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Youth has no awareness of time
How age warps time
Only the perpetually adolescent are keenly aware of their age, and they resist it. This is why a 30-year-old is spiritually younger than a 25-year-old.
Time's effect on perception depends on how much of reality a person has experienced. Every year is a smaller share of a life than it was in the early twenties, and the experiences piled up by then show where one stands in the larger trajectory of an existence. From that position, life can stretch very far.
The sensitive young man
The sensitive young man feels at the end of his life and twenty at the same time. He treats everything as serious and fragile, grieves for aging out, and struggles to keep his youth from slipping away. He feels an urgency to capture a quality everyone else seems to have, a competition he never got to enter, a puzzle he didn't solve in time. He is chronologically young and feels old, so he expects to die now when his real death is 50 years away.
Why do years seem to speed up with age?
In 1877 the French philosopher Paul Janet proposed that a year feels shorter as it becomes a smaller fraction of the life already lived. William James offered another explanation in his 1890 Principles of Psychology: days and weeks seem to shrink with age because fewer experiences are new. Routine stores little in memory, so a stretch of repeated days collapses when recalled, while a stretch of novelty looks long in hindsight. Both ideas are still the standard starting points for research on how people judge the passage of time.
Why do psychologists call the twenties a separate stage?
In a 2000 paper in American Psychologist, Jeffrey Arnett proposed the term emerging adulthood for roughly ages 18 to 29. He argued that in industrialized countries, later marriage, later parenthood, and longer education had opened a stretch of life that is neither adolescence nor adulthood. His surveys found that many people in this range say they feel somewhere in between. He named five features of the stage: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in between, and a sense of possibilities.
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