Time is objective. Nevertheless, an hour in a lesson you hate will appear to pass much slower than an hour with your friends. So, why has time "sped up" recently?
The 2020 effect - a term you may have heard being thrown around on social media - is the shared perception of time passing much slower than it actually is. This perception is a consequence of - as we blame a lot of things nowadays – the COVID-19 lockdowns that we all collectively experienced. This causes the memories of life pre-COVID, memories we remember as being recent occurrences - the "killer clown" incidents, the capturing of El Chapo, the discovery of a Bronze Age "megalopolis" - to feel closer to the present than they actually are.
Ultimately, the mundane days of the lockdowns - which were filled with us scrolling on our phones and only leaving our houses for a daily walk - have shifted our perception of time. This mindset has stuck until this point, leaving us perplexed as to how 2018 (a recent-seeming year) was six years ago, the same amount of time until 2030 (a year that we always viewed as a far-off destination).
Obviously, time did not speed up or restart when we came out of lockdown - that would be a far-fetched conspiracy theory - yet the pandemic has involuntarily distorted out ideas of the past and future in ways that "objective time" cannot capture.
But perhaps COVID isn’t the only source of blame. In articles which narrate the psychological process behind time, they argue that time “passed” at a slower rate when we were younger as the world was a place of mystery. As we have grown up and come to understand the world slightly more, time has "sped up” to accompany our growth.
Worry should not be an emotion we feel towards this. Time is remaining the same speed it has always been, even if our brains question otherwise.