Your subjective experience of time is based on your memories, and the best way to ensure that your brain remembers what you’re doing is with two things – novelty & intensity.
TLDR: routines compress time.
Habitual behaviours are processed with less cortical effort, meaning less attention and fewer stored episodic memories.
Childhood is rich with “firsts,” which become rarer with age, Novelty Saturation Theory is the idea that as we age, we experience fewer new things, so our brain stops encoding as many detailed memories, which makes time feel like it’s passing faster.
As we get older, days move quickly because we can’t remember them, and we don’t remember our days because we haven’t done anything memorable with them.
Our days are forgettable, therefore we forget them.
Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life.
Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences, that will later be memorable.
This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things.