I read something baffling online a few weeks ago: we are closer to 2040 than we are to 2010. 

That honestly doesn’t even sound real.

I still remember 2016 being the present. I remember elementary school classrooms, silly bands, Disney Channel shows, and thinking high schoolers were so old. Now, it’s 2026 and I’m finishing my junior year, and suddenly I am the one looking at colleges and planning senior spring break. 

What scares me the most is how fast it all happened.

I swear I just started high school. I can clearly picture walking through the hallways while being lost freshman year. Back then, senior year sounded so far away. Now it’s only a few months away.

Everyone always says time moves faster as you get older, but I never understood what they meant until now. Lately, weeks have been feeling more like seconds. Monday turns into Friday almost instantly. Entire months pass before I can process them. One second it’s finally summer and the next it’s Christmas again. 

If you feel like I do, you’re not crazy—our mental time is simply not the same as physical time. Research shows that our perception of how quickly time passes does actually speed up as we get older. Psychologists say that as we get older, the rate at which we process visual information slows down as our brains become more complex, causing electrical signals to have to travel longer distances.

I think part of growing up is realizing that life will never feel as slow as it once did. There are constantly things to count down to: finals, football games, prom, graduation. We spend so much time waiting for the next thing that we don’t realize the current moment is already disappearing. 

That’s the strange thing about high school. While you’re living it, it feels like the days left are endless. You complain about assignments, get up way too early, and count down the days until finals are over. But then junior year is over and you realize that these routines that felt permanent were just temporary all along. 

There’s something unsettling about the feeling of time speeding up. As kids, we measured everything by big events, like birthdays and holidays. Everything always felt so distant. High school felt distant. Getting your license felt distant. Becoming an adult felt distant. But now it doesn’t. Those moments that seemed like an eternity away we’re now living in.

I’ll graduate high school in twelve months, and in four months I’ll become an adult. It feels impossible that my childhood is coming to an end. 

Almost everyone I know is saying the same thing. We all joke that freshman year feels like yesterday, but recently it feels like less of a joke. Moments that felt so far away as a kid are now impending upon us. 

I keep having to remind myself to live in the moment: thinking that doing so will make time go slower. But it’s not only about getting carried away in the current: sometimes we have to look back on our pasts, which can actually slow down your perception of time.

So, I’ll leave you with this. 

111 hours ago, LFHS hosted prom. 

2,261 days ago, the world went into quarantine for COVID-19.

141 months ago, the ice bucket challenge started.

And 16 years ago, Instagram was created. 

In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”