Hey guys,
I’m 28, almost 29, and lately I’ve started to really feel the weight of time moving faster and faster. When I was a kid, a single summer felt like a lifetime. Now, a 15-day vacation with my family flies by like a weekend. It’s starting to hit me hard.
Financially, I’m relatively stable and have been focusing on building a secure future. But now that those basics are more or less in place, I’m beginning to worry about other things — and this one’s been creeping in strong: the acceleration of time.
Is this something you’ve noticed in your 30s or beyond?
Have you found any habits, mindsets, or approaches that help slow things down or at least make the passage of time feel less abrupt?
I’m not spiraling or anything, but I can’t shake this quiet sense of loss — like life’s slipping through my fingers even when I’m doing everything “right.”
Would love to hear how you guys deal with it.
Thanks in advance.
29 comments
The toilet paper roll always spins faster as you get towards the end.
Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end, the faster it goes
Age 30 isn’t some magical threshold where life starts to speed up. When you were a kid, the only responsibilities you had to worry about were homework and making it to the kitchen table on time. Now that you have a job, a home, a family, obviously way more of your time is consumed by responsibilities. You’re also likely not thinking about things day by day but week by week.
Yeah this is a common phenomenon. Some coworkers and I were actually just talking about it in a meeting today. It has to do with a lack of novel things in our lives. If I remember either Trevor Noah or Adam Conover has a YouTube video about it which is an entertaining watch.
That’s how perception of time works. Every day is a smaller percentage of your life experience than it was the day before.
Yes. I constantly mourn my own death, sounds weird but im scared of dieing, maybe its because my mom’s sick and probably won’t make it much longer but… yeah.
When you were a 10 year old kid, a year was 10% of your life.
When you’re 30, it’s 3%.
Every year you live is shorter relative the rest of the life you’ve already lived. When you’re 2 half your life has been the last year. When you are 30, only around 3% of your life.
This is a studied phenomenon – time perception changes with age. Buckle up, because it just keeps slipping by faster and faster. Try to change up your routine occasionally, do new things. But the days of long childhood summers are gone for good.
I started to experience that recently as well. I’ve experienced some loss in the family recently and seeing a lot of my extended family I grew up but didn’t keep in touch with now having families of their own and my nephew and nieces now going to college really puts things in perspective.
For me, it’s clearer that time is finite. As a kid, I could spend an entire weekend just goofing off and not doing anything productive and couldn’t wait until I was older so I could do more of what I wanted. Now every day that passes feels like a day I’ll never get back. At first it was terrifying but now, I’m trying to use that feeling to be more intentional on the decisions I make and redefine my goals on what I out of life.
Time is compounding. The horrifying part is, apparently 0-20 *feels* the same as 20-80.
“Mid-life” is very much closer to the end in terms of experience.
Here’s John with the weather!
29 to 31 felt like a blur. I suspect it will only get worse with age.
>Is this something you’ve noticed in your 30s or beyond? Have you found any habits, mindsets, or approaches that help slow things down or at least make the passage of time feel less abrupt?
Do new shit.
When you’re a kid everything is new and you’re constantly learning new things. This prevents you from being able to coast through the days, because you have to be engaged. The newness causes the memories to stand out because this was when you did X for the first time, this was when you learned about X, etc.
However when you’re an adult, you’re in a routine. You get up, often have the same breakfast, the same drive to work, do the same stuff at work, then get home and do the same things in the evening. You go through on autopilot and so the time seems to fly by.
Doing new shit counters this by making the brain be more engaged.
Life is like a roll of toilet paper. You keep pulling it out at the same rate, but the roll spins faster and faster.
Wait til your 40+. These 8 months seem like a blink of an eye.
Yeah Im 32 and Im scared, I noticed time when I was 21 and in the military, deployment would fly by and changing to a new duty station. Its been one of my greatest fears honestly and Ive just begun therapy for it.
The reason you retroactively feel like time is moving faster is because as you age you experience less and less novel experiences. The mundane doesn’t get saved in your long time memory (like your meals in the previous week or faces of random strangers you passed in the streets). Everyday work life becomes mundane, when you’re settled into it. When you’re young everything is novel which makes it feel like time moves slow, because it feels like a lot is happening. If you suddenly have a lot of new stuff happening it feels like time slows down again, when you look back. So, time doesn’t slow down for you. You’re just desensitized by experience while you’re brain filters out the mundane to save on storage space.
The key to time slowing down (I believe backed by science) is novelty. You have to do new things and experience new things.
Part of it is that we have more distractions now. Most people always have a smartphone in their hand and can access all kinds of media. Watching reels alone can cause an hour to feel like a few minutes. As adults we have work, bills, some people have kids to take care of, stress, on top of hobbies or smart phones. When we were kids, we just had toys, in my case we didn’t have internet, or cable. So we had hand-me-down toys, a few video games, and limited cartoons, so we weren’t distracted 24/7.
I live life holiday to holiday now.
The solution is to vary your routine as much as possible so as not to get in a rut where every day blurs together. Try new things, visit new places, trade in your wife of 10 years for an AI bot.
Yes, but there are ways to mitigate it. This is in large part due to the lack of new experiences. Your brain collapses similar memories into one, so it feels like barely any time has passed. When you’re a kid you’re experiencing everything for the first time. so you create lots of meaningfully distinct memories. As a young adult you’re still doing lots of new things as you’re new to adulthood. Something as mundane as taking care of your own place and paying the bills is new.
The solution is to engage in new activities that are radically different from your usual routine. It’s not going to make summer feel like it lasts a lifetime as it did when you were a kid, but it goes a long way to making the years not pass by so quickly.
Lots of comments about a day being a shorter percentage of your life as you get older, and that sentiment gets repeated a lot but I don’t think it’s a huge factor. It’s more to do with tuning things out, which causes us to pay attention less intently rather than deep processing.
How common is it for us to look forward to sitting down and zoning out in front of the TV or whatever? We get used to our surroundings so they aren’t as exciting, and processing starts to feel like work, so a lot of us try to do less of it, and that changes our perception.
Now imagine you’re sitting in front of the TV zoning out and your house catches on fire and burns to the ground or something like that. That’s now a new situation with tons of thinking and processing, and it’s going to be ingrained forever. The period of time following it might feel like the longest days, weeks, months of your life.
It’s the same when you change careers, or go back to college or something. Those situations put some really long days in front of you. When you start a new job, that first week takes forever. A couple years down the line, you have week after week that just get lost to the sands of time.
Another thing I’ve thought about is that people talk about their childhood like everything took so long to pass, but they usually aren’t talking about very early childhood, they are talking about the period of time when they started really paying attention. Very early childhood, time passes for us more like we are when we are older, just not paying close attention to things. It’s for a different reason, but it’s all related to processing.
So yeah I think the percentage of time lived thing is more of a meme and doesn’t have much substance.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-of-the-darkness/202409/why-does-time-seem-to-speed-up-as-we-get-older
I definitely relate to this. As my career settled in I was filling more and more of each day with routinized competence (cooking became easy with experience, chores on a schedule, regular engagements, fewer “new” issues cropping up at work), while at the same time having a lot of obligations, so the schedule really had to be kept if I wanted to get everything done.
My cure came in spurts but the biggest one was getting back into meditation and then bringing mindfulness to my moment-to-moment as a serious and constant practice.
I try to do one thing at a time when I can, especially in my private hours. When my wife and I cook and eat we don’t do other things like podcasts/TV at the same time, when I read I don’t do music, when I listen to an album I try to only do that, when I sit to watch the NBA I don’t touch my phone. All the while I actively try to catch and redirect myself if my mind slips to work issues or worrying or whatever.
A little boredom baby, it feels good when you’re living a good life, it’s salt. I can get lost in things one at a time but at the end of the day it feels like I’ve been up and about, and my days are lengthy again.
It’s because you’re experiencing less novel things each day
Wait until you’re almost 50. You’ll be like “Wtf do you mean it’s Tuesday?! What happened to Monday?”
everyone
Wait until your 50s, totally speeds up way beyond that in ones 30s
You’re an unc now. Welcome