Kishwar Jahan
Remember when you were a kid, and waiting for a Friday felt like it took forever, while a single month felt like a year and summer vacations lasted endlessly? I was recently talking to my grandmother, and she shared how it used to be back in her day days felt long, weeks felt heavy, and months felt like full years. But today, it feels like the opposite. A whole year flies by in what feels like just a month, making you wonder if the Earth has suddenly hit the turbo button in space or if we have just become so busy that time feels shorter. While scientists talk about tiny changes in how the Earth turns, let’s be honest: the planet is not spinning faster just to ruin our weekends, and as much as we love to blame smartphones and social media for messing up our view of time, that idea falls apart the second you realize that people who do not even use phones or social media feel the exact same rush.
The real reasons are much simpler, starting with how our brains work and take shortcuts as we grow older. When we are kids, everything is brand new, so our brains have to work hard to notice every little detail, which makes those early years feel big and slow unlike adulthood, where the most exciting part of your week is remembering which day to take out the trash. As we get older, life turns into a funny loop of the same days repeating over and over. We wake up, do chores, go to work or school, and repeat the same cycle, which causes our brains to stop paying attention to boring details like folding laundry or staring at spreadsheets, making a whole month vanish faster than snacks at a family party.
At the same time, even without a single phone notification, modern life just moves at a crazy speed because we always have a huge list of tasks to finish, places to be, and worries keeping us on autopilot until the sun sets and we wonder where the day went. We rush from breakfast to lunch and from lunch to dinner without ever stopping to catch a real breath. We pack our schedules with things we must do, things we think we should do, and things we forgot we agreed to do, turning every single week into a blur of running around in circles.
This brings us back to the strange feeling that seasons only last about three days before they change, and while we cannot slow the Earth down, we can change how we live by breaking our daily habits whether that means trying something new, taking a quiet walk without checking the clock, or just stopping for a few minutes to look around us because if we do not pause once in a while, life will keep slipping away in a blur, and we will wake up wondering where the last ten years went.
