Human life isn’t short; people just make it seem that way. Realistically, it takes a person until the age of 25 for them to figure out what they want to do with their life, and they have until they are about 80 years old to get it done. This is a tremendous amount of time, yet for most people, it’s a blur, just one big nothing.

I'm at the age where I've begun to take notice of the passage of time. Suddenly, the years seem to pass so quickly, yet I also remember how slowly time seemed to pass for me in childhood and how eager I was to grow up. I thought, “Surely, the laws of the universe haven’t changed, it must be something in me that is different.”

As it turns out, we all experience the passage of time equally (everyone has the same 24 hours in a day), but everyone's perception of time is different. The general rule of thumb to remember is, “One’s level of cognitive processing is inversely correlated with the subjective passage of time.”

Activities that don’t demand much of our cognitive resources, like scrolling social media or sleeping, can make hours appear to pass in an instant. This means that the fewer cognitive resources are applied to processing less information, the faster time seems to pass.

Conversely, the more cognitive resources are applied to processing more information, the slower time seems to pass. An extreme example of this is when the fight or flight response is triggered, such as during a near-death experience. Many people report seeing in slow motion as the stress hormones in their blood force them to take in as much information as possible to help them survive.

Whenever we have a new experience, we are forced to pay attention and direct our cognitive resources to what is happening in front of us. Children, for example, know nothing of the world, and so they cannot help but study and explore every detail of their surroundings; everything is a new experience for them. That is why childhood seems to last forever.

However, as we get more familiar with our world, we need less raw sensory data from which to extrapolate our conceptual frameworks. We stop paying such close attention to our environment and increasingly begin to form more and more preconceptions about the world. This happens because it would be really hard to get anything done if we approached every situation like an infant, so we form preconceptions to save time and energy. This isn’t a conscious choice; the mind just takes shortcuts so it can free up cognitive resources for other tasks.

The only problem with this is that it causes people to live on autopilot. If you look around in public, you will see that most people aren’t really "there." They are just paying enough attention for their minds to fill in the blanks left by the absence of sensory data with what they expect to experience.

It takes very little cognitive resources to live on autopilot, which skews one’s perception of time, making it seem as if the years are passing in an instant. And so, people spend decades in this state, stuck in the same routine, living the same day over and over again, until they wake up one morning and realize that life has passed them by.

So, how do you combat the subjective acceleration of the passage of time? The easiest way is by enriching your experience of reality. Stop doing the same things the same way and safely introduce danger and challenge into your life so you are constantly growing as a being. This forces you to pay attention to what is happening in front of you, instead of continuing to run on autopilot as usual.

You can also practice mindfulness. Instead of mindlessly doing everything automatically, pay attention to your actions. Question yourself about why you do the things you do. Is there a better way to do them?

Lastly, if it’s at all possible, you can try doing less. The biggest enemy of mindfulness is busyness. Time moves faster the busier you are. Because you have to do 1000 things every day, you don’t really experience doing any of them. Choose busyness as a lifestyle, and your life will pass you by.

Without the sword of death looming over people's heads, constantly reminding them of their mortality, most people are perfectly content with just existing and not doing much. They will do anything for one more day of life, yet they are not even present in their lives most of the time. Don’t wait for a great loss or a terminal diagnosis to start living.

Extra information:

When people leave their minds on autopilot, they stop engaging with reality and fill in the gaps with their own extrapolated models of reality. This is how people get stuck in paradigms. They cannot see the world as it is; they can only see the world as they are, i.e., through their own screen of beliefs. So if a person is cruel and hateful because the world is unfair to them, then they can only see cruelty and hatred in the world and nothing else.

It is not possible to experience anything outside of your own consciousness. One of the consequences of this is that the quality of yourself comes to imbue everything that you perceive with itself, so that reality becomes a reflection of your being. Therefore, to escape from the cruel and hateful world, the person must resolve the cruelty and hatred within themselves. This is the meaning of the saying “change the world by changing yourself.”
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References:

Orion Taraban — Why time seems to move faster as you age: the relationship between perception and cognition