“What is time, anyway?”
How often did we hear some version of this through the pandemic, when time warped into a Groundhog Day of Zoom calls in collared shirts and pajama bottoms. “Pandemic time” often felt slow like molasses. But those years also feel somehow flattened, gone.
The COVID-19 period gave researchers a treasure trove of data on people’s perceptions of time – on our wildly subjective internal clocks and the way time feels different at various points in our lives.
Emerging from the crisis, there’s a sense that time is accelerating again into a busy blur. In 2022, Canadians complained about feeling the most pressed for time since the early nineties, when Statistics Canada started collecting data on the problem. Nearly 56 per cent said they felt stressed when there wasn’t enough time, 39 per cent felt trapped in a daily routine and 36 per cent lamented having “no time for fun.”
You’re not wrong to think time is running away from you. Hustle culture at work, a productivity compulsion at home, over-programmed kids, the emerging longevity movement: they’re all attempts to maximize time and keep up with the galloping pace of life.
The Globe spoke with five thinkers about why time flies and how to give our days more space, meaning and value.
Time and age
The older we get, the faster each year seems to pass. There are reasons for this, and part of it is proportionate: when you have decades behind you, a single year can speed by quickly.
“The amount that a year takes is a much smaller fraction of somebody’s time as they get older,” said Anne Wilson, a social psychology professor at Wilfred Laurier University who’s studied how people reckon with the past and future.
Cognitive decline also factors in with age.
In 2010, Marc Wittmann, research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, used fMRI scans to reveal that the insula cortex nestled deep in the brain is responsible for our perception of time.
With age, the brain processes less information and stores fewer memories. Then, time can feel like it’s flying by, especially when people look back on the preceding decade, research from Dr. Wittmann and Alice Teghil at Sapienza University of Rome found.
Time and routine
There’s another reason time feels like it’s speeding up as we get older: repetitive routine.
In childhood, when everything’s new and exciting, summers and school years seem to stretch on forever.
“The year feels much longer if you have experienced a lot of new things,” said Dr. Wittmann, author of Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time. “The more vivid, emotional memory content, the slower time passes, subjectively.”
By contrast, the routines of adult life are often forgettable. Sitting through morning traffic, again. Planning dinner, again. Routine is “the killer” of memory, Dr. Wittmann says. With fewer recollections, our sense of time shrinks.
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That’s why he urges people to be open to new experiences. Don’t choose the same holiday resort every year; visit a new country. Learn a new language or instrument. “Try and be open to novelty.”
Time and hustle culture
Productivity, self-optimization, busyness: this is how many people now fill their days. But there are consequences to this beavering way of life.
For years, North Dakota State University communication professor Ann Burnett collected the “brag letters” families send every Christmas. With each passing decade, people describe life getting more hectic and time flying by. Everyone’s now “crazy busy,” from grade-school children to retirees.
“Busy is the operative word. When we use that language, we create a culture where that is fostered,” said Prof. Burnett, now retired.
Just a few Christmas letters writers described slower-paced lives: “Those are the people who say, ‘I appreciate every day.’ ‘I’m glad to be alive today.’ ‘There was a bird outside my window; it was beautiful.’”
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But they are the outliers, Prof. Burnett noted. “You don’t often hear people say, ‘My life is very slow. I’m just kicking back.’ Society looks at you and says, ‘What are you talking about? You must be very boring.’”
She argues that the ways we talk about our fast-paced lives can actually shape how we experience time.
In a 2020 research paper, “I’m On A Rollercoaster,” Prof. Burnett and her colleagues asked women from various socioeconomic backgrounds how they experience time.
Many described each day as if they were on “fast forward.” For some working multiple jobs, there was no option to slow down. But at least some of the frenetic pace was self-imposed. Women talked about taking on more to keep up with others, about earning respect by pushing through piles of tasks each day. Many believed a slower pace would leave them feeling bored and worthless.
“It goes back to how people articulate expectations of what we should be doing with our time,” Prof. Burnett said.
Time and screens
Screen time – the culprit behind everything from distraction and anxiety to bleary eyes and wrecked backs – is also a time-gobbler.
It’s bedtime. You pick up your phone to set a morning alarm. Your notifications light up so you dip into social media. A few celebrity reels and cat bathing videos later, you realize an hour’s vanished into thin air.
“The experience that people have on social media is often one of losing big chunks of time,” Prof. Wilson said. “Many people tend to dramatically underestimate how much time they’ve spent on social media when they get sucked into something.”
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For our sense of time to slow, the hours need to be marked with meaning and memories – everything doomscrolling is not. “It’s one hour of your lifetime which wasn’t very creative or fulfilling. Nothing stays,” Dr. Wittmann said.
Along with researchers across Europe, he’s part of TIMED, a cross-cultural research study investigating how digital technology affects people’s experience of time. Led by Ruth Ogden, a psychology of time professor at the Liverpool John Moores University, the project examines how living with “permanent connectivity” alters our daily rhythms.
Dr. Wittmann worries digital distraction is robbing us of our capacity for boredom, which makes time drag in a way we don’t like. It’s why we turn to our phones while waiting for a train.
“People get on their phones because they know it will make them lose this sense of time passing slowly,” he said. “But then you lose your sense of lived time.”
Lengthening time
The outliers who describe their time as slow and expansive: how do they do it?
“Slowing down – experiencing awe, spending time in nature, reflecting on meaningful things in our lives – will often give us more of a sense of ‘time affluence,’” Prof. Wilson said. “Our time feels like it stretches out.”
A 2016 paper from Carlton University researchers, “Time Grows On Trees,” examined people’s sense of slowing down in nature.
Mariya Davydenko, then a graduate student, and psychology professor Johanna Peetz gauged people’s internal clocks during two different 10-minute walks: one through Carleton’s underground tunnel system and the other along the Rideau River weaving through campus. The nature group assumed their walk was nearly two minutes longer than it really was.
“Inside, the time seemed to pass faster. And outside, it seemed to pass slower,” Prof. Peetz said.
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Others are looking at the role of reflection in slowing time. At the University of British Columbia, psychology professor Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva is an advocate for spontaneous thought, saying it leads people to replay their experiences and consider them more closely.
“In that process, we can change our feeling of how fast time passes,” Prof. Christoff Hadjiilieva said.
Like a historian, the professor makes a point of scanning the arc of their life, whether by looking at photographs or thinking back to events in the recent and distant past.
“I reset my feeling that my life is actually going at a pace that it should.”
In the busy churn of life, people often neglect this type of contemplation.
“The experience of life isn’t just passing through the moments, it’s also having the chance to reflect,” they said. “Time is the same. We’re not going to take time forward with us if we don’t have these moments of reflection. Of course it’ll feel like time flies.”