More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it was yesterday.
Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.
More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it was yesterday.
Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.