Is time speeding up?

Wednesday, July 9, 2025, will be one of the shortest days ever recorded—at least in the precise, scientific sense. That’s not because we’re losing hours on the clock or that the universe is conspiring to rob us of our summer. Rather, the Earth itself will be spinning just a little faster than usual, trimming about 1.5 milliseconds off the standard 86,400 seconds that define a day. The cause? According to Popular Mechanics, it’s tied to the moon’s distance from the equator and subtle shifts in Earth’s internal and external dynamics.

“Nobody expected this,” said Leonid Zotov, an Earth rotation expert at Moscow State University, who noted that ocean and atmospheric models don’t fully explain the acceleration. “Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth.”

The magazine recently reported in “Earth’s rotation is speeding up this summer”—but Just for 3 Days. These fluctuations are not unheard of, though they have become more pronounced since 2020. In fact, scientists expect July 9, July 22, and August 5 to be among the shortest days in modern times—shorter even than anything seen prior to this decade. Still, we’re talking about changes measured in milliseconds, not minutes.

This naturally raises the question: does Earth’s quicker spin help explain why so many of us feel as though the days are flying by faster than ever? Is there a link between this cosmic quirk and our all-too-common complaint that time slips away before we can catch our breath? The answer is a resounding no. The millisecond blip in our planet’s rotation has nothing to do with our subjective sense of time’s passage.

Instead, there are far more plausible—and humbling—explanations offered by psychology and neuroscience. One is proportional time theory: as we age, each year represents a smaller fraction of our life. For a ten-year-old, a year is a tenth of their existence; for a fifty-year-old, it’s just two percent. Our brains process this relative difference, making time seem to accelerate as we grow older.

Another factor is novelty, or rather, the lack of it. Childhood is full of firsts—first day of school, first love, first job. These new experiences create dense, detailed memories that stretch our perception of time in hindsight. But as we settle into routines, the days and years blur, and time feels compressed.

A third explanation lies in attention. When we are fully engaged or experiencing something new, our brains record more information per second, giving the impression of time slowing down. In contrast, when distracted or on autopilot, we miss those fine details, and the hours seem to vanish.

Likewise, the sense that today’s 40- or 50-year-olds look younger than their grandparents did at the same age has nothing to do with planetary rotation. This is the result of concrete, well-understood factors: better nutrition, improved medical and dental care, less smoking, and greater awareness of sun protection, along with more casual, youthful fashion choices.

As for the Earth’s spin, scientists continue to monitor these tiny variations, and for now they tell us far more about geology than about human psychology. One thing is certain, though: we’ll soon stop adjusting our clocks to keep up. Starting in 2035, the leap second—a micro-addition designed to align atomic time with astronomical reality—will be discontinued, leaving the planet to spin as it will, and us to complain about time in our own ways.