Is it just me, or does time pass even faster as you get older?

Not, this isn’t my usual fatalism. (“I’m getting older? One step closer to the grave!”) It’s just something I’ve noticed recently, due to some surprising “decade markers.”

Let me explain. I graduated college in December 2000, which was slightly more than ten years ago. I can’t believe it was that long ago, yet the time seems to have passed by incredibly fast, even though a lot has happened since then. In sharp contrast, the ten years prior to my college graduation seemed to pass at a much slower rate.

I think this has a lot to do with what’s going on in one’s life at the time.

For example, from the end of 2000 to the end of 2010, much of my life has been dominated by one thing: the daily grind of the working world. This is normal, as after I graduated, securing employment was my top priority. Ever since then, it’s been the usual working on weekdays and having the weekends off, and I’ve held the same job for nearly a decade. Sure, there’s been other events here and there, but for the most part my life is fairly routine.

During the period from 1990 to 2000, however, I completed junior high school, high school, and college. Those were three very different chunks of time in my life, each with their own unique challenges. Not only that, my family moved across town in 1992, and I moved away to college in 1996. As such, my routine was never the same for more than a year; classes changed, part-time jobs changed, and even entire groups of friends changed. Time was a slow crawl back then, but nowadays, it’s going at lightspeed.

Does this mean I need to radically change my routine more often in order to stretch out the passage of time? Perhaps, but my options are obviously much more limited than they were in the 1990s. I’ve been trying to shake things up as it is — such as joining a gym last January, and I plan to go biking more often this year — but my work schedule is set in stone.

Of course, if this perceived speeding-up of time is nothing but a common psychological function, then I’m fucked.