You know how life speeds up as you get older. When you’re five, it takes forever to become six. Then, as you age, whole years seem to fly by and you catch yourself saying, Where did the year go. Yet I’ve noticed time has slowed again, closer to how it felt when I was a child. I’m sometimes surprised to realise I did something earlier this year, even though it feels like there’s a huge space between then and now.
There’s a theory that time feels slower when we’re young because each year is a much larger percentage of our life. When we’re five, a year is twenty percent of everything we’ve ever known. As we get older, each year becomes a smaller slice of our life, and time seems to speed up.
But our time perception is influenced by far more than percentages, and it can change depending on what we’re experiencing. It can freeze in grief, race under pressure, and slow in danger. In boredom it stretches; in trauma it fragments; in burnout it collapses into a blur. When we’re happy or absorbed it can feel spacious. In all these states the clock seems to loose its hold.
An adult can spend forty minutes doing something they love and still think, “I really should be getting on with something.” Yet a child can spend an afternoon watching an insect without once thinking, “I’m wasting my time.” Childhood isn’t simply a period when time moves slowly. It’s a period when we’re relatively free from the adult preoccupation with where we ought to be by a particular time.
Most of us take the way we measure time in days and hours for granted. But for much of human history, daily life was organised around the natural world — sunrise and sunset, the phases of the moon, and the changing seasons.
When mechanical clocks became more widespread, they didn’t just tell us the time. They made it possible to be precise about when things would happen. How cool is it that we can now say, “I’ll meet you at 10.30 for coffee,” instead of, “I’ll meet you when the sun is in a particular position.”
But this precision came with a whole new way of organising life around the clock. We work from 8.30am to 5pm. We catch the 7.43am train to be there on time. We eat between 12pm and 1pm because that’s our lunch hour. Even exercise gets timed; 45 minutes at the gym, whether we feel like it or not.
For many adults, the combination of schedules, obligations and constant stimulation leaves little room for simply being in a moment. Consumerism pushes this even further — buying more, doing more, working more to pay for it. The more we try to fit in, the faster time feels. However, living at a relentless pace takes its toll and over time, the effects accumulate.
When people look back on their lives, they often regret working too hard, neglecting relationships, or putting off the things that mattered to them. They regret missed opportunities and moments that passed unnoticed because they were too busy getting on with something else.
Slowing down can be a form of self-care, a way of looking after ourselves not just in the present but in the years ahead. But it’s not always as simple as it sounds, and doing less doesn’t automatically change our relationship with time. For example, retirement might mean doing less, but time can still race when stress or grief is heavy, or drag when life feels dull or disconnected. And that’s true for anyone, no matter their age or stage of life.
It can be the case for a child who feels understimulated or disconnected at school, or an adult working in a tedious, meaningless job. In more extreme situations, such as when someone is trapped or imprisoned, time can turn into an enemy. Something watched and wished away.
Even when we finally find the space to breathe and do more of what we enjoy, it can take a long time to retrain our relationship to time. If we’ve spent years living with stress, always doing, thinking and planning, switching off doesn’t come easily, even when life allows it.
We might need to learn how to feel safe in stillness, to let our nervous system settle, and to get used to a different pace. That takes practice, patience, and sometimes years. Changing our circumstances is one thing; learning how to live differently is another.
When we try new things, do things we enjoy or find meaningful, and allow ourselves to become absorbed in them, time can feel more spacious. In a culture built on consumption and productivity, choosing to slow down is a way of reclaiming some control over how we live. Perhaps the question is not how much we can fit into our time, but how we want to experience it.