For anyone who feels like the years are moving faster than they used to
The Real Reason Your Last Ten Years Blurred Together
Your tenth summer felt endless. Last year is already a blur. Researchers have a name for the gap between them, and a small habit that closes it.
In 1877, a French philosopher named Paul Janet offered the first real explanation for something almost everyone notices eventually: a year feels like ten percent of your whole life when you are ten, and only two percent of it when you are fifty. Smaller slice, faster it goes.
The math is real, but it turned out not to be the whole story. Time does not slide faster in a smooth line as you age. Some years still drag. Others vanish. **Researchers now point to something else as the bigger driver: your brain does not read time off a clock. It counts landmarks.**
A landmark is anything memorable enough to become a fixed point, a move, a new job, a birth, a conversation you still remember. Childhood is packed with landmarks because almost everything is new. Adulthood runs on routine, and routine leaves nothing behind to count.
1. Why your tenth summer still feels longer than last year
Researchers who study time perception call it the holiday paradox: **a week away, full of unfamiliar things, feels short while you are living it and long when you look back, because it left behind so much to remember.** An ordinary week at home does the opposite. It flies by, and afterward it barely exists in memory at all.
The current thinking is that this is not one cause but several working together: fewer new experiences, fewer moments that actually register as different from the last one, and the steady creep of autopilot. Adult life runs on routine, and a familiar day gets filed away by the brain as nothing worth keeping, then it is gone.
Time does not actually speed up. Your brain just runs out of new things worth remembering.
2. The fix is not a bigger vacation, it is a five minute landmark
You do not need to quit your job or book a trip to reset this. What researchers point to as the trigger is novelty, even a small break from routine counts. **A conversation that pulls up a memory you have not touched in years is itself a landmark, something your brain will actually file away instead of waving through.**
For a parent or grandparent, capturing one story on a call does double duty. It slows that afternoon down for the person telling it, and it becomes a fixed point the whole family can return to later, instead of one more Tuesday no one will remember happened at all.
A single recorded memory is a landmark twice: once for the person who tells it, once for the family who keeps it.
3. The years you do not capture disappear the same way they arrived: quietly
The uncomfortable part of this research is not that time speeds up. **It is that the years that vanish fastest are often the ones spent with the people you will miss most, since routine visits and ordinary calls rarely register as landmarks in the moment.**
With LifeScribe, you do not need a special occasion to fix that. You talk it out loud on a call you already had planned, and Ari turns it into a keepsake in your own words, the landmark and the record, made at the same time.
The routine years disappear fastest. A five minute call is enough to keep one from being one of them.
I read this and realized I could not tell you one specific thing from a normal Sunday call with my mom, even though we talk every week. We recorded one that afternoon. Now I can.Denise, 57, calling her mother every Sunday
What you get with LifeScribe
- No writing and no blank page: you talk, Ari listens.
- A warm guide asks the question, so the call becomes a landmark without extra effort.
- Your conversation becomes a keepsake in your own voice, not a memory you have to trust yourself to keep.
- A living record your family can return to, long after the ordinary years have blurred together.
Start free, with nothing to lose
Try it on a call you already have planned this week, free. There is nothing to install and nothing to learn. If turning a few minutes of an ordinary conversation into a keepsake does not feel worth it, you have lost nothing but a few minutes.
**Paul Janet made his observation in 1877, and it is still true: the years are not getting longer.** The only years that stay sharp are the ones with something in them worth remembering. You do not need a special occasion to make one, just a phone call you already have.
Do not let another year blur past. Make one call count.
Pick a call you already have planned this week. Spend a few minutes of it capturing one memory instead of letting it pass like an ordinary Tuesday.
Questions grandparents ask us
Is this really backed by research, or just a nice idea?
The proportional theory of why time feels faster with age goes back to the philosopher Paul Janet in 1877. More recent research on time perception has focused on temporal landmarks and the holiday paradox, the idea that memorable, novel moments are what your brain uses to measure time, not a smooth internal clock.
Do I need a big life change to slow time down?
No. Researchers point to small breaks in routine, not major life events, as what creates a landmark. A single meaningful conversation can be enough.
I already call my parents every week. Isn't that enough?
Regular contact is wonderful, but routine calls often blur together in memory precisely because they are routine. Capturing one of them as a keepsake is what turns it into something you can actually return to later.
Do I have to write anything down?
No. With LifeScribe you talk it out loud on a phone call and Ari turns it into a written keepsake, the same way you would already tell a story to your family in person.
What happens to what I record?
Each memory becomes a keepsake you and your family can read and share, building into a living record of the moments that would otherwise have blurred into an ordinary year.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/the-real-reason-your-last-ten-years-blurred-together