Why Does Time Go By Faster As We Age?

If you want to romanticize relativity and time, then this video is for you. From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows comes "Zenosyne: The Sense That Time Keeps Going Faster," which explains why time goes faster as we get older. The project is headed by John Koenig, who creates poetic word montages to accompany fictional words for feelings that we don't yet have words to express. This one, "zenosyne," is for the passage of time, and how time seems to fly by as we age. The word might not be real, but the feeling is. You know it: Every year feels a little bit shorter than the one before, and time seems to speed up the older you get.

The video opens with the following narration:

"At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year,

Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity.

You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year."

It goes on to explore the feeling of time compressing, and if you're prone to tears you may get a little choked up. (Note: I cry over everything, but not this, so maybe you're safe). Watch below and see what you think:

Meanwhile, science has offered up several theories (which likely all work together to create the illusion that time passes faster as you age), which are based on various studies (you can read more at Scientific American):

1. Time is gauged by memorable events like firsts, and the less of these you have, coupled with the more repetitive, mundane every day things, the shorter time begins to seem

2. The relativity of age to time, or "ratio theory" is important — for instance, when you're five, one year is 20% of your life, but when you're fifty, it's 2% of your life

3. The unstoppability of your biological clock seems to speed time up

4. The older you become, the less attention you pay to time (as attention turns to other things like chores and bills), so therefore you don't notice every passing second the way you might as a child

5. As you get older you also begin to stress more, and having more to get done in the same amount of time makes that time seem compressed

Images: Getty Images; Giphy (5)