Why the Last 10 Years Went So Fast (It's Not Your Age)

Why did the last 10 years go so fast? Everyone blames age. But when researchers in Japan asked 868 people, aged 16 to 80, how fast the last week, month, year and decade had gone, age only moved one answer, the decade, and only a little. So what really shrinks a decade? We take a road trip to find out. In this video: where the famous "each year is a smaller fraction of your life" idea comes from (1877) and why William James rejected it, the four-gauge study from Japan with matching results from the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany and Austria, the busyness we forget, why routine vanishes in hindsight (a beach holiday and a kibbutz in Israel), what 2020 did to time in Britain, Argentina, Iraq and nine other countries, memories as mile markers, an honest caveat from a 2026 study, and why the drive home feels shorter, with the one sentence that made that feeling vanish in a lab. (Made in 2026, so 2016 is ten years back.) CHAPTERS 0:00 The 2016 page 0:39 The 1877 fraction everyone quotes 1:39 Four gauges: only one moved with age 2:57 Traffic: the rush you forget 4:08 The identical road (and 2020) 5:26 The photo strip, and an honest caveat 6:45 The drive home: the one sentence 7:55 3 things to try this week SOURCES • Janssen, Naka & Friedman (2013). Why does life appear to speed up as people get older? Time & Society, 22(2), 274. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X13478052 • Friedman & Janssen (2010). Aging and the speed of time. Acta Psychologica, 134(2), 130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.01.004 • Wittmann & Lehnhoff (2005). Age effects in perception of time. Psychological Reports, 97(3), 921. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.97.3.921-935 • Teghil et al. (2026). Memory & Cognition, 54(6), 2394. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-026-01879-1 • James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, ch. 15 (reporting Janet, 1877). https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Princ... • Lemlich (1975). Subjective acceleration of time with aging. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 41(1), 235. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1975.41.1.235 • Avni-Babad & Ritov (2003). Routine and the perception of time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132(4), 543. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.132.4.543 • van de Ven, van Rijswijk & Roy (2011). The return trip effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 827. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-011-0150-5 • Ozawa, Fujii & Kouzaki (2015). PLOS ONE, 10(6), e0127779. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127779 • Zauberman, Levav, Diehl & Bhargave (2010). 1995 feels so close yet so far. Psychological Science, 21(1), 133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609356420 • Rubin, Rahhal & Poon (1998). Memory & Cognition, 26(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211366 • Conway, Wang, Hanyu & Haque (2005). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 36(6), 739. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022105280512 • Ogden (2020). The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown. PLOS ONE, 15(7), e0235871. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235871 • Brenlla et al. (2022). PLOS ONE (Argentina). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266261 • Alatrany et al. (2022). PLOS ONE (Iraq). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266877 • Chaumon et al. (2022). The Blursday database. Nature Human Behaviour, 6, 1587. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01419-2 If time has felt heavy and slow for a long while, and it comes with low mood, please talk to a doctor or someone you trust. This video is psychology, not medical advice. MUSIC "Montauk Point", "Late Night Radio", "Silver Blue Light" and "Summer Day" — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Sound effects: CC0 (Freesound). Narration voice is AI-generated. Animation, script and research are original to this channel. #psychology #timeperception #2016