Somewhere Along the Way, Time Changed

Somewhere Along the Way, Time Changed

Childhood felt endless. Adulthood feels like turning a page and finding another year already gone.

Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash

As a kid time didn’t work like this. This rat-race was non-existent.

Summer vacation felt endless. Waiting for my birthday felt unbearable, like it was never actually going to arrive.

A long train ride turned into a whole adventure.

One school year had enough in it to feel complete by the time it ended.

Now entire months slip by before I’ve even noticed they started.

There’s a mathematical explanation people bring up. At ten, a year is ten percent of your life.

At fifty, it’s two percent. Every year becomes a smaller slice of the total, so it feels shorter. Fine, sure. But it doesn’t explain everything, and honestly it never felt like the real answer to me.

I think the bigger shift is what filled those years, not how big the years were. Childhood kept handing me firsts. First close friend. First exam that actually scared me.

First failure I couldn’t shake for weeks. First win that made me feel unstoppable.

The year had markers built into it, holidays, birthdays, new classrooms, new teachers, so each stretch of months had its own shape and its own memory attached.

Adulthood mostly doesn’t do that. Most weeks look like the last one. Wake up, work, come home, watch something, sleep.

Monday turns into Friday and back into Monday before I’ve clocked either.

Nothing wrong with that rhythm exactly. Familiarity is comfortable. But looking back I genuinely cannot tell last February from last April.

Years compress into a handful of moments that actually stuck, and the rest just goes.

Maybe time isn’t moving faster at all. Maybe I’m just giving my memory fewer things to grab onto.

There’s something else going on too. Everyone seems to be in a hurry.

Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash

Rush through school to get into college. Rush through college for a job. Rush toward the next promotion, the house, the relationship, whatever’s next on the list.

Some days it feels less like living and more like sprinting from checkpoint to checkpoint in a video game, chasing the next achievement before you’ve even looked around at the last one.

I do this. I finish one goal and immediately swap in the next, without ever stopping to check if I actually felt anything when I got there.

Then there’s a feeling that’s harder to name. Not that I’m old.

Just that someone else always seems further along. I open my phone and see a wedding, a first house, a startup, a trip somewhere I’ve never been.

None of it is actually about me. But stacked together it turns into a timeline I keep measuring myself against without meaning to.

The calendar hasn’t changed. It just feels like everyone else’s clock got louder until I started hearing my own ticking too.

Phones don’t help. An evening disappears into reels and scrolling, and afterward I can barely say what I watched.

Something can eat that much time and leave almost nothing behind. It’s strange.

Compare that to a weekend spent differently.

Taking a train somewhere I haven’t been. Learning something new. Getting a little lost on purpose.

Those weekends feel longer afterward. Not more hours. Just more of it actually stayed with me.

I feel the same acceleration with tech lately too, another tool or announcement every week, and a low pressure that if I look away for a bit I’ll fall behind.

I don’t know if that pressure is even real. I just know it’s there.

Maybe that’s why years disappear so fast now.

Maybe they’re genuinely smaller pieces of a much bigger life.

Maybe adulthood is just more repetitive than childhood was.

Maybe comparison shrinks every year before it’s even over.

Or maybe I’ve just stopped paying attention to most of the days as they pass.

I still don’t have an answer. I only know that sometimes I stare at a calendar, try to work out where six months went, and remember a time when waiting for one birthday felt like forever.

Has time actually gotten faster? Or did I just stop noticing it?

Alas, it’s July again. Second half of the year, starting now.

So this is it, I guess, the point where you either go back and look at whatever you wrote down in January or just quietly let it die.

Half the year’s gone already. The other half hasn’t happened yet. Happy half new year!!

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