Do the years seem to be going in a faster pace after age 40 than when you were younger, or is this a time illusion?

Do you feel that since you turned 40 or even 50 that the years have been speeding up? Do you often wonder: "Where did the years go?" Do you feel that your 40s or 50s are all blurred together? Do you often hear yourself saying:" Has it been really that long?" during a conversation with your friends?

Well, several points need to be mentioned here:

1. As we age, each year becomes a smaller fraction of our total life: for example: at age 10, one year is 10% of your life, while at age 60, one year is only 1.7% of your life; so subjectively, a year feels "shorter" the older you get, because it is a smaller slice of your lived experience. This was discussed by the French philosopher Paul Janet in 1877. Also, when we are younger, everything around us seems larger than reality as we perceive it as such, while when we are older, things look smaller than when we were children. 

2. When we are young, everything is new by the day, almost, so the years seem to pass more slowly. When we age, routine and repetition dominate, and fewer new experiences occur, making the days all similar, thus the weeks and years feel like they are blurring together and passing faster. This is true for most aging people.

3. We look at duration/time through Internal Optics. Remember when we fall asleep, even for a brief time, we can have images of an event that seems as if it lasted for hours. Also, when in the doctor’s office and you were asked when was the last time you had a mammogram or a prostate exam, you may reply: 2 years ago, but when the record is checked, the real time was actually longer than the reported time. A disturbance of the internal optics can alter the way one feels about time. This was discussed by Jean-Marie Guyau in 1881 when he documented his own life experience.

4. Certain high-emotional events in the past are reviewed by the person through a magnified lenses that cause the distance in time to shrink, thus the events seem to have occurred more recently. This was discussed in 1997 by the psychologists Crawley and Pring, who drew a list of significant events and realized that older people look at those events as they occurred sooner than reality. Examples include the death of a famous person, a catastrophic event, etc. One always feels that the event occurred sooner than reality.

4. Our internal biological clock slows down with age; thus, fewer mental ticks are generated per unit of real time, so time seems to pass more quickly when we are older, as we do not record on a smaller interval of time but we compare the current time with the time we had when we were younger so the current time seems to be moving faster.

Collected from a book: Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older. Douwe Draaisma 2006