April 15th, 2026
I stumbled onto something Sunday morning that stopped me cold.
I was reading, coffee in hand, not looking for anything in particular, when I came across a piece by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist, explaining why time speeds up as we get older. More importantly, he described how to slow it back down.
If you’re north of fifty, that’s not a curiosity. That’s a headline.
Think back to when you were seven. Remember summer? It stretched out in front of you like an ocean. June felt like its own year. July was a whole separate lifetime. And the wait from New Year’s Day to the next Christmas? That wasn’t twelve months. That was a geological epoch. You lived entire chapters of your life between breakfast and dinner.
Now think about last year. Where did it go? It seems like I was just putting up Christmas lights when, wait, wasn’t New Year’s only a few weeks ago? Whole seasons vanish. You blink in March, and suddenly someone’s handing you a pumpkin spice latte.
So what happened? Did the clocks change? Did the Earth start spinning faster?
No. You changed.
Tyson’s explanation is elegant in its simplicity. When you’re young, everything is new. Your brain is recording constantly, cataloging fresh experiences, filing away novel sensations, building memories at a furious pace. And the more data your brain stores, the longer the experience feels in retrospect. Your brain essentially measures time by how much new information it processes. The more new input, the longer the experience seems. Fewer fresh recordings, and the whole thing compresses into a blur.
Here’s the problem. As you get older, routines take over. Your brain stops saving so much detail. It switches to autopilot because everything feels familiar,
predictable. You’ve seen this movie before. You’ve driven this road a thousand times. You’ve eaten at this restaurant, had this conversation, watched this show. Your brain, being efficient, simply stops recording.
And when your brain stores fewer new memories, your perception of time compresses. Childhood feels long. Adulthood feels like someone hit fast-forward.
Steve Taylor, a psychologist and author of several bestselling books including Time Expansion Experience, puts a finer point on it. As children, he says, we process a massive amount of perceptual information because so much of the world is genuinely unfamiliar. Children also experience the world with an unfiltered intensity that makes everything appear more vivid. Colors are brighter. Sounds are sharper. A thunderstorm is an event.
But as we age, we grow desensitized. Our perception becomes automatic. We absorb less. And when we absorb less, time passes faster. Taylor’s phrase is precise and a little haunting: “Time is less stretched with information.”
That’s the diagnosis. Now here’s the prescription, and it’s surprisingly hopeful.
We can break the cycle.
Tyson believes that by deliberately changing our behavior, we can recapture something close to those endless childhood summers. The formula isn’t complicated, but it requires intention. Break routines. Have new experiences. Learn new things. Force yourself into the uncomfortable zone, that place where your brain can’t coast, where it has to wake up and start recording again.
Take a different route to work. Pick up a language. Travel somewhere you can’t pronounce. Sign up for the class that intimidates you. Cook something you’ve never attempted. Have a conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like yours. Do the thing that makes you feel slightly awkward, slightly off-balance, slightly alive.
Because here’s what’s really going on. When we talk about “slowing down time,” what we’re really talking about is waking up. Paying attention. Living with enough novelty and curiosity that our brains treat each day as worth remembering rather than just another Tuesday to fast-forward through.
A friend told me something years ago that I’ve never forgotten: “Adventure is discomfort remembered.” I used to think that was about travel, about summiting some mountain or white-knuckling through a foreign city where you don’t speak the language. And it is, partly. But it’s also about something quieter. It’s about refusing to let your life become so predictable that your brain stops bothering to record it.
The cruel irony of aging is that the years you have left are the ones that feel shortest. But they don’t have to be. The science says we get a vote in this. We can choose to be uncomfortable, curious, new. We can choose to stop sleepwalking through the familiar.
You can’t add more days to your life. But you can make the days you have feel longer, richer, and more fully lived. All it takes is doing something tomorrow that your brain doesn’t expect.
Your clock isn’t speeding up. You’ve just stopped giving it reasons to slow down.
