill.

The inner child wasn't being cute

This is what people are clumsily reaching for when they talk about "not losing your inner child." It's easy to hear that as an excuse to be childish. It isn't. The psychologist Stuart Brown spent decades studying play and concluded it's not the opposite of serious work — it's how intelligent animals stay adaptive their whole lives. Animals that keep playing keep learning. The ones that stop, calcify.

Picasso put it better than any researcher: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." The goal isn't to regress. It's to keep the one thing children have by default and adults have to fight for — the willingness to approach the world as if you don't already have it figured out.

How to slow it back down

You can't add years to the end of your life on demand. But you can make the years you have feel longer, by giving your brain more worth recording.

• Deliberately break routine. Take the road you don't know. Cook the dish you can't pronounce. Novelty doesn't have to be a plane ticket — it has to be unfamiliar.
• Stay a beginner at something. Pick up a skill where you're clumsy and bad. The discomfort is the brain switching the recorder back on.
• Travel, even small. A weekend somewhere genuinely new buys more remembered life than a month of the usual.
• Pay attention on purpose. Half of novelty is just noticing — looking at the ordinary as if you'd never seen it.

I think about this a lot living in Mallorca, somewhere I had every reason to let become wallpaper. The days I remember are never the smooth, efficient ones. They're the ones where I did something for the first time, badly, with my kids watching.

The clock isn't really speeding up. You're just feeding it less to remember. Keep exploring, and the years get long again.