Your Years Aren't Getting Shorter

Think back to a summer when you were eight. It went on forever — and somewhere inside it there was a single week that felt longer than this entire year has felt. Nothing about the planet has changed since then. So whatever is speeding up, it isn't time. The explanation you've probably heard — that each year is a smaller fraction of the life you've already lived — was written down by a French philosopher in 1877, and it sat untested for roughly a century. When researchers finally measured it, the effect nearly disappeared. This video follows what they found instead: why the feeling barely shows up in the data, why it only appears across decades and not months, and what a 2026 study says is actually behind it. Some of this is genuinely unresolved, and the video says so where that's true. 0:00 The summer that lasted forever 0:37 An explanation from 1877 1:15 What happened when it was measured 2:14 Asking people in the moment 2:48 Two kinds of time 3:54 So what actually changes? 4:42 Counted, not felt 5:52 What the 2026 study found 6:32 What nobody can explain yet Sources: • Wittmann & Lehnhoff (2005), "Age effects in perception of time," Psychological Reports 97(3) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16512... • Friedman & Janssen (2010), "Aging and the speed of time," Acta Psychologica 134(2) — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010... • Janssen, Naka & Friedman (2013), "Why does life appear to speed up as people get older?", Time & Society 22(2) — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... • Teghil, Wittmann, Lifrieri, Saad, Boccia & Wittmann (2026), Memory & Cognition — https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01... • Stetson, Fiesta & Eagleman (2007), "Does time really slow down during a frightening event?", PLoS ONE 2(12) — https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... • Yue et al. (2026), "Retrospective duration judgments … event boundaries," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 33(1) — https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-025-02... • Droit-Volet & Wearden (2015), Acta Psychologica 156 — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2015... #timeperception #memory #psychology