Growing up, summers felt like they lasted forever—or close to it. It felt as though the season had no end, until the lure of a new backpack and crayons finally summoned us out of the pool.
In adulthood, we’re all too aware of summer’s fleeting nature from the moment it begins. We anticipate our vacations. We guard our weekends. We complain about “Back To School” promotions that seem to start the day after school lets out.
It’s tempting to chalk this up to simple logistics—kids have the summers off. But teachers have summers off, too, and they’ll tell you that August hits like a freight train carrying a giant load of Mondays.
So, what happened? How does the season that once felt never-ending now seem to disappear before we’ve even found our sunscreen?
According to time perception researcher Dr. Marc Wittmann, the answer lies in the mechanics of memory, specifically which moments get stored and which ones slip away.
The science behind the endless summer
When we look back on a period of time, our sense of how long it lasted comes down to how many moments we actually remember from it. Novel experiences—firsts, surprises, anything that catches the brain off guard—are the moments most likely to stick. In childhood, those moments are everywhere. Almost everything is happening for the first time.
“Everything seems new in childhood: the first ride on a pony, the first trip to the circus, the first vacation at the beach—everything is a first,” Wittmann, a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, and author of Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time, tells Popular Science. “So that causes us to store the memory as something special.”
In addition to how novel a summer feels to a child who has only experienced a handful of them, there’s the fact that a child’s brain is still developing. So not only is the child processing new experiences, but they’re processing them through a rapidly changing brain.
“Each year is a completely new year for a child and adolescent,” says Wittmann. “There are so many bodily and mental changes happening. Each year, the child is a new person.”
All those brain changes help cement new experiences into memory.
Why does time go so much more quickly as an adult?
One of the more commonly cited explanations for why childhood summers feel endless deals with simple proportions: a year at age five represents a fifth of your entire life, while a year at age 50 is merely a fiftieth.
Although Wittmann acknowledges the popularity of this theory, he questions whether an individual’s experience of time perception really lines up so neatly with the math.
“This is an easy calculation for us to do, and it’s so intuitively compelling,” he says. “But the question would be whether the mind and brain actually calculate lived time this way, and there is no evidence.”
What is happening, says Wittmann, is something both more human and complex. At some point, childhood ends. Development plateaus, the brain stabilizes, and the world stops feeling quite so new. We’ve seen summers before; we know how they go.
This is where time starts to accelerate, or at least, where it starts to feel that way in retrospect. With fewer novel experiences being stored, there’s simply less to look back on. The summers don’t disappear, exactly. They just leave less new memories behind.
How memory shifts as we age
But novelty is only part of the picture. Wittmann’s newer research points to an additional factor, one that surprised even him.
In a recent study accepted for publication in the journal Memory & Cognition, Wittmann and colleagues tracked memory and time perception across adults ranging in age from their 20s to their 90s. What they found was not what they expected: Older adults didn’t describe their memories as fainter or less vivid. If anything, the opposite was true. The memories they did retain felt richer and more emotionally resonant than those of younger adults.
What was declining was something far more subtle: the ability to encode the unremarkable moments of daily life. Wittmann attributes this to cognitive decline, a process that can begin as early as our thirties.
“From 30 years on, we already have a slight decline, and then at 50 and 60 we decline even more, and, in very old age, we have a steep decline,” Wittmann says. “And this seems to correlate exactly with this feeling that the last ten years have passed so quickly.”
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How you can make summers feel longer
The good news? We can still live our daily lives in ways that can slow the relentless tick of the clock, or at least make those seconds, minutes, and hours more memorable.
Wittmann recommends seeking out new experiences, new places, and new people where you can find them. Even the smallest shake-ups to your usual routine can make a difference. He also suggests staying physically active, keeping up your social connections, and challenging yourself mentally. These are the same habits, he notes, that help ward off cognitive decline in older age.
“The glue for memory”
However, Wittmann cautions against cramming one’s day planner with novel experiences as a means of seizing (and holding on to) the day.
“Very often, people think they have to pack their Saturdays full of things to do,” he says. “But because you’re so focused on the timeline of items, time will pass quickly again. Instead, try living into your Saturday morning. Start the day without any plans. Be aware of how you feel, what you want to do, and stay open to whatever comes.”
The endless summers of childhood aren’t coming back, but that may be beside the point. What Wittmann’s research suggests is that we have more control over our experience of time than we might assume. We can seek out the new, maintain social bonds, and keep moving. We can learn to live into our Saturdays.
Ultimately, Wittmann suggests welcoming emotions into your life with—and if that feels like a tall order, start with your calendar. “Emotions are basically the glue for memory,” says Wittmann. “If something is very emotional, it will last your whole life.”
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