Have you noticed that time is speeding up?

Physicists, psychologists and philosophers explain what’s really happening

In October 2025, Jacob Whelan realised it was happening to other people, too. The 41-year-old YouTuber was attending a wedding on a Highland-cow farm in Tennessee, eavesdropping on some nearby guests. His ears pricked up when a woman started complaining.

“I just can’t get done in a day what I used to get done,” she sighed. Errands took twice as long; the days themselves were slipping by. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Whelan recalls the woman saying. “There’s something up with time.”

Whelan had been experiencing the same thing. Every morning he’d wake up, brush his teeth, shave, dress and head downstairs to work out. But how could it be that he woke at 7am and didn’t make it to his basement gym until 7.45am? Why was it often 12.30pm by the time he’d finished and eaten breakfast? “Where in the world did the time go?” the Kentucky-based Whelan asked me recently. “I sure didn’t work out for two or three hours.”

Still eavesdropping, he was amazed to hear that a crowd concurred with the woman, no matter their age. “I was like: ‘This isn’t just me.’”

Whelan’s right: it’s not just him. In 1851, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed, “Time goes faster and faster the longer we live, like a ball rolling down a hill.” But while many of us have experienced time flying as we age, people online are now claiming that time itself is speeding up. Across YouTube, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram, influencers and ordinary people alike are sharing their experiences and amassing hundreds of thousands of likes. People believe there are now fewer seconds in a minute – or fewer minutes in an hour, or fewer hours in a day. The phenomenon has been christened “the Quickening”.

On 2 April, a user on Reddit shared a video of a timer he was using while cooking potatoes. The seconds on the digital clock rolled over rapidly: 18, 17, 16, 15, all in the blink of an eye. The video itself lasted 17 seconds, but commenters were shocked to realise it wasn’t edited. Some said the pace was inconsistent with the way they were taught to count seconds as a child: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four… “Can hardly fit my Mississippis in there,” one person wrote.

The man who posted the video, a 26-year-old student with the username “badrillex”, told me the timer “didn’t match the rhythm” in his head. Like Whelan and his wedding guests, Saudia Arabia-based badrillex struggles to get errands done in a timely manner. “When I dedicate a specific block of my day to a task, nine times out of ten, the time I’ve allocated is never enough.” This wasn’t an issue a few years ago. “It’s like the internal rhythm I’ve lived with my whole life suddenly doesn’t sync up with the clock any more.”

For another Redditor, Cassie, it means burnt food. Historically, the 40-year-old – who works in finance and lives in Cyprus – has always cooked by instinct. “I don’t use a timer because I love to cook, and you get a sense of things,” she says – but lately, something has felt off. “I’m burning things more often.” One of Cassie’s friends has an explanation she finds quite compelling: time is moving 20 per cent faster than it once did.

In the past year, Whelan has made two YouTube videos about time speeding up, accumulating more than 870,000 views. In the first, he says he noticed time speeding up after he retired in 2024. While he used to work in a corporate job and manage his homestead in his spare time, he’s now “scrambling” to feed his animals and maintain his land, even though he technically has more time.

Whelan put forward a range of explanations in his video: it could be our unrelenting news cycle, the way phones colonise our time, or even a form of mass psychosis. But he also shared another theory. Whelan wondered if it could have something to do with Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Could the laboratory’s experiments be messing with time?

“These people are basically trying to play God,” Whelan tells me. “Who knows what they’re actually able to do? Who knows what they’re actually doing?”

In 2012, scientists at Cern used the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to discover the Higgs boson – or “God particle” – after a nearly 50-year hunt. The finding helped us understand why matter has mass, and physicists compared the breakthrough to man landing on the moon. But ever since, conspiracy theories about Cern have flourished online. In 2012, a German woman tried, unsuccessfully, to sue the lab, claiming the LHC could create black holes that would swallow the Earth.

For more than a decade, people have theorised that Cern disrupted time, threw us into an alternate timeline or opened a portal to a parallel universe after the God particle discovery. But, earlier this summer, something changed. On 29 June, Cern switched the LHC off for maintenance. “HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE SAME THING – TIME HAS RETURNED,” began one post on X three days later; it earned more than 7,000 likes. One Redditor claimed their son walked up to them and said, “Time feels slow today.” Another wrote, “I was shocked at the time every time I looked at my phone.”

I’ve personally felt as though time is going faster; I regularly marvel when my phone tells me it’s 2pm, even though all I’ve managed to do is work out, eat and reply to four emails. But in early July – before I heard anything about the LHC switch-off – I suddenly started having the opposite experience. I kept looking at my phone and finding it was earlier than I expected.

Whelan can relate. Recently, he was editing a YouTube video and felt as though hours had passed – but when he checked, not even an hour had gone by. “Lately, I have had more time,” he says.

Clara Nellist is an assistant professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, a scientist at Cern and a TikToker with almost 300,000 followers. Ever since she started posting videos about her work in 2021, she’s received conspiracy-minded messages. Some commenters are genuinely afraid; others are angry (“So basically u working for Lucifer”); still others are kidding around. Yet Nellist was unprepared for the response after the LHC hiatus in June.

“We get a lot of attention when we turn on,” she says. “I wasn’t necessarily expecting so much uptick in these comments when we turned off, because we’ve also turned the accelerator off multiple times in the last 15 years.”

Nellist works on the Atlas experiment at the LHC, which involves accelerating protons nearly to the speed of light and smashing them together to observe the collisions and measure the particles they create. This is done in order to understand more about particles and phenomena that exist but are difficult to observe, such as the Higgs boson or dark matter.

“What we do at Cern with the Large Hadron Collider colliding these protons is happening naturally in our atmosphere all the time,” Nellist says. “Even though the LHC is off, those particles are still colliding in our atmosphere. We’re not doing anything that isn’t already happening naturally.” She adds that there are lots of particle accelerators around the world aside from the LHC.

The confusion may have arisen because particles in the LHC do experience changes in time. “As these particles approach the speed of light, they experience time dilation,” Nellist explains – a phenomenon whereby time passes differently due to speed or gravity. Humans experience time dilation on airplanes, for example, although you only gain a ten-millionth of a second flying between London and New York. But the time dilation happening in the LHC is only happening to the particles, and it doesn’t affect the world around us.

Video by video, Nellist is debunking conspiracies. “What I personally think happens is that people are looking for a way to have some control in their life,” she says. If time is slipping away, it’s natural to seek something to blame, in the hope that the problem can be solved by flicking a switch.

Happily, a man once took his conspiratorial video down after Nellist had a conversation with him. And yet, the scientist herself is no stranger to the sensation of time speeding up. “It feels like my life is moving on very quickly,” she admits. Cern might not be messing with the universe, but something strange is clearly happening – if not with time itself, then definitely with our perception of it. What is going on?

The prevailing explanation is simple: time feels faster as we age. When you were ten, the logic goes, a year was a tenth of your life – of course it felt like a long time! When you reach 50, a year is a measly 2 per cent of the time you’ve been alive. Schopenhauer was one of the first to write about this in 1851. Since then, it’s remained a persistent idea in the psychology of time.

But many people online dislike this explanation; they claim their children are experiencing time speeding up too. And, in fact, numerous papers have now cast doubt on the idea that older people feel time is going faster than younger people: one 2016 study “showed no difference between young and elderly people in judgements of rate of passage of time”. The truth – as is so often the case – is more complicated.

Ruth Ogden is a professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University. She first became fascinated by time perception when she was driving to her mum’s house and time suddenly slowed: she could see a car coming towards her and realised they were going to collide. Researchers believe when our anterior insula – a region of the brain involved in processing emotions – is activated in moments of threat, it can distort our sense of time.

“We are part of an environment that creates our temporal structures for us,” Ogden says. “If that environment changes, then the way that we feel time changes.” Her research has found that over 80 per cent of Brits felt time passed at a different speed during England’s second Covid-19 lockdown, and she wonders if we’re still feeling the repercussions. “Lots of people aren’t going back to work, or are working from home. It’s not like we’ve just reversed the clock and gone back to exactly how things were before Covid.”

Ogden is not remotely surprised to hear that many people feel time is moving faster. Our clocks aren’t changing, she says, but our “internal psychological clocks” could be. “We live incredibly time-pressured lives,” she says, “When we’re constantly busy, we can’t pay attention to time.” When we do pay attention to it, time slows (which is why airport delays feel like forever).

For the last three years, Ogden has also been researching how digital technology warps time. She has found that tech can lead to “vanishing hours” – five minutes scrolling can suddenly become an hour (which somehow still feels like five minutes). “It steals our time through constant intrusion,” Ogden says. While we might have had spare minutes in the past to stop and reflect, today we’re bombarded with notifications. This could explain why young people feel time is speeding up, too.

The Redditor who posted the video of his speedy-seeming potato timer is satisfied by psychological explanations. “I remember the old mechanical clock in our living room. As a kid, the ‘tick-tock’ sounded so much slower and heavier,” badrillex says. “Today, everything is digital and instant, and I think that has changed how we feel the pulse of time.”

Ogden says our perceptions are also linked to our memories. When we say time has “sped up”, what exactly are we comparing it to? More often than not, our childhoods. Many of us recall long summer holidays and counting down to Christmas as a child – time felt especially slow. “There’s a memory effect that’s going on there where our lived experience of being an adult is fundamentally opposed to our lived experience of time as a child.”

Human memory is fallible. Whelan told me he first realised other people experienced time speeding up at the wedding – but the invitation reveals it was on 18 October 2025, and his first YouTube video about the phenomenon was posted in August 2025. I put this to him. “Wild!” he says via email, “[You] just blew my mind.” Whelan says he must’ve got his timeline crossed. “Maybe it truly is because all the days are blurring together, making it harder to distinguish between them.”

Ogden argues that many of us are experiencing a “poverty of time”, calling it a public health crisis. “It’s impacting our health, our wellbeing, our relationships,” she says. But she also believes we can reclaim our time. “Look at time like you do your bank account: look at where the minutes are going and look at where you can save.”

How is it that thousands of people agreed that time slowed down when the LHC was switched off? Ogden says our experience of time is “socially constructed”, which means our feelings about it could be contagious. The internet allows this contagion to spread at an unprecedented rate, and confirmation bias means that once we’ve heard time has slowed for others, we look for changes in our own lives. Ogden says anticipation like this can actually make time feel slower.

When time seemingly slowed for me after the LHC switched off, I was excited to discover the online chatter. But it took 30 seconds away from the computer to realise the truth. Time had slowed because I’d just finished an intense month-long book tour, and at the start of July, I was taking a week off. (I was also using that week to clean out my cupboards – a task that all the scientists at Cern could not speed up.)

Physicist Nellist notes that Cern turns the LHC off every winter, but people didn’t claim time changed then, “because it wasn’t publicised that it was off”.

Whelan concedes that the switch-off chatter could have been a placebo, making him feel that time had slowed. He is open to psychological explanations; he tells me getting into a routine that lacks novelty can make his time feel like it’s slipping by (scientists have observed this – routine days can blend into one, which can make time feel shorter when we look back retrospectively).

Nonetheless, a part of Whelan still wonders if something else is going on – is the government messing with time? Have we jumped to a parallel universe? “More than one thing can be true at the same time,” he says.

Time has captivated everyone from philosophers to physicists to psychologists for centuries. After all, there’s simply no avoiding it. As Schopenhauer observed: “Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath.” But the wedding guest Whelan overheard might have put the complexities of the phenomenon best: “There’s something up with time.”

Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer and the author of Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller (Hachette)

[Further reading: How did British singers get so posh?]