Time Speeds Up as Time Passes By

I would like to write an article about this. There’s something strange about how I view time lately. By lately, I’m talking about the last 3-5 years or so. I don’t think there is anything new, but it feels different now than before. Weeks pass in what feels like days. Moments blur together, and life begins to feel less like a sequence of experiences and more like a continuous stream, the scrolling, updating, refreshing. Always moving, rarely settling. It raises a quiet question: has something fundamentally changed in how we experience time itself?

Something about our contemporary digitalized age is not normal. The mass amount of information, the increased expectation from work, to be productive and the continuous comparing. Social media is a huge part in this. People live in another version of themselves, of life itself and of what we are as social beings. Everything is extracted. You are expected to extract something from everyone and consume in a continuous and never-ending manner. To just sit in silence with yourself is the most natural thing one can do. Do that in public and its considered weird. To just be absorbed in the moment itself.

I find myself returning to this thought more often. Growing up in the 1990s, time felt different. Slower, perhaps. Or maybe just more tangible. I think back to old VHS recordings — family gatherings, childhood afternoons, friends from kindergarten. There’s a certain stillness in those images. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything that happened existed fully within its moment. Nothing was for attention, nothing was being documented for an audience, and nothing was interrupted by a feed.

It makes me wonder whether it was the analog nature of that time that kept us more anchored in it. Whether we were more synchronized with the moment because we had no alternative version of it running in parallel. We played, we experienced, we existed without constantly stepping outside ourselves to observe, evaluate, or share. Now, that boundary feels less clear. We live in a constant flow of information, a digital layer that sits on top of reality and shapes how we perceive it. Time no longer feels like something we move through; it feels like something that moves through us, faster and faster.

With that acceleration, something subtle begins to slip. We start to lose the ability to sit inside a moment without questioning it, to experience something without immediately translating it into content, meaning, or comparison. Even our sense of purpose becomes entangled in this. Everything is measured, optimized and often externalized. So what actually holds meaning anymore? Just see the value in what you have created for what it is. That’s what is the value itself.

I have questioned this. What is it that we miss now in how we understand time as a chronological and linear concept? There is nothing wrong with taking a moment where we drop everything and just walk somewhere, mentally or physically to the woods and just exist beyond the algorithmic idealizations, perceptions and expectations. We are not meant to outsource our sacred potentials to any machine.

There is a clear distinction, though a fragile one, between the usage of the technology to improve ourselves and our lives, and allowing it to define them. Between engaging with tools and slowly becoming shaped by them. Where this line is crossed, I don’t know. But I think each and every one has to search deep beneath the individual surface to know that limit. Because once that line is crossed, something essential risks fading. Call it presence, intuition, or the inner voice that doesn’t operate on speed or efficiency, but on depth, curiosity and creativity. Perhaps it goes away and you do lose the ability of seeing through time as in knowing the value of what time means to you.

Because it is moving fast. At least it seems as if everything is speeding up. Even if that is an illusion, sometimes that lingering in the moment of time, as you are being afloat on water, as you just breathe and not questioning the irrelevance of a feed, living up to anyone’s expectations or chasing manufactured, culturally constructed achievements, means that you are in the space you’re meant to be. At least it does to me, and I’d like to keep it that way.

I believe that’s something profoundly human, which is unlike any other being throughout time. Time is moving, whether we notice it or not. Life is unfolding, whether we are fully present for it or partially distracted by something else. Nothing about that is permanent, and that is exactly why it matters. If nothing lasts forever, then the value of time isn’t in how much we optimize it, but in how deeply we experience it. Right now, as it is. Before we go extinct and some other species finds our lost civilization, you realize the philosophical weight of nothingness is a compass to live by and to value. That moment of forever, right here and now, is the most sacred time you possess.

You should strive for a place you can tap into, where you don’t consider what is right, because what you do is a reflection of yourself and your greater vision. Everything you create, all you do, the decisions you make are aligned with, and a representation of how you channel and canalize this. So the question becomes less about how to keep up with time, and more about how to meet it. To be present enough to notice it, to live in a way that feels aligned, not because it meets external expectations, but because it reflects something internal and real. To create, act, and choose not out of pressure, but out of connection to something deeper. That might be the closest we get to slowing time down. Not by stopping it, but by finally being inside it.

Take care and stay hopeful,
Tom