When Time Speeds Up

(and what that teaches us about Age, Experience, and Empathy)

Time is such a slippery thing. The clock ticks evenly, but our experience of time stretches, collapses, or disappears entirely depending on where we are in life and how we’re living it.

There’s a famous scene in Risky Business where a teenage Tom Cruise is sitting in class, desperate for the final bell to ring. The second hand ticks backward. His face says everything: “Come on!” For him, time is crawling.

For me, these days, it’s the opposite. When Labor Day rolls around, I blink and it’s Halloween. Then it's New Year's Eve. Before I know it, I'm celebrating another birthday. And all I can think is: I’m going to die someday. Time doesn’t just move — it whooshes.

Why Time Feels Faster as We Age

Psychologists suggest that as we get older, each year feels shorter because it represents a smaller fraction of our lives. A single year at ten is a tenth of your existence; at sixty, it’s 1/60th — barely a blip. But it’s also about novelty. When everything is new — first loves (and heartbreaks!), first jobs, first time you take the car out — your brain has to work harder to encode and store those moments. They take up more mental space, so time feels fuller. Once life becomes familiar, the brain stops recording with such detail. Routine collapses time into a blur.

It’s not that the days go faster — it’s that we stop noticing them.

The Paradox of Flow

Then there’s flow, as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it — that delicious state where you lose track of time entirely. When you’re immersed in something meaningful — a project, a conversation, a craft — you’re not watching time. You’re inhabiting it.

Paradoxically, flow is one of the only ways to slow down time as we age. Not by forcing the minutes to linger, but by filling them so fully that they expand from the inside out. Flow isn’t about productivity. It’s about presence.

When the Game Slows Down

Elite athletes often describe the game “slowing down.” The ball that once flew by now seems to float toward them in slow motion. It’s not magic — it’s mastery. They’ve seen so many versions of that pitch, that play, that moment, that their brains can process what’s happening with ease. They don’t panic. They see.

That’s what wisdom looks like in motion — not faster reaction, but calmer recognition. Life still throws curveballs at us, but we’re not crouched in the duck-and-cover position at the plate anymore. We're standing tall, ready to crack the ball beyond the outfield wall.

Generational Time and the Myth of ‘They Should Know Better’

Which brings me to something I think about often: the way seasoned professionals sometimes look at younger colleagues and say, “They don’t think things through.”

Well, of course they don’t — not the way we do. They haven’t been here before.

We forget that our “obvious” conclusions are built on decades of pattern recognition — on the hundreds of times we’ve seen the same dynamics play out and the 10,000+ hours we've put in to learn from them. Younger workers are still collecting those experiences. They’re living in slower time. Their world is full of firsts.

Expecting our younger colleagues to interpret or decide the way we would is not just unfair — it’s irrational. It’s like expecting a rookie batter to read a curveball the same way a veteran does. Wisdom takes exposure. And time.

So, What Do We Do With This?

Maybe the answer isn’t to fight time, but to re-experience it. To reintroduce novelty. To find flow. To lead with empathy toward those who are still living life in slow motion.

Time is not our enemy — indifference is. The more awake we become, the longer life feels.

---

Andrea Applegate is a leadership consultant, coach, and facilitator who helps leaders model and coach the behaviors they want to see in their teams. Her work is rooted in the Mutual Learning Approach, where clarity, trust, and accountability aren’t abstract values—they’re daily practices.

👉 Curious what this could look like for your team? Explore the Great Leaders | Great Bosses™ Series or schedule a conversation.