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A 5-year-old's summer equals a decade
The pattern is called Janet's Law, after the 19th century French philosopher Paul Janet. At 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. At 50, a year is 2%.
Roughly half of perceived life is behind a person by age 20, which is why the early years feel long and the later years seem to fly by.
The effect is sharpest with a young child in the house. A son born in 2022 sits next to parents who have suddenly begun to look mature, and the contrast shows how quickly time is moving. One father turned the realization that he would see his parents only 15 more times before they were gone into the opening line of a book.
Why do unfamiliar days feel longer?
Journalist and broadcaster Claudia Hammond calls one version of this the holiday paradox in her 2012 book "Time Warped." A trip feels like it flies by while it is happening, yet looking back it seems to have filled a lot of time. The reason is that memory builds the sense of elapsed time from the number of distinct moments stored. Novel days lay down many such moments, and repeated routine days lay down very few.
How did Janet's idea reach psychology?
Paul Janet was a French philosopher who taught at the Sorbonne in Paris. American psychologist William James cited his idea about the length of years in "The Principles of Psychology," published in 1890. James wrote that the same stretch of time seems shorter as people grow older, and credited Janet with the proportional explanation. The idea has been repeated in textbooks and popular science ever since.
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