Adults often lament that time accelerates with age. Summers once felt endless; now Christmas seems to have already arrived again.
This sense that “time speeds up” as we get older is widely accepted, and looking at time passage over the past decade is especially revealing: In several studies over the last 20 years, people reported that the last 10 years of their life seemed to pass faster the older they were. My initial survey in Germany and Austria (Wittmann & Lehnhoff, 2005) was later replicated with participants in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan. As I presented the findings in an earlier Psychology Today article, across industrialized nations, the pattern is clear: The last decade of life feels increasingly to pass faster as we grow older.
The fact that this finding has been reproduced is quite astonishing in the face of a replication crisis in science, when empirical results often cannot be reproduced in follow-up studies. Some studies have also shown that the last three years and five years of our lives are sensitive to this age effect, but never the last year.
Our retrospective sense of time hinges on memory: Periods rich in novel, significant experiences feel longer, while routine collapses duration. This principle could explain the age effect on subjective time. Childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood overflow with “firsts”—biological and psychological leaps, new skills, new places, new relationships—each adding weight to memory. As the years pass, routine gradually displaces novelty, and even changes in jobs or travel cannot recreate the intensity of early milestones. With fewer meaningful events experienced, subjective time accelerates as we grow older.
This was the state of knowledge when Alice Teghil and Maddalena Boccia at Sapienza University of Rome and my group at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology in Freiburg set out to test whether the memory hypothesis behind the aging effect truly holds—something never directly examined. Alongside ratings of how fast the past year and past decade had passed, we assessed autobiographical memories from those periods and measured cognitive functioning. We included indicators such as processing speed, immediate and short-term memory, and attention, given their steady decline with age. In total, we tested 120 adults aged 20 to 91 in Freiburg, Zurich, and Rome, with 60 participants from each language group. Our study results have now been published as a preprint on PsyArXiv.
At the heart of our study was the simple question: Does time feel like it speeds up because we remember fewer life events? Surprisingly, the answer is no. We found no link between how fast people felt the last 10 years had passed and how many autobiographical (personally significant) memories they could recall from that decade.
Even the qualities of those memories—their vividness or personal importance—had no connection to the sense of time speeding by. In fact, older adults actually described their memories as more vivid and meaningful than younger adults did.
As we age, it seems we don’t lose richness of experience; we may even savor it more. In a way, it’s a quiet reminder to embrace the moment—carpe diem—and growing older doesn’t dull our memories; it deepens them. What an unexpected and genuinely encouraging twist in our study.
So what actually makes time seem to speed up as we age? Our study points to a key factor: the gradual decline in certain cognitive abilities. Older participants—and especially those who scored lower on tasks requiring them to recall spoken words after a delay—were the ones who felt that the past decade had vanished more quickly.
Cognitive decline sets in sometime after 30 years of age, minimally, but measurable, and with a sharper decline after 50 years of age. The idea is straightforward: When fewer everyday events can be encoded in detail, the memory “density” of a decade thins out. Looking back, that sparse record makes the years feel compressed. Importantly, this doesn’t diminish our meaningful autobiographical memories, which stand out as special—the emotional stories and peak experiences we carry about our lives. Those remain rich and intact, even as the fine-grained details fade.
This study is a great example of how science works through falsifiability. We began with a clear hypothesis: that people remember fewer autobiographical events over the last 10 years as they age, and that this thinning of memory would explain why time feels faster. The data proved us wrong.
Instead, we found that age-related cognitive decline—particularly the intake of new information—helps explain why the past decade can feel like it sped by. But that is only part of the story; other, unmeasured factors will also contribute to the link between aging and the acceleration of subjective time.
The good news comes in two parts. First, older adults actually cherish their meaningful experiences more, recalling them with greater richness.
Second, we’re not powerless: Staying physically active, socially connected, emotionally engaged, and mentally stimulated are all known to be protective factors against cognitive decline. In other words, living well with people we enjoy may help to both keep our minds sharp and our sense of time a little more spacious.
