Where Did This Year Go

We say it as a joke. It is not really a joke. The year took exactly as many days as last year, and last year took exactly as many as the one before it. Nothing about the calendar has changed. Something about you has.

Before we go further, try something. Somewhere inside these months were about thirty-seven Tuesdays. Find one. Not a birthday, not a holiday, not the day something went wrong. An ordinary Tuesday in March. You were awake for every hour of it. You made decisions. You ate three times. You spoke to people you love.

And it is gone so completely that you could not prove it happened.

I went looking for the answer because, well, I wanted to.

0101The answer is 149 years old

A year is one tenth of your life when you are ten and one fortieth when you are forty, so of course it feels shorter. Neat, tidy, sounds like physics.

That idea belongs to a French philosopher named Paul Janet, who proposed it in 1877. William James repeated it in 1890 and it has been circulating ever since, mostly unexamined. It has one obvious problem, which is that you do not actually judge a Tuesday against the total span of your life. Nobody does that. You judge Tuesday against last Tuesday. Later reviews have picked at the model on exactly those grounds and it has never really recovered.¹1 Janet · 1877

0202What people actually report

In 2005 Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff surveyed 499 people between the ages of 14 and 94 and asked them plainly how fast time seemed to be moving. The paper appeared in Psychological Reports. Yes, the feeling is real, and yes it increases with age.²2 Wittmann & Lehnhoff · 2005

The age effects were small to moderate and accounted for at most 10 percent of the variance. Ten percent. The most universally agreed-upon experience in adult life, the thing everybody nods along to at every birthday, is statistically a modest effect sitting inside an enormous amount of individual difference.

Buried in that same body of research is the detail that cracks the whole thing open. The acceleration does not show up evenly. Ask people how fast the past week went, or the past month, or even the past year, and the age differences mostly vanish. Ask them about the past ten years and the effect appears clearly.

Your Tuesday is not moving faster than your mother’s Tuesday. Something happens when you turn around and look back.

When Ruth Ogden surveyed people in the United Kingdom during the first lockdown and published it in PLoS ONE in July of that year, more than 80 percent reported that the passage of time had gone strange on them. The days crawled. The months evaporated. Same clock, same calendar, completely different experience, and all it took was removing everything that made one day different from the next.³3 Ogden · 2020

0303The tower

In 2007 a neuroscientist called David Eagleman decided to test something everyone believes. People who survive car accidents say the same thing. It all happened in slow motion. I saw everything. Time stretched.

So Eagleman, with Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta, took volunteers to a place in Texas where you can be dropped backwards off a platform about 150 feet up, fall roughly 31 metres with nothing underneath you, and land in a net. Genuine terror, safely.

On each person’s wrist they strapped a device they had built called a perceptual chronometer. It flashes a number, then instantly flashes its inverse, alternating just fast enough that ordinary vision cannot separate them. You look at it and you see a blur. But if time really did slow down during terror, if your perception genuinely switched to a higher frame rate, then somewhere in that fall the blur would resolve and you would be able to read the number.

The paper is called ‘Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?’, it was published in PLoS ONE in December 2007, and its answer is no. Nothing slowed. What happened is that terror made them pay ferocious attention, attention laid down memory, and when they went looking for the length of the fall afterwards, the only thing available to measure it with was how much they remembered.⁴4 Stetson, Fiesta & Eagleman · 2007 (Figure 1)

That is the finding the whole thing rests on. You do not experience duration. You reconstruct it afterwards, from how much you stored. Time does not have a feel. Memory has a thickness, and you mistake one for the other.

0404The years that did get written down

Ask someone in their fifties to tell you a story about themselves. Not a particular one, just a story, and watch where they go. They will almost never come back with last April. They will come back with a hostel in a city they could not afford to visit now, or the week they met the person they married, or something that happened in a corridor at school. It happens so reliably it looks like a personality trait. It is not. It is architecture.

In 1986 David Rubin, Scott Wetzler and Robert Nebes gathered data from several different laboratories, all of it collected the same way. Give a person a cue word, ask for whatever memory it brings back, then date that memory against their life. Their chapter appeared in a Cambridge University Press collection called Autobiographical Memory. When they plotted where all those memories sat, the same shape came up everywhere.⁵5 Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes · 1986 (Figure 2)

Almost nothing before the age of about six, which is ordinary childhood amnesia. Then a steep climb into a hump covering roughly ages ten to thirty. Then a long flat stretch. Then a rise again at the recent end, because the last few years are always close to hand.

That hump has a name now. The reminiscence bump. It is one of the most replicated findings in the study of memory. The tempting reading is that your twenties mattered more. They did not, necessarily. What they had was volume of first time. First time living somewhere that was yours. First time earning. First time being left. Nothing had to compete with a previous version of itself to be written down, so almost everything was.

0505The problem of the memory itself

Here is where it gets uncomfortable, because the instrument you are using to measure your own life is not reliable.

We talk about memory as though the brain is writing things down. It is not. When Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe and Joseph LeDoux published their work in Nature in 2000, they showed something that upset the field. A memory that has already been consolidated becomes unstable again when you recall it, and has to be rebuilt in order to stay. This was rat work, in the amygdala, and the human picture is more contested, but the direction is clear enough. Remembering is not playback. It is closer to reconstruction, and anything you rebuild, you can rebuild differently.⁶6 Nader, Schafe & LeDoux · 2000

You can see the consequences in people

In 1995 Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell took 24 people, got true childhood stories from their older relatives, and slipped in one that never happened: getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of five. About a quarter of them came to remember it. Not vaguely. Some of them added details nobody had given them. They furnished a memory of an afternoon that did not occur.⁷7 Loftus & Pickrell · 1995

In 1992 Ulric Neisser and Nicholas Harsch did something simpler and more devastating. The morning after the Challenger shuttle exploded in January 1986, they handed a questionnaire to 106 students at Emory University asking exactly how they had heard the news. Two and a half years later they asked the same people the same questions. The average consistency score was 2.95 out of a possible seven. Some people’s accounts had nothing in common with what they themselves had written down the day after.⁸8 Neisser & Harsch · 1992

The part that is important is not the error. It is that confidence had no relationship with accuracy. People described their wrong memories vividly and with total certainty. Shown their own handwriting from 1986, some of them did not believe it.

You are not remembering your life. You are remembering the last time you remembered it.

So when you sit in September and ask where the year went, understand what you are doing. You are consulting a record that rewrites itself every time you open it, and then trusting the answer completely.

0606It is not that you have fewer memories

The obvious story would be that as we get older we accumulate fewer memorable events, so the years feel emptier in retrospect.

In April this year Wittmann and colleagues published a study in Memory & Cognition with 120 participants aged 20 to 91. They asked people how fast the past decade had felt, then asked them to actually produce autobiographical memories from it, and measured their cognitive function.⁹9 Wittmann et al. · 2026

They replicated the effect: older people experienced the past ten years as having gone faster. But the number of memories people could produce had no relationship with that feeling. Neither did how meaningful or how vivid those memories were. In fact, older participants rated their recollections as more vivid and more significant, not less.

The one thing that did track was the ability to encode new information, measured by a standard delayed recall test that has nothing to do with your personal life at all. The impression of how fast a decade went seems to be connected less to how many events you can pull up on demand and more to a general sense of how much encoding took place across those years. It is a correlation in 120 people, with age and cognitive ageing tangled together, and it needs replicating. But what it suggests is that the feeling is not about what you have. It is about how much of it went in.

0707Nobody knows how to fix it

This is where I expected to write the tidy ending. Seek novelty. Break routine. Take the different road home. Every article on this subject lands there.

I cannot write that, because in January this year Landau and Ryu published a review in Frontiers in Psychology looking across the whole literature on how we judge the tempo of our own lives, and the finding is that the popular prescriptions do not hold up cleanly. Novelty, enjoyment, mindfulness. The evidence is mixed. There is no proven intervention that makes your years subjectively slow down.¹⁰10 Landau & Ryu · 2026

The review notes that remembered growth and fulfilment are often associated with a faster remembered pace of life, not a slower one. The years in which you grew the most may be precisely the years that feel like they disappeared. Almost as if it takes something away and hands you something better.

It means the thing we are complaining about in September might not be a symptom of a life going wrong. It might be what a full life feels like from the inside, looking backwards. The vanishing is not the bill for a year badly spent. It may be the receipt for one spent well.

0808How little any of us actually knows

I want to be honest about the ground we are standing on here.

For decades everybody said the human brain contains 100 billion neurons. It was in every textbook and every talk. Then in 2009 Frederico Azevedo, Suzana Herculano-Houzel and their colleagues actually counted, by dissolving brain tissue into a uniform suspension and counting nuclei, and published the result in the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The number is about 86 billion. The figure everybody had been repeating for years had never been measured by anyone.¹¹11 Azevedo et al. · 2009

We have complete wiring diagrams for exactly two adult brains. A roundworm, which has 302 neurons. And an adult female fruit fly, mapped by the FlyWire consortium and published across a set of papers in Nature in October 2024, with around 140,000 neurons and more than 50 million connections between them. That fly took years of work, an enormous amount of machine learning, and thirty-three person-years of human proofreading.¹²12 FlyWire Consortium · 2024

A fly has 140,000 neurons. You have around 86 billion. We have never mapped one human brain.

So this organ that is doing the thing we are discussing — deciding what to keep and what to let go, building your sense of how long you have been alive out of material it edits every single time you touch it — is something we understand a fraction of. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

I find that beautiful rather than frightening. There is more inside you than anyone has been able to account for. Whatever is deciding which Tuesdays to keep has never been read by anyone. Not once. Not in any human being who has ever lived.

0909Where this leaves us

I cannot tell you how to slow it down. The research does not support anyone who says they can, and I am not going to be the person who tells you that a weekend pottery class will give you your twenties back.

So let us say the hard thing instead. Most of what you are living through this week will not survive. These weeks, the ones you are inside right now, the ones that feel so heavy while they are happening, will be erased. The Tuesdays go first. Then the months they were made of. Then the shape of the whole season, until all that is left is a sentence you tell people about the year you were busy.

That is a little sad if you think about it, but that is how it works. You will not remember the days you spent on the way to something. The stretch when you were head down, building, optimising, getting good, running the same Tuesday forty times in a row, is exactly the stretch that will not be there when you turn around. Not because those years were wasted, but because competence is the ability to do something without paying attention, and attention is the price of admission for memory. You were not absent. You were efficient. It costs the same.

And a life you remember every moment of would be a life you spent standing slightly outside of, watching yourself have it.

So let the weeks close over. Let them go. The forgetting is not the enemy and it never was. The goal is not the problem either. The goal is fine. The problem is arriving at the far end of it holding the result and nothing else.

Live beside the thing you are chasing. Not instead of it, beside it. The speed was never yours to control. The content always was.

1010Sources

1. Janet, P. (1877), proportional theory of subjective time, discussed in Timing & Time Perception (2022). ↩
2. Wittmann, M. & Lehnhoff, S. (2005). Age Effects in Perception of Time. Psychological Reports, 97, 921–935. ↩
3. Ogden, R.S. (2020). The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown. PLoS ONE. ↩
4. Stetson, C., Fiesta, M.P. & Eagleman, D.M. (2007). Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event? PLoS ONE, 2(12): e1295. ↩
5. Rubin, D.C., Wetzler, S.E. & Nebes, R.D. (1986). Autobiographical memory across the lifespan. In D.C. Rubin (Ed.), Autobiographical Memory (pp. 202–221). Cambridge University Press. Background on the bump. ↩
6. Nader, K., Schafe, G.E. & LeDoux, J.E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature, 406, 722–726. ↩
7. Loftus, E.F. & Pickrell, J.E. (1995). The formation of false memories. See also this replication and extension (Memory, 2023). ↩
8. Neisser, U. & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. ↩
9. Wittmann, M. et al. (2026). Memory encoding for new information, not autobiographical memory load, is linked with age-related differences in subjective time passage over the past decade. Memory & Cognition, 54(6). ↩
10. Landau & Ryu (2026). The time of your life: mapping the mechanisms behind life tempo judgments. Frontiers in Psychology. ↩
11. Azevedo, F.A.C. et al. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513, 532–541. ↩
12. FlyWire Consortium (2024). Whole-brain annotation and multi-connectome cell typing of Drosophila. Nature. ↩