Mike Mariani is a writer and journalist based in the D.C. area, and the author of “What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us,” published in August 2022 by Penguin Random House
We’ve long been ensorcelled by the passage of time. Puckered leaves fluttering from the spidery arms of barren trees. Grains of sand tumbling through the delicate neck of an hourglass. A curved cornice perched over a snow-covered mountain, awaiting an avalanche to bring it down. These evocative emblems of seasons, hours, and the vicissitudes they leave in their wake speak to the bittersweet relationship we’ve cultivated with this unit of measurement.
Whether in Proustian reveries, digital photo libraries, or the watchful doppelgänger that gazes out at us each morning, ever-so-slightly altered, we’re inclined to a tender wistfulness toward time — the persistent awareness that, however fast or slow, it’s forever slipping through our fingers.
But lately, our relationship to the months, years and decades that landscape our lives has shifted in some unsettling ways. Instead of regarding the passage of time with introspection or melancholy, many of us now observe it with a mounting sense of alarm.
You don’t have to look very far to find ample evidence that we are experiencing a metaphysical crack-up around time. There’s a growing conviction among people from all walks of life that time is moving faster than it did several decades ago — or even prior to the Covid pandemic. While this belief crept into the zeitgeist like a sly, slinking fog, the refrains are now so pervasive that they’ve started to supplant idle chatter on the weather. Our focus has shifted from rejoicing in cloudless days or grousing over gloomy skies to fixating on the dizzying speed at which our lives are hurtling by.
This is particularly evident on sites like Reddit, where users now regularly commiserate over how rapidly the years are passing. A farmer whose work cycles alongside the seasons “can’t believe how fast this year has gone.” A middle school teacher recounts how she finds herself “having these conversations with students … who are perturbed by the speed of life.” Perhaps most tellingly, for a programmer, the “pandemic years blurred together, and everything after feels compressed, like one long season instead of separate years.” Civilizational events, including not only Covid but also climate change, large-scale armed conflict and the rise of AI “have piled up so quickly that it feels like we’re living through multiple decades at once.”
In recent years, these stray observations have coalesced into a chorus. Everyone from Boomers to Zoomers is mystified at how the passage of time has sped up, and feels disoriented by the strange velocity that’s colored how we’re living through the 2020s. But to hear these stifled laments is also to observe the absurdity of contemporary American life: While so many of us agree that our relationship to time has been warped, our collective response has been to shake it off and move on. It’s as though we all started losing our depth perception at the same time — crashing into road medians, pratfalling down staircases — and instead of resolving to rectify the predicament, we’ve simply resigned ourselves to daily collisions and collapses.
In some ways, the scale of this phenomenon resembles an episode of mass cognitive dissonance, or even a population-level folie à deux. It’s worth asking if something about our internal mechanisms for gauging the passage of time has changed — or been irrevocably thrown out of sync with human timekeeping and the atomic clocks we’ve structured civilization around for nearly a century. Or, alternatively, perhaps the pandemic spoiled our capacity to judge duration, expanding and contracting our sense of time over and over until the fabric grew loose and rippled, an undifferentiated mass of fibers stretched into a form we no longer recognize.
A Theory Of Relativity
Scientists and academics have been grappling with some of these questions since the 19th century. In the 1890s, renowned French philosopher Paul Janet proposed that human beings experience time in proportion to their age. When we’re 10 years old, one year is fully 10% of our entire lifetimes; as a result, we process it with slow, substantive vividness. When we’re 50 years old, on the other hand, that same year represents only 2% of our lives, and we experience it with corresponding ephemerality and diminished gravitas. Janet’s theory would come to be known as “logarithmic time perception,” a reference to the measurement scale that represents mathematical figures proportionately (it’s sometimes referred to as the “time alive” theory).
William James picked up where Janet left off, positing in “Principles of Psychology” that time moves more slowly for young people, who slingshot themselves into fresh experiences every day. “Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out,” he writes.
James argues that the absorbing episodes children and teenagers so often find themselves in give the brain more to chew on — both in the moment and long after the moment’s passed. Because their exploits are consistently novel and stimulating, young people have the retrospective sensation that those specific intervals of time were fuller, deeper, more robust.
As we grow older, however, we become more immersed in patterns and routines, without the same opportunities to process new information, foster fresh skills or feel our way through unfamiliar circumstances that galvanize our intellects. We’re living by rote, so to speak, and our consciousness slides into a more dulled, dampened state. As a result, James notes, “the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
Though James was writing before the fields of neuroscience and psychology were even established — Freud had yet to publish his first book — his insights have been embraced by researchers more than a century later. Many of them now argue that the way we gauge time is inextricably linked to how active and engaged our brains are, and the extent to which we form memories.
When we’re seeing, hearing, touching and tasting exotic sights, sounds, surfaces and foods that arouse our senses, we’re far more likely to lay down new memories. Those recollections inform how we retrospectively evaluate the passage of time, giving it that languorous, “long-drawn-out” quality James described. “We only remember things which are novel or exciting or scary or have some visceral meaning to them,” Luke Jones, a psychologist at the University of Manchester, explained to me. “And your retrospective perception of duration is based on memory.”
But while we’ve long established that humans perceive time in an elastic, subjective way, that knowledge could not have prepared us for the Covid pandemic. That generational event bowed and buckled the way so many of us experience those hourglasses and cornices, swapping out placid reflection for consternation and dread. Over three years of lockdowns, quarantines and the claustrophobic monotony they inspired, countless Americans told anyone who would listen how different time felt to them. The weeks and months, we stammered, felt “stretched,” “warped,” “blurred.”
In 2023, researchers at Baylor University set out to legitimize these anecdotes. A team of sociologists published a study using Gallup data collected at the height of the pandemic to analyze how people perceived time during the period. The authors found that Americans experienced “time disorientation” in multiple directions, with time speeding up, slowing down and days blending together to the point of indistinguishability.
Another study of Uruguayan university students, published in “Time & Society” in 2022, found that 80% of students surveyed felt time had either sped up or slowed down during the pandemic. These findings were replicated in other parts of the world, including Argentina and Iraq. The co-authors of the “Time & Society” paper also noted an intriguing irony: In instances where excessive free time caused by lockdowns or other public health measures led to boredom, “time would be slow in the moment, but looking back on the experience retrospectively, people would feel that time flew.”
This points to a crucial aspect of time perception, one that continues to captivate me: We gauge the speed of time based on one set of factors in the moment — how engaged or stimulated we are — while using a distinct set of criteria to evaluate it retrospectively (the degree to which we formed memories). People trapped in their homes during the pandemic with little to do suffered a worst-case scenario, temporally speaking: the emptiness of their days slowed them to a crawl, while the insipid repetition of their experiences yielded few memories, causing wide swaths of time to, as James puts it, “grow hollow and collapse.”
When I spoke to Marc Wittmann, one of the 2022 study’s co-authors and a time perception researcher at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, he explained that the lack of distinct markers during the pandemic made each day look exactly alike, contributing to time disorientation. “Every day was the same,” he said. “Monday used to be the day you went skating, Tuesday was the day you spent with your friends. We used to have something associated with each day.” But all of this disappeared during global lockdowns, he said. Wittmann calls this “Blursday.”
The surge in time disorientation so many of us experienced during the pandemic came to be known as the “2020 effect.” The abrupt upheaval and subsequent tedium of restrictive, repetitive routines in those years led to the sensation of days bleeding into each other, time “stretching” and people losing the ability to recall events sequentially — as though our memories were shuffled and rearranged during a game of three-card monte.
But the most relevant question in 2026 isn’t whether the pandemic influenced how we experience time. A raft of academic papers demonstrate that it clearly did. The question now is whether our perception of time ever snapped back to the way it was before that generational event.
The Internal Clock Fallacy
To determine why our internal clocks sped up over the past few years, it helps to understand exactly what we mean by “internal clocks.” For years, time perception researchers have been trying to explain how human beings subjectively gauge duration. But it’s proven to be a stubborn riddle. One reason for this is that we have no organ or system dedicated to sensing time. Instead, as one 2016 paper puts it, “Psychological time is an abstraction, a construct or epiphenomenon of our mind’s functioning that we create in order to explain the coherence of events.”
Nevertheless, researchers were convinced for years that humans possessed a specific mechanism for measuring time — a theory referred to as the “internal clock model.” Though the model served as a convenient explanation for how humans tell time, scientists eventually grew skeptical of it. “Back then, there was a very anthropocentric model that was suspiciously similar to actual man-made clocks,” said Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “You have some oscillator ticking away at some frequency, and then counting the time units, much like clocks work.” Another problem with the internal clock model was that scientists struggled to find hard evidence for its existence. As Warrick Roseboom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, told me, “Researchers were just like, ‘Oh, you have a clock in your brain. We just need to find where the clock in your brain is.’”
But scientists never found the clock, and for some the model lost its credibility. Meanwhile, Roseboom and other academics began exploring alternative theories. In 2022, he and several colleagues at the University of Sussex published the results of a study that showed participants short videos to determine whether there was a relationship between the way we process the world around us and how we gauge the passage of time.
In the experiment, the amount of activity the videos elicited in participants’ brains was strongly correlated with their subjective sense of how much time passed. When the participants detected more happening in the videos, it triggered large changes in brain activity associated with visual processing, creating the sensation that more time had gone by. Roseboom and his co-authors concluded that we tell time based on “the accumulation of salient changes in the perceptual processing hierarchy” — or, as co-author Maxine Sherman said when the paper was published, “the brain just ‘counts’ how much ‘stuff’ has happened, which is very intuitive.”
One of the paper’s key takeaways is that our perception of time isn’t based on any fixed sense of duration. We do not, in fact, have an internal clock measuring minutes, hours and days. Instead, we use our external environment as a proxy for the passage of time. The more “stuff” our sensory cortex is picking up on, the more time we register as passing.
This new way of looking at time perception could shed light on why so many people feel like time is speeding up today. We’re inundated with videos, images, notifications and a cavalcade of content 24 hours a day, forcing our brains to contend with far more information than they needed to 10 or 20 years ago.
When I reached out to James Hyman, a neuroscientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he felt that applying Roseboom and his co-authors’ new theory of time perception to our current media ecosystem explained why so many people now feel flummoxed by the speed of their lives. “We’re constantly moving onto the next thing,” he said. “And the more things that we experience that cause us to move forward, well, if our brains are only able to tell time by counting things, then we’re jamming lots more things in there.” When we’re flooded with text, images and glowing blue light, our brains are tricked into speeding up the internal proxy mechanisms they use for measuring time. As a result, time feels like it’s moving faster and faster.
But the casino-like frenzy of our digital environments is only part of the reason our perception of time is changing. Remember that we assess duration from multiple vantage points, including retrospectively, when we gauge how much time we feel passed during a specific period. When we tell our spouse that “this week flew by,” we’re engaging in retrospective time perception. Arguably the most important variable in those judgments is memory — whether we formed them, how many we formed, how vivid they are.
Memories are the trees, shrubs and undulating peaks that landscape our past, preventing it from hollowing out and collapsing in on itself. (Smooth and featureless as the interior of a spaceship, the pandemic had no landscape, and our memory of it collapsed accordingly.) Because of this variability, retrospective time perception is even more subjective than other forms of time judgment, given its outsized dependence on “things which are novel or exciting or scary or have some visceral meaning to them.” The memories that stem from those stimuli are our footprints in the snow, giving our past the solidity and verisimilitude that would otherwise blow away in the past’s enveloping whiteout.
Our memories are the key to the central irony of our supersaturated world. Roseboom’s theory posits that time spent in an environment overflowing with visual information should feel long and robust. “You would think that because we’re paying more attention to more things, that retrospectively time should feel longer,” Jones noted. “But I think we’ve got the worst of all worlds.” Because while we encounter a glittering constellation of apps, games and videos beckoning us at every turn, eager to light up our sensory cortex, they’re not generating the indelible experiences crucial to forming memories. “When you get to the end of the day, you look back and there’s no meaningful content there. It’s just the same blur, the same stuff, and there’s nothing distinctive about it.”
Wittmann agrees that toggling between apps on our phone and numbing ourselves with Instagram reels can impoverish our retrospective perception of time. “When we’re on digital media, time passes very quickly,” he explained. “You lose yourself. You’re jumping around like mad in these apps, and you can’t put them into memory and later recall them, because the experiences just vanish.”
Browsing, scrolling and swiping are more likely to quiet or even anesthetize our brains than activate them in the ways required to form memories. As a result, spending an hour on TikTok might feel like 10 or 15 minutes, because we don’t have any of the “intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out” sensations that give time depth and fullness. Instead, it all blends together in a turbulent vortex, overwhelming the senses rather than engaging them on the level necessary to endure over time. It’s easy to extrapolate this further and speculate how spending several hours a day on social media distorts our sense of time, giving us the impression that we were awake for just 12 or 13 hours of the day. Over months and years, surrendering this much time to our ersatz digital warrens can lead to a sense of deprivation — a feeling that years have been carved out of our lives.
According to Wittmann and other researchers, social media platforms are uniquely effective at short-circuiting our retrospective time perception. After spending time on these apps, the abstract field our mind’s eye draws from to make sense of recent experiences is left barren, devoid of the evocative wisps we integrate into the hazy memory palace that ultimately serves as our past. Instead, many of us are now confined to a permanent amnesiac present, one throbbing with artificial life but unable to fathom where it came from or where it’s going.
Investigating The Time Warp
The collective sense that time is moving faster today than it has in the past has gained enough traction for scientists to start taking notice. A group of European psychologists has teamed up to form Time Experience in Europe’s Digital Age, abbreviated as TIMED. This research consortium, which includes some of the top time-perception researchers in Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K., is using interviews, questionnaires and experiments to explore how our perception of time is influenced by how we use technology.
TIMED has spent the last three years collecting data from tens of thousands of study participants all over the world, and they’re now sharing the results of that project. In papers published so far, researchers have arrived at a number of important takeaways. First, people who spend more time on devices and social media platforms experience time passing more quickly. In one of their papers, Wittmann and his co-authors cited memory as a key factor in this correlation, with the use of digital technology limiting the breadth of people’s experiences and foreclosing on the events we most often remember.
“Routine activities such as repeatedly checking apps or prolonged online engagement for professional purposes could reduce the frequency of novel, embodied, and enactive experiences,” they wrote. “This, in turn, results in fewer rich or meaningful events being encoded in autobiographical memory. Consequently, such periods may retrospectively appear less eventful and more compressed, contributing to the feeling that time has passed quickly.”
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, researchers also found that excessive use of technological devices promoted a negative relationship with time. “Participants associated digital technology use with a loss of time, a desire to fill all time, a propensity to forget time and, as a result, a desire to gain greater control of time,” they wrote. Feeling that one’s relationship with time had spun out of control in turn spawned “feelings of guilt, shame, and a lack of self-control.”
Wittmann and his colleagues conducted qualitative interviews for TIMED, and some participants expressed frustration and even helplessness at how devices were transforming their sense of time. “What was really interesting to me was how people constantly talked about digital technology stealing their time,” Ruth Ogden, TIMED’s lead investigator, said. “One of the things that happens when you engage in doom scrolling and other forms of social media is you completely forget about time — time doesn’t exist anymore. So then you massively overextend how long you engage in these activities for.”
But Ogden doesn’t think that technology should be seen as the sole culprit for our warped perceptions of time. The strains in that relationship go deeper than memes, AI slop and infinite scroll, stemming from how modern society frames inert, unproductive states like boredom and “doing nothing.” In TIMED’s interviews, respondents also told Ogden and her colleagues they were uncomfortable with periods of inactivity and felt compelled to use their devices to fill every available gap in their schedule. “What we found through TIMED is that even when people have time, they don’t use it to do nothing,” she told me. “We live in a society that really values constantly being busy and constantly having something to do. We saw this in TIMED through people’s use of digital technology, where every bit of free time was spent on screens.”
If people were more comfortable with intervals that lacked so-called productivity — quiet longueurs, spells of boredom or periods of aimless reflection — they might stand a better chance of expanding and enriching the way they experience time. “It’s in those calm moments where we see a unique pattern of activity in the part of our brain responsible for helping to make our memories,” Hyman said. Those still, empty stretches are when we contemplate our immediate pasts, integrating them into the larger arc of our lives.
We know, however, that these states have been largely vaporized this decade — and only a seismic shift in our values and ideals stands a chance of reclaiming them. In Ogden’s eyes, the dilemma hinges on a simple question: “How do we get people back to being comfortable with doing very little and believing that doing little is not an indication of laziness?”
The Beauty Of Boredom
The stakes of this phenomenon can sometimes seem low. Feeling like time is speeding up is not a “kitchen table issue”; it won’t raise your taxes or make you go hungry. But the TIMED project has demonstrated that people who feel like they’re losing time are genuinely unhappy and even distressed about it. Members of Gen Z, in particular, don’t talk about the quickening pace of their lives with disinterested curiosity or frivolous bemusement — they lament it. When we lose our grip on the passage of time, it can feel like we’re also losing grip on our own lives.
Western culture views time as a currency to be leveraged, channeled and optimized. The societal pressure to perform productivity at all times is so insistent and thrumming that many of us — myself included — have lost the ability to slow down and luxuriate in the inherent slowness of time, the way it oozes forward like honey slithering across a glass jar. When Aldous Huxley was asked about time by an interlocutor in “The Doors of Perception,” his reply was both simple and profound. “There seems to be plenty of it,” he said. Untethered from his ego and all the worldly attachments it clung to, Huxley was able to tap into the spaciousness of existence — an amplitude and abundance that’s permanent and inviolable, if only we still had the freedom to see it.
It’s true that technology has capitalized on this culture of synchronized compliance. The companies that manufacture our devices and make the programs that run on them have wedged themselves into this perverse relationship to productivity, offering the badges and motifs that signify a certain enterprising competence. As Jenny Odell points out in her book, “How to Do Nothing,” there’s a battle playing out “for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” Through these products, we personify the ideals of practicality and industriousness.
The pandemic, too, eventually fed into the hungry zeitgeist of maximizing our output and sacrificing ourselves on the altar of “getting ahead.” The increased use of communications platforms like Slack, Teams and Zoom promoted a porousness between our work and home lives, allowing what Odell calls a “certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought” to infiltrate spaces long insulated from them.
This explains why many people feel that the way they experienced time during the pandemic never snapped back to how they processed it before Covid. In the aftermath, we became even more tethered to these platforms and other virtual spaces where productivity lingers at a low, insistent hum 24 hours a day. With our minds more anxious and overstimulated, our perception of time never had the chance to return to an earlier, more composed pace.
Further, trends that predated Covid resurfaced as though shot out of a cannon, and the ambient pressure to advance our lots at all costs imbued our culture with a mercenary quality. We were all racing to make more money, afford a home, secure a job, #YOLO at the live events we were unceremoniously robbed of. Amid this competitive turbulence — and the technologies that capitalized on our unease about it — everything started to move faster.
If we accept this premise, then maybe the crisis of time speeding up is not as hopelessly irreversible as it often seems. According to the latest time perception research, the amount of information our brains engage with shapes our subjective sense of how fast time is moving. If we intentionally reduce the stimuli we’re exposing ourselves to in a given day or week, then our brains will gradually slow down. And if our brains slow down, then our perception of time will taper off, too.
For their part, Ogden and other TIMED researchers feel that society has imposed too much responsibility on the individual to limit their use of technology. “Maybe it’s time that we shifted some of that onto the creators,” Ogden said. “The key metric for the success of digital technology is how long users are on it for, and how many people they can get on it for as long as possible. How do we flip that?” While we wait for those larger systemic changes, though, Ogden emphasized the importance of using our devices in a more intentional fashion. “What are you trying to get out of this digital technology use?” she asked. “You need to have an awareness of your own goals.”
In addition to modifying our own individual behavior, however, we also need to change the culture surrounding how we spend our time. That means coming to terms with the reality that boredom and “doing nothing” are neither shameful nor necessary evils. “There is huge value in doing nothing,” Ogden said. “We need to move away from thinking that it’s weird, lazy or slovenly.” Asked how she would spend a perfect holiday, Ogden described something very close to what people now labor so strenuously to avoid. “It would be to go and sit in a square in Italy with a nice glass of wine and watch the world go by.”
In his “Principles of Psychology,” William James invites us to participate in an experiment. “Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed,” he writes. The length of that single minute, he explains, will feel overwhelming. “You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course.” Those 60 seconds feel so full, James goes on, because “you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se.” When our senses are engaged and stimulated, time is compressed, disguised, eclipsed. “The feeling of bare time,” however, “is the least stimulating experience we can have.”
We used to tolerate those interminable minutes standing in a crowded grocery line, gazing out the convex glass window of an airplane, waiting for the dull red digits on an oven timer to run down to zero. These are now the endangered species of our day-to-day lives. And they are far more valuable than we ever could have known.