Chapter 3: The Acceleration Myth

There's a story about time that everyone over thirty seems to know. It goes like this: time speeds up as you get older. It's just what happens. When you were a kid, summers lasted forever. Now they don't. That's life. Get used to it.

The story is comforting in a bleak sort of way. If time acceleration is inevitable, a law of ageing like grey hair or sore knees, then there's nothing to be done about it. You can stop looking for a fix and just accept the fade.

The story is also wrong. Or at least, it's so incomplete that it might as well be.

The most common explanation is the proportional theory, first articulated by William James in 1890. The logic is simple: when you're five, a year is 20% of your entire life. It's enormous. When you're fifty, a year is 2%. It barely registers. Each year becomes a smaller fraction of the whole, so each year must feel shorter.

It's elegant. It's intuitive. And it crumbles the moment you push on it.

If the proportional theory were the whole story, time acceleration would be smooth and universal. Everyone at fifty would feel roughly the same compression. But they don't. Some people in their seventies report that time has barely sped up. Some people in their thirties already feel it racing. The theory can't explain why a single week can feel enormous while the month it sits inside feels tiny. It can't explain why your commute feels long but your year feels short. The maths is tidy. The experience is not.

William Friedman, a psychologist at Oberlin College, found something more interesting. He studied how people of different ages experience the passage of time, and the results were not what the proportional theory would predict. For short intervals, hours and days, there was almost no difference between age groups. A 30-year-old's Tuesday feels about as long as a 70-year-old's Tuesday. The big differences only showed up at longer timescales: years and decades.

But here's the part that matters. When Friedman controlled for time pressure, the age effect weakened dramatically. A 30-year-old under heavy time pressure reported the same temporal compression as a 70-year-old. And a 70-year-old with low time pressure, someone retired with a calm schedule and varied days, reported much less acceleration than expected.

The variable that predicted perceived time acceleration wasn't age. It was stress.

That's not a small finding. It suggests that what we've been calling an age effect might actually be a lifestyle effect. People in midlife feel time accelerating not because they've turned forty but because they're buried. They're running a career, raising kids, managing a household, and navigating a dozen competing demands. Their attention is permanently fragmented. Their days are full but undifferentiated. Their stress is chronic.

Take away the stress and the fragmentation, and much of the acceleration goes with it.

This lines up with research on so-called "super-agers," people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who maintain sharp cognition and, notably, report that time hasn't particularly sped up. What distinguishes them isn't genetics or luck. It's continued engagement with novel experiences, active social lives, and ongoing learning. Their brains keep switching between states. Their days remain distinct from one another. Their memories stay rich.

It also lines up with a 2025 finding that challenged the popular assumption about why older people feel time compressing. The standard explanation was that older adults form fewer autobiographical memories, so retrospective time shrinks. But when researchers actually tested this, they found something unexpected. Older adults didn't describe fewer memories. They described memories that were just as vivid and meaningful as those of younger adults. The difference wasn't in the quality of recall. It was in the reduced capacity to take in new information in the first place.

In other words, the past doesn't get thinner. The present does. And a thin present leads to a thin past.

There's a version of the time acceleration story that's more honest, and more useful. It goes like this: time doesn't speed up because you're getting older. Time speeds up because your life has become more predictable, more demanding, and less novel. Your attention is fragmented. Your stress is high. Your days look the same. Your brain, which is ruthlessly efficient, stops encoding what it already knows.

This version of the story isn't comforting in the way the old one was. You can't shrug and say "that's just ageing." But it's liberating in a way the old one never could be. Because if time acceleration is driven by lifestyle rather than biology, it means you can change it.

Not by trying harder. Not by adding meditation to an already overloaded schedule. But by understanding the actual mechanisms and redesigning the inputs.

The question isn't why time speeds up. That's been answered, and the answer is plural. The question is what to do about it. And the first step is letting go of the idea that it's inevitable.