The year that disappeared
My wife said something at breakfast last week that I haven’t been able to shake. We were talking about our daughter, and she said, “I feel like the last year didn’t really happen.”
She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being precise. Our daughter has grown a head taller. Our business has gone through two full quarters of change. I’ve run about three hundred kilometres along the Saigon River. Objectively, a lot has happened.
But when she tried to mentally scroll back through the last twelve months, there was nothing there to catch her memory on. No ridges. No edges. A smooth grey blur of reasonably similar days, broken up by a few specific things. The trip to Hue in March. Her mother’s birthday in August. The new coffee machine in November. And that was essentially it.
I recognised the feeling because I’ve had it myself this year, sitting on the balcony at night and realising I can’t actually remember what April was like.
The easy, slightly panicked interpretation of this feeling is that something is wrong with your memory. That your mind is slipping. That this is how the slow erosion of middle age announces itself.
It isn’t. What’s actually happening has a name, and the neuroscience behind it is surprisingly clear.
What the research calls temporal landmarks
A 2019 paper in Current Opinion in Psychology by Hengchen Dai and Claire Li, two behavioural scientists at UCLA, reviews a now-substantial body of research on what psychologists and neuroscientists call temporal landmarks. A temporal landmark is an event that stands in marked contrast to the ongoing stream of ordinary days. Dai and Li’s review summarises it crisply. Temporal landmarks organise people’s time perceptions, memories, and activities by creating what they call mental accounting periods.
In plain language. A temporal landmark is a memory your brain can use to divide time into segments.
The start of a new school year is a temporal landmark. The day you moved cities. Your wedding. The birth of a child. Your fortieth birthday. A funeral. A big trip. These are the events around which everything else gets organised. When you remember the smaller events of your life, your brain files them in relation to these landmarks. “That happened the year we moved to Saigon.” “That was before Ella was born.”
When you have enough landmarks, time feels chunky. Textured. Navigable.
When you stop creating them, time smooths out and accelerates, and the feeling people describe is that years start disappearing.
The neuroscience of the smoothing
A separate thread of research helps explain why this happens at the level of the brain. A 2023 review in the journal Neuron, titled “Time for Memories,” describes something the researchers call event segmentation. The brain doesn’t remember continuous streams of time. It remembers discrete events, bounded by what the researchers call event boundaries. The more event boundaries your brain registers, the longer a given stretch of time feels in retrospect.
Here’s the counter-intuitive finding from that same review. Experiences containing a lot of change lead to the perception of time passing quickly in the moment, but they make the actual duration of those events in memory longer. A two-week trip to a new country feels like it’s flying by while you’re on it, but when you remember it later, it feels enormous. A smooth month of routine feels slow while you’re in it, but vanishes completely from memory afterwards.
This is the exact mechanism most adults are stuck in. Routine feels slow at the time. Then it disappears. You look up, and a year is gone.
Why adults stop making landmarks
Childhood is dense with temporal landmarks because everything is new. A child’s first time at the beach is a landmark. Their first time at the dentist is a landmark. Starting school, losing a tooth, a birthday party, a family trip. The brain flags these events with the same quiet instruction. Keep this one.
A 2024 immersive virtual reality study found that older participants underestimated simple time intervals by roughly fifteen percent, and that novelty was what sharpened the internal clock. The researchers called it “copy-and-paste days.” Adults often glide through weeks that differ only by the date on the calendar. With fewer event boundaries recorded, the book of any given month reads as a short story.
The cruel thing about adult life is that almost everything conspires against creating landmarks. Your environment stops changing, because you’ve found your city and your home. Your relationships stabilise, which is mostly a gift. Your job, if you’re lucky, settles into competence. Your diet and exercise routines calcify. You develop preferences, which is just another word for not trying new things. You get efficient.
Efficiency is the opposite of memorable.
Why this isn’t a failure of memory
The feeling of time slipping away faster every year is not early-onset anything. It is not a character flaw, a symptom of burnout, or evidence that you are somehow not living fully enough. It is the predictable, well-documented consequence of a brain that has nothing novel to file.
The Mental Floss summary of the research, drawing on work from the University of Michigan psychology department, puts it in a single useful sentence. When the brain has less to record, time seems to speed by. The brain isn’t breaking. It’s doing what it was designed to do, which is to compress the predictable and preserve the novel.
Your job, if you want the years back, is to give it more to record.
The Buddhist angle
In Pali Buddhism there is a concept called sati, usually translated as mindfulness but more precisely meaning something like “present attention” or “full remembering.” The Buddha taught that most human suffering is related to living in a kind of waking sleep, in which we process the world through habits and assumptions rather than through direct, first-hand noticing.
What the temporal landmarks research describes is, in Buddhist terms, a description of what happens when sati falls away. The days start to blur not because the days are empty, but because we are no longer fully present inside them. The brain stops recording, because attention has stopped arriving.
I wrote about this in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. My own practice of sati, on the cushion each morning, is in part an experiment in whether paying closer attention actually makes days feel longer. It does. A week of meditation retreats feels, in retrospect, much longer than a week of normal life. Not because more happened, but because I was more present for what did.
What to actually do about this
I’m going to resist the urge to give you twelve tips for living a more textured life. The research suggests something simpler.
Create a small number of deliberate temporal landmarks each year. Not one huge trip. Three or four moderately memorable events that you and your brain will never confuse with ordinary days. A weekend somewhere you’ve never been. A deliberate break from your routine. A conversation you wouldn’t normally have. A physical challenge you wouldn’t normally set yourself.
The landmarks don’t need to be expensive or dramatic. They need to be meaningfully different from the week around them. They need to contain at least one moment that interrupts the copy-and-paste.
Plan a few of them in advance, because another finding in the Dai and Li review is that anticipation of a temporal landmark is itself a form of landmark. Your brain starts organising time around the thing that’s coming.
Then, inside your ordinary weeks, pay slightly more attention than you usually would. Notice three things on your walk home. Remember the name of the new staff member at the cafe. Say something honest in the conversation where you usually say something polite. Each of these is a small act of presence. Each of them is your brain quietly flagging, keep this one.
My daughter, who is five, does this effortlessly. She came home last Tuesday and told me about the specific colour of the afternoon sky, and the fact that the cat next door had moved to a different windowsill, and that her teacher had a new pencil. She has no trouble remembering last Tuesday. It had thirty landmarks in it, because she was paying thirty-five-year-old attention to it.
The years don’t slip away because we’re losing our minds. They slip away because we’re losing our attention, and attention, blessedly, is one of the few things in life that is still completely under our control.
Give this year something to record. It will give you back the time.
