Why Time Flies

As my wife and I hiked with a friend along the sun-splashed Kalalau Trail on Kauai’s Nāpali coast, we felt like we had all the time in the world. Our rhythm became the cadence of our steps, not the tick of time on a quartz watch or on our smartphones, which were buried in our daypacks. Playing it safe, we spread out our picnic lunch well above the high-water mark on Hanakapiʻai Beach. Then I saw a wave that made my stomach turn.

“Get ready to run,” I shouted to my wife and our friend. Surprised, they looked out to sea to ascertain if we were in danger, then reached for our packs. “Now!” I screamed. The water hit our ankles; a split second later it was knee-high. Instantly it reached our waists, and then we were under­water, being propelled horizontally across glass-sharp volcanic rocks that sliced our skin.

I can recall every second of that chaotic journey, the turbulent force of the water carrying us away from the sea and then its reversal starting to pull us out. Fortunately, the rocks acted like a colander, providing a way to hold on, but when the water receded and I came up, I couldn’t find my wife. “Jackie!” I shouted again and again. Those few seconds felt like an eternity. Then I heard our friend cry, “Jackie’s here!”

The ordeal, from being swept off our feet to locating my wife, felt like it lasted several minutes. Because my wife’s phone somehow recorded a video, I know exactly how long it lasted: 15 seconds underwater and about 7 more seconds to find Jackie. That unplanned swim got me thinking about the power of nature, mortality, and, most of all, time: how it can seem to expand or contract, and how time feels like it’s accelerating as I get older.

In a recent study, Ruth Ogden, a psychology professor at Liverpool John Moores University, found that 77 percent of people said Christmas feels like it arrives more rapidly each year. She got a similar response from Iraqis about Ramadan.

Alan Burdick, author of Why Time Flies, said the sense that time is accelerating isn’t limited to older people. “Everybody at all ages says time is speeding up. You would think that more older people would say it than younger people, but actually everybody at every age says it in just about the same proportion,” he said. “Two-thirds to 80 percent of people say that time is speeding up, whatever age they are. So we’re all experiencing something.”

Burdick notes that an older person could be “romanticizing a time” when they were less busy or felt more free. “Am I remembering what I actually felt as a kid?” he wondered. “Or am I fantasizing what it would be like to not be doing what I’m doing right now?” It comes down to recollection: “When we’re perceiving periods of time, what we’re really experiencing are memories of events that took place in that time. So a year will last longer if you remember more of the things that happened in that particular year compared to some other year in which you don’t remember as much.”

Events become a “kind of milestone,” Burdick said. “There are these periods of time in our lives when we lay down memories that are in Technicolor, or we add the Technicolor later, and so they loom larger. So the high school years seem to last longer than four years right now.” In ­studies by the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere, this phenomenon is called the reminiscence bump — the idea that those over age 40 look back on their teenage and young adult years and, because they have so many memories compressed into a few years, that time feels expansive.

 

There’s a common argument about why time feels like it goes by faster as we get older: When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20 percent of your life — when you’re 50, it’s just 2 percent. But scholars don’t see that as the primary reason that time seems to accelerate as we age.

Dean Buonomano, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA, notes that “when you’re 60, your memory of how time went by in your 30s is what’s changing.” The best way to describe this, he said, is “memory bias.” He offered this example: “If you had two root canals, one last week and one ten years ago, and I asked you, ‘Well, which root canal hurt more?’ You might answer that the recent root canal hurt more, because that’s fresher in your memory. So the most accurate way to think about this is it’s sort of a memory illusion — we just don’t remember how quickly we felt time passing when we were young.”

Yet it’s typical when looking back on our lives to feel that time was boundless when we were younger. Steve Taylor recalled moving to eastern Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he was in his early 20s. “Everything seemed exhilaratingly different and strange,” he wrote in Time Expansion Experiences. “My life changed radically. Besides the hyper-reality of a new environment, I was living with a partner for the first time. I joined a new band and started to give English lessons to augment my income. … After eight months, I came back to the U.K. on holiday and felt like I had been away for more like eight years. … I was genuinely shocked that the same people were working in the same shops, and that my friends were doing the same jobs. I felt that I had been away for so long that major changes should have occurred in people’s lives.”

Time flies when we’re having fun, but when we think back on fun-filled days, whether a week on vacation or a first year of parenthood, those times feel like they’ve lasted forever. As pioneering psychologist William James noted in 1890, “A time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences [like a month of sickness] seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.”

Buonomano, the author of Your Brain Is a Time Machine, notes that we think about time in two distinct ways: prospectively (in the moment) and retrospectively (looking back). “When we say time flies when you’re having fun, we’re absolutely referring to prospective timing,” he said. “We’re referring to as you’re having fun.” Looking back, “the more events we have in memory, the more time we feel has gone by, the more time we feel has elapsed.”

When you’ve been traveling for two days, it can feel like you’ve been gone two weeks. But at the end of two weeks, if it’s been a good trip, the entire vacation can feel like it passed in a couple of days. “This is often referred to as the vacation paradox,” Buonomano said. “When you’re on vacation, prospectively, as it’s happening, it seems to fly by. But once you’re back home, if the vacation was filled with a lot of new events, then you have a lot of items in memory, and that will give it the subjective feeling of being a long time.”

 

Pico Iyer, author of Aflame: Learning from Silence, seeks slowness in our age of acceleration. “It’s funny how some of us find we’re slowing down even as the world is speeding up — and actually try to cherish that slowness as a way out of the blind, mad acceleration that can so easily consume us in the age of Instant Everything,” he said.

When he was 29, Iyer was “living a very fast-paced life in Midtown Manhattan, and sensed that I could get so caught up in the speed and exhilaration that I might wake up soon and find that I was 70 and had never tried another kind of life.”

So he moved into a single room in the eastern hills of Kyoto, where “I knew, whatever happened or didn’t happen, that every day would last a thousand hours — and every trip to the supermarket would be a fresh ­adventure.” Iyer has lived for 37 years in Japan, and “instead of killing time,” he’s “hoping to revive it.”

Ultimately, Iyer wants his life to be memorable. “We don’t want everything to race past in a blur, so maybe the best practice is attention,” he said. “If you’re really paying attention to something, you don’t care how the seconds and minutes pass, because you’re carried out of yourself.”

Burdick noted that active people who lead purposeful lives found that time moved quickly, and those who were depressed, in pain, or stuck in a rut felt that time crawled. In the moment, we want time to fly, he said. But in retrospect we hope time feels like it moved slowly because our lives have been full of memorable and gratifying experiences. “The way to enjoy your time,” he said, “is to not be thinking about time.”

If you’ve lived a rewarding life, you’re going to feel that it went by “­really fast,” Burdick said. “I think that’s, all in all, a good thing. That’s an indication that you enjoyed your time. That’s an indication that you occupied your time, that you inhabited your time. That’s all we can really hope for.”

Michael Shapiro is the author of A Sense of Place and The Creative Spark. He writes for National Geographic and studied intellectual humility last year at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

This article is featured in the March/April 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.