Matti’s Principle of Temporal Recall: Why Time Feels Faster as We Age
We’ve all felt it: the strange acceleration of time as we get older. Summers blur together. Years vanish in what feels like months. Birthdays sneak up like thieves. But why does this happen?
Most people have heard that time seems faster because each year is a smaller percentage of your life. While that explanation holds some mathematical weight, I want to propose a new, more psychological theory—one I’ve been thinking about for a while.
I call it Matti’s Principle of Temporal Recall.
The Core Idea
Just as we have a working memory—a limited number of thoughts we can hold in mind at once—I believe we also have a life memory: a set of standout events that we instinctively recall when we think about our life as a whole.
But here’s the catch: this life memory doesn’t grow proportionally with age. It doesn’t stretch to include every meaningful moment. Instead, we tend to remember roughly the same number of events, no matter how old we are. What changes is the spacing between them.
In other words, when we look back over our lives, we see the highlight reel. And the reel doesn’t get longer. It just gets more spread out.
You can think of it like how we handle numbers. Most people can comfortably hold about 7 digits in their working memory—which is why phone numbers were traditionally kept to 7 digits (often grouped as 3 + 4 to make them easier to recall). But try remembering 10 or 12 random digits without writing them down, and most people will struggle. The brain doesn’t lose the capacity to remember numbers—it’s just that short-term memory has a limited slot count. I believe the same holds true for life memory: we can quickly access only a handful of life’s biggest moments, and that number doesn’t necessarily increase with age. The result? Our personal highlight reel gets more spread out—and time feels like it’s speeding up.
An Example from Age 10
When you're 10 years old, you may think back on your life and instantly remember:
The time you broke your arm at the playground
The family trip to Disney World
Your best friend moving away in grade 2
Winning a school prize or scoring a goal
The day your little sister was born
These events span just 4–5 years, and they feel packed, vivid, alive. Your sense of life is full, even though your history is short. The spacing between memorable events is small, so the past feels “dense.”
And Now, at Age 50…
Now think about being 50. When you do a mental scan of your life, five or six moments might rise to the surface:
Getting married
The birth of your first child
Starting your own business
The death of a parent
That epic trip to Greece
A career-defining moment or personal reinvention
But these events might span 20 or 30 years. You still only remember a handful off the top of your head. You’re not thinking of the Tuesday in 2008 when you had a great sandwich. (Unless it was a really great sandwich!) You’re thinking of peaks—high or low. And since those peaks are spread out, the past feels thinner—even if there’s far more of it.
What Does This Mean for Us?
We don’t remember life equally. Ordinary days blur together, but peaks imprint. And the farther apart the peaks, the “emptier” the intervening years feel in hindsight.
To slow down time, add texture. New experiences, intentional reflection, deep relationships—these all create more memorable moments. They fill the reel.
Your memory is not a faithful recorder—it’s a spotlight. And it doesn’t get brighter with age. You have to aim it intentionally.
Cancun, circa 2008
Travel and the Highlight Reel
When I was a teenager growing up in Northwestern Ontario, my “travel life memory” was short and simple: family road trips to Duluth, Minneapolis, or Winnipeg. Then one summer we drove west and added Montana, Banff, Vancouver, Edmonton—and on the way back, we stopped at Mount Rushmore. Each of these stood out, occupying their place in that early reel of adventure.
Fast-forward a few decades. I’ve been to far more places and stayed longer:
Greece – Santorini, Mykonos, Rhodes, Athens
Italy – Rome, Naples, Florence, Parma, Venice
Turkey – Kusadasi, Ephesus
Caribbean – St. Lucia, Dominica, Barbados, Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Roatán
Mexico – especially Cancun, where I live half the year
Israel – two months, mostly in the north, living near the Talpiot Market in Haifa and on the Coast
Other highlights – Oahu, Hawaii; Venice, and so on
Yet despite the sheer number of stamps in my passport, my “travel memory” works the same way as my broader life memory: only a few moments come instantly to mind. Not because the others weren’t wonderful—they were—but because a handful created a deep imprint.
When I close my eyes and reflect, I don’t recall every hotel, every view, or even every country. I recall:
Glacier National Park in Montana, as a teen and then an adult, yet both times feeling very small before those mountain vistas
My first sunrise looking out over the Caribbean on the beach of Cancun
The ancient stones of Capernaum under my Crocs (go ahead, hate all you want)
Santa Rosa Wall, the dive site off Cozumel where I truly fell in love with diving
The Acropolis, looking up at those ancient stones, picturing life millennia ago
The grandeur of the Colosseum, thinking of the horrors that happened there, and the amazing engineering that allows it to still survive
This isn’t a knock on the other places I have been. I still really want to return to Venice. One of the best meals of my life was in Parma. And the memory of touching stingrays for the first time on Grand Cayman still gives me goosebumps
And as much as travel is part of who I am, it is the places I’ve truly lived that imprinted the deepest.
My current apartment in Cancun, where I sip my tea in my hammock and enjoy peaceful moments every chance I get
The house on a corner lot in Southern Ontario, with a swing on the back deck where I would rest when I returned from the long days at the office
Our first house as a married couple, where our family grew to include our girls. It was over 100 years old and needed constant work, but I drive by it every time I return to the North
My childhood house, whose shape I can still walk through with my eyes closed
These peaks get farther apart with time. But I think an important thing is to keep your life interesting. Add new places. And keep it filled with people—both new friends and old. The continuity ties you to the past, and maybe… puts the brakes on time, just a bit.
Final Thought
Matti’s Principle of Temporal Recall suggests that we don’t just experience time—we curate it. And if you want time to feel slower, fuller, or more meaningful, the solution isn’t in the calendar. It’s in how you live, and what you choose to remember.
So go make memories. And make them memorable. Make new peaks. And hold on to the people who make the memories with you.
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