It may sound surprising, but as of today it has already been five years since many countries experienced lockdowns due to COVID-19. Yet when we think about that period, many people feel as if it happened only a year or two ago.

Lately I have noticed a pattern that seems increasingly common — and I include myself in this observation. When we recall events from five years ago, two years ago, or even a few months ago, we are often surprised by how much time has actually passed. Sometimes we could swear those events happened only a few weeks ago.

In some conversations I have heard interesting explanations. Some people believe that time itself is somehow moving faster, or that something in the universe has changed. But when reflecting on it, there seems to be a more consistent explanation behind this feeling: our lifestyle.

Adult life is often filled with repetitive routines. Many people wake up, shower, get dressed, and rush out the door. Sometimes they do not even have breakfast at home and end up eating at work or during their commute. While traveling they check their phones or answer messages. After work they return home tired, have dinner, scroll on their phone for a while, and go to sleep — only to repeat the same routine the next day.

Looking at this pattern raises an interesting question:

How many truly new experiences occur during a typical week?

In several conversations I asked simple questions to people who felt that time was passing faster:

• What new songs did you learn this week?

• Can you remember what you ate for lunch eight days ago?

• What new skill did you learn recently?

Surprisingly, many people answered the same thing:

“I don’t remember” or “I haven’t learned anything new.”

This led me to a possible conclusion: perhaps we are training our brains to register fewer distinctive memories, and these gaps may contribute to the feeling that time is passing faster.

Children, for example, tend to experience time differently. One possible reason is that their daily lives are filled with novel experiences: they constantly learn, explore, interact with their environment, and discover new things.

Adults, on the other hand, often live within much more repetitive routines.

To explore this idea, I decided to run a small experiment on myself. For a while I intentionally introduced more novelty into my daily life:

• memorizing the songs I listened to (including title and artist),

• practicing two new skills,

• exercising both physically and mentally,

• improving my sleep schedule,

• and changing small aspects of my routine every few days.

After about a month I noticed something interesting: my perception of time had changed.

Time was not literally moving slower, but the month felt much longer, as if it had been filled with more moments.

The feeling reminded me of something curious: when we stare at the second hand of a clock, right before it moves it sometimes seems to pause briefly. This small perceptual “stretch” happens because our brain is paying closer attention to the moment.

Something similar may be happening with how we experience time in everyday life.

Today we live surrounded by instant information: short videos, reels, and content designed to be consumed quickly. These stimuli are often so brief and repetitive that we experience them without deeply storing them in memory.

From cognitive psychology we know that our perception of time is strongly linked to memory. The brain does not measure time only with an internal clock, but also through the number of experiences it records. When many new experiences occur, memory becomes filled with distinctive events. When life becomes repetitive, those memories tend to compress.

As a result, when we look back at our lives, periods filled with new experiences often feel longer, while routine periods seem to have passed very quickly.

Perhaps time itself is not accelerating.

Perhaps our experiences are simply becoming too similar to one another.

Here are some references. These studies explain how memory and novelty influence the perception of time:

• Eagleman, D. (2008) – Human time perception and its illusions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

• Block, R., Gruber, R., & Hammond, D. (2010) – Prospective and retrospective duration judgments. Acta Psychologica.

• Wittmann, M. (2016) – Felt time: The psychology of how we perceive time. MIT Press.

• Tulving, E. (1983) – Elements of Episodic Memory.