Fly Away Zone Addendum: How to Make Time Slow Down as You Grow Older

I’m in my seventies now. Christmas seems to arrive about every six months. Birthdays show up too quickly. (Didn’t we just have a party?) Something I remember happening “a few years ago” turns out to have happened in 1998.

The clock hasn’t changed.
Time is still a constant.
A minute still has sixty seconds.
A day still has twenty-four hours.

But from research I recently read and duly forgot about, and from my own perception of time, here is what I am learning: our experience of time changes as we age.

Researchers have studied this for years. And while the research makes it clear that time seems to run away from us faster and faster as we get older, it also suggests a few things we can do about it.

Here are four reasons our life seems to speed up. Then we will look at four ways to slow it down.

The first reason why time seems faster is obvious.

Can you remember the year you turned ten? I can. My mom made a birthday cake shaped like a pup tent, which is what I wanted for my May birthday. I received it and couldn’t wait to sleep outside in it.

I remember it seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r for school to end and my parents to let me use the tent for the first time. Time moved slowly.

Why?

Because one year represented one-tenth of our entire life. But when you're seventy-five, one year represents one-seventy-fifth. That’s runaway inflation.

Our brains don’t sit around calculating percentages, but the comparison helps explain something we already know from experience.

Here’s more evidence: Remember how long summer seemed when you were a child? June, July, and August felt endless. The distance between one Christmas and the next seemed enormous.

No more. Now, in the Fly Away Zone, we see Christmas decorations going up and think, Didn’t we put those away a few weeks ago? A year hasn’t become shorter. But we have lived through more of them.

This is the second reason time flies: Think about the first twenty-five or thirty years of your life. They're filled with firsts.

Your first day of school.
Your first bicycle.
Your first date.
Your first kiss.
Your first car.
Your first job.
Your first apartment.

Life kept handing you something new, and new experiences demand our attention. Our brains have to take them in because they don’t know what comes next.

But then we age. We drive down the same street. We shop at the same store. We sit in the same favorite chair to watch our same favorite show and pet the same dog. We follow the same schedule.

We love routine because we don’t have to think about it. We just do it. Mindlessly. Routinely.

But we pay a price for familiarity. Sameness makes time melt away.

When Monday looks like Tuesday and Tuesday looks like Wednesday, our memory has fewer reasons to keep those days separate.

They are not special.
They are not firsts.
They are the same, same, same.

Perhaps one solution to runaway time isn’t adding more time to your life.
It’s adding more events to your time.

Here is another way to think about how time speeds up as we age.

You spend seven days in a new place. You wake up in a strange bed. You must remember where the bathroom is. You walk streets you’ve never walked. You have to pay attention because you need to get back to your hotel.

You eat food you’ve never tried.
You meet new people.
You get lost. You find your way again.
You finally stand in front of something you’ve seen a hundred times in photographs and think, So that’s what it really looks like.

And at the end of seven days, you think, We did all of that in one week? Your week seems full. Almost longer than a week.

Then you get home, and Monday is back to your routine. You make the same coffee the same way. You watch the same morning news show. You drive down the same streets to the same store to buy the same things. And suddenly, the week is over, and you say to your spouse as you fall asleep on Saturday night, “Wow, where did the week go?”

Both weeks have exactly 168 hours. The same. Your vacation didn’t have more time, but it had more memories.

And when days run together, then years start running together too.

This gives us one of the best pieces of advice I know for growing older:

Don’t only fill your days. Differentiate your days.

This next reason is related to the previous one: We stop noticing things.

Children don’t.

Take a walk with a young grandchild and see how far you get. A bug crosses the sidewalk, and suddenly the expedition comes to a halt. The child bends down. Where is the bug going? What kind is it? Why does it have so many legs?

You want to keep walking.
The child wants to study the bug.
Children notice life because so much of it is new.

But we have seen it all before. So we stop looking.

You drive across town and arrive with almost no memory of the drive. You eat lunch while reading something on your phone. You walk outside on a beautiful October morning and spend the entire walk thinking about what you need to get done when you get home.

We call this autopilot, and we spend a surprising amount of our lives on it.

The problem is simple. When you stop paying attention to your life, you give your memory less to remember.

But here is where time gets strange.

Spend a wonderful evening having dinner with people you love and three hours seem to disappear in thirty minutes. But when you sit in a doctor’s waiting room for thirty minutes, it feels like three hours.

So which one was longer?

While you were living it, the waiting room was longer. But when you look back six months later, it was the dinner. You probably won’t remember the waiting room at all.

So perhaps we live with two clocks. One clock measures how fast time feels while we are living it. The other measures how full time feels when we look back. As I get older, I’m becoming much more interested in the second clock.

Here's the research I find most interesting.

In one study, researchers asked 473 people to think about the previous five years. Then they asked them how quickly those five years seemed to have passed.

However, before they answered, some were asked to think back and remember major events from those years.

Where had they gone?
What had happened?
What stood out?

Among the people who recalled at least four meaningful events, the previous five years seemed to have passed more slowly.

Think about this for a moment.

They didn’t get any extra time.
They didn’t create new memories.
They simply went back and remembered the memories they already had.

And somehow those five years became fuller.

We talk a lot about “making memories.” We take the family on vacation. We celebrate birthdays. We gather everyone at Christmas. We take hundreds of pictures. Your cell phone probably has thousands.

But how often do you go back and look at them?

How often do you sit with your spouse and say, Remember when we went there? Remember what happened? Remember how hard we laughed?

The research is telling us this much: we spend too much time making memories and too little time remembering them.

Now, let’s look at the solution side of this issue. How can we “slow” time down?