Why does time seem to go by faster, the older we get?
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A large part of this comes due to habit, rhythm and repetition. While you’d think repetition makes for a dull (and thus slow-moving) time, in most cases it does the opposite.
Your morning routine is probably so ‘default’ for you, so hardwired, it takes you zero effort and really does fly by as you just ‘do’ your routine.
For a toddler, the morning routine is a gigantic set of impressions, (semi-)difficult tasks, sometimes accompanied by new impulses. This simply takes more time and makes it more time-consuming from a perceptive point of view.
I believe the most prevalent theory for this quirk of time perception is that as you get older and older each individual time unit becomes a shorter percentage of your entire life. I.e. when you’re 15 1 year is 6.7% of your entire life, but when you’re 50 it’s only 2%. So a year seems longer when you’re younger.
When you’re 5, a year is one fifth (20%) of your entire life. Assuming you can’t remember anything before you were 4, a whole year is half of all the time you remember experiencing when you’re 5, and you’ve pretty much just experienced a full year for the first time. When you’re 55, a year is only one fifty-fifth of your life, or less than 2% of the time you’ve been alive, and another year is something you’ve seen dozens of times.
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