I hear a lot of people making that remark, that the years go by quicker as you get older.
For me, at least, it seems like that’s only the case if nothing much changes in my life in that year.
To me, years seem to feel like they go slower if there’s lots of new/different things happening.
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As you get older, less things are new to you. The brain prioritizes focusing on new information, so when there is less novel experiences you literally save less of the memory.
Edit:
>Our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-time-seem-to-speed-up-with-age/
As you get older, you gather more stuff and more people into your life. That means you have more things to think about. Thinking about those things requires concentration. And doing that means you don’t notice time passing. And when you are not thinking about the people in your life, you need to be doing laundry, shopping, and preparing food. You have to clean and do maintenance on the stuff you own.
And if you are lucky like me, you have a few minutes to spend on Reddit replying to ELI5s.
And then you die!
Time doesn’t pass faster, but when you look back and think about it you remember it passing faster. Because there were less milestones and memories to mark a particular time period as you get older.
In addition to what others have said, later in life you have fewer time markers. School years, summer breaks, etc. conveniently mark out time when you’re younger. In later life it’s all one long flow so you don’t notice it passing in the same way.
If you turn 10, a new year will take 1/10th of your life.
If you turn 20, a new year will take 1/20th of your life.
As you get older each year has a less mathematical impact on your overal life, so it tends to feel shorter aka “faster”.
As someone already said, as a young human you receive more incentives, which makes your brain run at a lower “speed” to recognise it all. if you are older and already used to incentives, youre brain handles it is “nothing new”, so it perceives time as going faster.
Perspective. You’ve lived so many years and seen so many things that not as much is notable. You can combat this by doing something different each day and open yourself up to new experiences and adventures
Probably because as you get older there are less and less things that are new for you and life starts to get repetitive. And our brains tend to vividly memorize only the important events so as you get older it feels that time passed faster because gaps between important events get longer and longer.
Cause our life is like a roll of toilet paper.
At the beginning it feels like the roll can last forever… then the last 3rd it’s over fast.
I remember once reading a book called The Velocity of Honey, and one of the chapters talked about this. In addition to what others have said here, one of my favourite notable items mentioned in the book is that following a research study based on this topic and the fact that time appears to speed up as you age, it was determined that the subjective half-way point of our lives is about the age of 20. So 0-20 feels more or less the same as 20-80. Depressing, but neat anyways
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