Why a Year Felt Like Forever at Seven and Vanishes at Forty

Ask a seven-year-old how long until their birthday and the wait feels endless. Ask an adult where the year went and they genuinely can't say. Same calendar, completely different felt duration. In this episode we trace why subjective time speeds up with age — from Adrian Bejan's 2019 physics theory that we perceive time as a stream of mental images that slows with our eye movements, to the proportionality and novelty accounts, to 2025 research showing older adults still recall meaningful moments vividly even as routine time blurs. We untangle the two questions that always get confused: how long a stretch feels while you're inside it versus how long it feels looking back. We sit with the genuine scientific disagreement — no single model has won — and land on what the leading explanations quietly share: novelty and attention are the two levers that stretch felt time. Featuring the work of Duke engineer Adrian Bejan, William James's nineteenth-century observations, and recent 2025 neuroscience and psychology reviews, this is an invitation to see your own vanishing years differently — and maybe to design for moments worth remembering. This episode was generated with AI assistance.