If you spend any time on TikTok right now, you have probably seen the videos. People saying time feels wrong. December vanished. Christmas showed up without warning. Some swear we jumped timelines or that reality shifted when nobody was looking.
This week was Christmas, and a lot of people are saying it barely registered.
The more interesting explanation is also the less dramatic one. This does not look like a cosmic glitch. It looks like an attention problem.
Short form video is extremely good at erasing time. TikTok is designed to remove every natural stopping point that once told your brain a moment had passed. There is no beginning, no middle, no end. Just a stream of novelty that never asks you to pause. When your brain cannot find edges, it cannot store memories properly.
That matters because time does not feel fast in the moment. It feels fast afterward. We judge how quickly time passed by how many memories we can grab onto. Three hours scrolling feels like nothing in hindsight because your brain saved almost none of it. It all collapses into a blur.
Now zoom that out to weeks.
If a large chunk of December is spent scrolling, streaming random content, and bouncing between apps, the month does not build texture. It does not feel like a season. It feels like a single stretched out afternoon. Then suddenly it is Christmas Eve and people are asking what happened.
TikTok did not invent this feeling, but it industrialized it and gave it a storyline.
Time speeding up as you get older is normal. Adults have felt this for generations. What is new is millions of people being fed the same explanation at the same time. When someone says they feel disconnected, the algorithm does not push calm reflection. It pushes videos that say reality is broken. Those videos perform well because they feel validating and dramatic. They turn a personal sensation into something external and uncontrollable.
Instead of asking what changed in daily life, people ask what changed in the universe.
There is another piece here that rarely gets mentioned. We lost shared time.
There used to be cultural synchronization. Holiday specials aired on schedule. Movies premiered on TV at a specific hour. Commercials, countdowns, and programming blocks reinforced the calendar. Even if you were not excited, the world around you told you what time it was.
Streaming erased that. Everyone watches different things, at different times, on different screens. There is no common moment when Christmas officially arrives. If your attention is already fragmented, the holiday never quite lands.
That is why people say Christmas did not feel real. Not because it changed, but because nothing helped anchor it.
Phones also killed boredom, and boredom used to be important. Waiting, anticipating, counting down days, all of that created emotional spacing. When every idle second is filled with content, the brain loses its sense of progression. Days stop stacking. They smear.
Put all of this together and it creates a powerful illusion. Time feels faster. Holidays feel hollow. Months vanish. TikTok then offers an explanation that feels bigger than personal habit and easier to accept than personal responsibility.
The uncomfortable truth is that time still works the same way it always has. What changed is how we experience it.
People who step away from constant scrolling often report the same thing. Days feel longer. Weeks feel fuller. Seasons feel distinct again. Watching a full movie, having uninterrupted conversations, following routines, even doing boring things on purpose creates memory anchors. Those anchors stretch time.
This does not require quitting technology or moving off the grid. It requires friction. It requires moments with a start and an end. It requires letting life have punctuation again.
Time did not speed up. We just stopped noticing it.
Blaming timelines is comforting. Blaming apps is inconvenient. But if Christmas felt like it flew by this year, the explanation is probably already in your pocket.
You’re not wrong. IMHO, social media in general has caused widespread brainrot and phone/app addiction, especially among the under 30 demographic. I see so many people who lack critical reasoning skills and who have no actual understanding of how anything works. From taxes to light switches, they’re just ignorant of how any of it works. They’re also depressingly ignorant of almost any history in the last 100 years, including World Wars. (!!) No clue what who fought who, what sides they were on, or why.