Stop all the clocks...

Ever feel like time seems to be speeding up as you age? The key could be to shake up your routine

- Helen Coffey

As I sit here, contemplating the fact that we’re about to enter the year of our lord 2025, I feel a bone-deep weariness settle upon my ageing frame. Perhaps it’s hitting that quarter-century mark, but the very notion of “2025” – twenty twenty-five! – sounds absurd. It can’t possibly be a real year, happening in real time – it’s the stuff of time-travelling tales; films set in a space age future; dystopian novels that paint a bleak picture of societal breakdown in decades to come. It can’t possibly be happening now.

Yet the calendar doesn’t lie. It is about to turn 2025, whether I believe it temporally possible or not. The passage of time seems to be playing pesky tricks – for surely the pandemic was a mere couple of years ago? The London Olympics were five years ago, weren’t they? And the millennium was a decade ago, tops – I’m certain of it…

It’s not just me who experiences the sensation of the years shooting by at an ever-increasing pace the older I get. While Albert Einstein popularised the concept that time is relative – an hour spent with someone you fancy passes in a moment, a moment spent with your hand on a burning hot plate stretches out endlessly – research consistently shows that our perception of how quickly time passes really does speed up as we get older. According to a recent study by Liverpool John Moores University, the vast majority of people in the UK felt like Christmas approached more rapidly every year, for example, while people in Iraq felt like Ramadan came sooner.

“Physical time is not mind time,” as mechanical engineering professor and author of Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies And Beauty Never Dies, Adrian Bejan, puts it. “The time that you perceive is not the same as the time perceived by another.”