Why Life Feels Faster Every Year

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]If you think about it, time seems to get faster as you get older. We all feel it speeding up, but it's not time that's changed. You have. When we were kids, the summer holidays [music] felt like eternity.

[00:00:14]It was the end of the world.

[00:00:17]Freedom!

[00:00:19]But then [music] you grew up and realized that summer holidays were only 6 weeks. 6 weeks. Nowadays, 6 weeks is nothing. I don't know about you, but the last 6 weeks of my [music] life have just flown by. Hell, March 2020 feels like yesterday. This isn't about a single [music] evening disappearing.

[00:00:40]This is about what happens when you zoom out and you look [music] at your life in hindsight and realize it's just disappeared. A year as a child felt like an eternity, [music] while a year as an adult can shoot by.

[00:00:54]If you didn't know any better, [music] say you were a medieval French peasant, you'd be forgiven in thinking that time had actually sped up. But of course, >> [music] >> time isn't changing. Your experience is why. In this grand plane of existence, your experience is unique. [music] It's yours. Your consciousness, your physicality. If you're walking along the [music] street, you're barely moving.

[00:01:20]But if there's an ant on your shoulder, suddenly [music] you're a warp capable vessel traveling ridiculously fast. Oh my god, it's so fast. Time works [music] the same way. It's relative to you because your perception of time is [music] measured using memories. Memories are time keepers.

[00:01:42]Memories [music] act as markers. Without them, you're adrift in a vast ocean of consciousness [music] with no reference points. No sense of distance. There's no earthly way of knowing which [music] direction you are going. There's no knowing where you're rowing or which way [music] the river's flowing.

[00:02:04]So, memories, or more specifically memory [music] density, determines perceived time. The more memories you form, the longer a stretch [music] of time feels. The fewer memories you form, the faster it disappears. And this isn't your brain failing. This is your brain working exactly as [music] it was designed. So, the real question is, "Why doesn't the brain just record everything?" Well, it can't afford to.

[00:02:30]>> [music] >> Even your brain is experiencing a cost-of-living crisis.

[00:02:34]Your brain is roughly 2% of your body weight, but [music] takes up 20% of your energy. Running that little organic [music] supercomputer in your skull that pilots an exoskeleton made of bone and a muscle and alters the structure of its own atoms to project mental images into an unknown dimensional plane. Where are your memories? Where am I seeing this [music] memory now? Where is it in the world? I don't know. That's another conversation. But, it's not cheap to run that organ. [music] It's an expensive organ. And more, it's being flooded with information every second of every day from the moment it develops in the womb, developing in the womb, to the moment you die. [music] It's being inundated with information. So, if you walk into your kitchen for the 500th time, your brain isn't going to create a new memory. It doesn't need to. It already has a model of your kitchen. And this leads us to the core of why your brain won't remember everything. Your brain isn't trying to remember the world at all. It's trying to predict it.

[00:03:51]New memories are only worth the memory cost when something breaks the pattern.

[00:03:58]When there's something novel, surprising, meaningful.

[00:04:04]Because those moments contain new information, they update [music] the universal model that your brain is constantly trying to create. This [music] is why childhood feels so long, because your brain is building its model from scratch. It's taking [music] in as much data as it can to accurately model a future where you're not And this is also why adulthood [music] feels so fast, because your brain has already seen most of it before. It's already taken in this [music] data. It already understands where you are. It knows your living room chair isn't going to kill you.

[00:04:49]This is a result of our good friend evolution. Evolution. Your brain's job isn't [music] to record your life. It is trying to keep you alive. Around [music] 520 million years ago, very long time indeed, creatures went from loose networks of neurons [music] across the body and started developing dense clusters of neurons, which we could describe as >> [music] >> early brains. They did this to process information faster. This is roughly the same time [music] when hunting and being hunted started becoming a serious part of life. So, [music] early brains didn't evolve to remember everything. They evolved to remember what mattered. The ones that survived were not the ones that stored more information, they were the ones that were tagging the right [music] information, what to avoid, what to find, and what to pay attention to.

[00:05:48]And over [music] time, those simple signals, good, bad, safe, dangerous, became something [music] far more complex. What started as basic survival skills eventually became what we now call emotion.

[00:06:05]And it still works the same way today, [music] but refined to the point where emotions are now super effective [music] chemical signposts. And instead of simple good berry bush, bad big tiger signals, you now have a system that can [music] prioritize what matters with incredible precision. Part of that system is a small structure >> [music] >> called the amygdala. It decides what's important. If something feels significant, [music] it triggers a response. Another structure, your hippocampus, is [music] responsible for turning experience into memory. Most of the time, it's very [music] efficient. It's very careful.

[00:06:45]But when the amygdala feels emotion, it flags something as important, shouting at the hippocampus, [music] "Record this." Your memory system switch mode activated. Without that signal, without any emotions, without anything standing out, your brain just simply decides nothing is worth remembering.

[00:07:08]So, if time feels like it's speeding up, >> [music] >> it's not time, it's your brain. [music] It's a consequence of your unchanging routine, of the mundanity, the mundanatility, the mundentality, the munda- It's a consequence of how mundane life is. But that's a good thing. This is good news, positive [music] news, good stuff, because it means that you can change it.

[00:07:42]Go outside, do something new, subscribe to a new YouTuber.

[00:07:48]Break the pattern because you do not [music] experience time. You experience what your brain chooses to remember.

[00:07:56][music] So, if you want a longer life, give it something worth remembering.

[00:08:03]Thank you for watching. If you've gotten to this part of the video, that means you're you're cool. I like you personally. I think you are an interesting individual right there. Did you leave uh a like, um >> [music] >> subscribe if you haven't already? Maybe leave me a comment telling me what you thought of the video. That's appreciated. I reply to all of them because honestly, I get no comments.

[00:08:29]Yeah, what's up, poor hah. If you think about it, if you think about it, you want to subscribe.

[00:08:37]You do a little dance.

[00:08:40]Cuz doing a little dance is healthy.

[00:08:44]See, this is a novelty.

[00:08:47]My brain's going to remember [music] this, and this is going to make my life feel longer.

[00:08:53]You can't do too many little dances.

[00:08:55]You have to do just enough to keep them novelty, or change them up every [music] now and then so you're doing a new dance in a new place.

[00:09:06]Haha. [music] Ah, the summer holidays.