Time Starts Moving Fast

When years become moments

Category: Existential

This booklet is for people who’ve noticed that time has changed. Not theoretically. Actually changed. The years that used to stretch endlessly now collapse into what feels like weeks. You blink and it’s December. You blink again and your child is graduating. You blink and you’re ten years older than you were in what feels like yesterday.

When You First Notice

It might have been something small. A song comes on that was popular ‘recently’, except it came out twelve years ago. Your college roommate’s kid, who you remember as a toddler, is applying to college. The TV show you were watching ’last season’ actually ended three years ago. The feeling is disorienting. Like you’ve been living in one time stream and just discovered you’re actually in another, faster one.

What Changed

When you were young, time moved slowly. Summers lasted forever. Waiting for Christmas was an eternity. A school year was an epoch. You were impatient for time to pass. In your twenties and maybe early thirties, time felt manageable. There was a lot of it. Then something shifted. The years started accelerating. And now you’re here.

The Panic

You start doing the math compulsively. ‘That was ten years ago.’ ‘I’ve been at this job for seven years.’ ‘My youngest is fifteen.’ None of it feels right. All of it is factually true. The disconnect is nauseating. The calendar says one thing. Your internal sense of time says something completely different. And the calendar is winning.

Good Company

The Sense of an Ending — Julian Barnes, 2011
A sharp, elegant novel about memory and time’s acceleration. Tony Webster, in late middle age, confronts how decades have slipped past and how unreliable his own memories have become. Barnes captures the specific vertigo of realizing years have vanished while you weren’t paying attention. It makes you feel time’s speed rather than just reading about it.
Boyhood — Richard Linklater, 2014
Shot over twelve actual years with the same cast, watching Mason grow from six to eighteen in under three hours creates the exact sensation you’re living, years compressing into moments, the impossible speed of change. You blink and everything’s different. It doesn’t just tell a story about time passing; it makes you feel it.
A Crow Looked at Me — Mount Eerie, 2017
Phil Elverum’s raw, spare album about losing his wife captures both sides of time’s cruelty: how quickly a whole life together became past tense, and how time keeps moving forward when you need it to stop. Quiet, unflinching songs about time doing what it does, taking everything with it.