What is everyone talking about this week: Are we all just running out of time?

Can you believe it is already mid August? For many of us at Country Life, the thought is unfathomable. Our inbox is already full of emails warning about Christmas. Blink twice and it will be September.

The name given to the feeling that each year whizzes by faster than the last is Janet’s Law. A tribute to 19th-century philosopher Paul Janet, it explains the phenomenon via mathematics. One year feels like a long time when you’re 10. By the time you’re 40, it is a drop in the ocean. Many drops blur into one. It makes sense, to a point. I wish to offer a different explanation: that a year goes by faster when you’re busy.

Modern life — of which Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times offers, to date, the most searing critique — ensures that we are busy with every waking minute. Chaplin himself could not have anticipated the horrors of the 21st century: the endless news cycle; a different app for everything; the British Airways indemnity form; too many options on Deliveroo.

I often return to a line spoken by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, a show every writer at the Edinburgh Fringe is still trying to ape: ‘I just want someone to tell me what to do.’ Amid the tribulations of our humanoid age, it is a statement I end up making daily. Paying an invoice? Returning a hire car? Claiming money back on a delayed flight? It takes three webpages, four departments and about 10 years off one’s life. Someone, please, please tell me how to get this off my plate.

Our lack of time boils down to a lack of autonomy. Surrendering all human processes to a device is no good. The programs get things wrong. They are lazier than us. I now have to get through three different automated voices merely to contact my GP receptionist.

Writing in FT Weekend earlier this year, Janan Ganesh lamented a world in which he believes there is too much spare time. Childlessness and the absence of grunt work — his projections for the West — will eventually render us idle. To me, this isn’t the case. If technology has sped up some processes, it has more often lengthened them. I have no reason to believe AI will be different. It took the chatbot Claude nearly three minutes to answer my question about Janet’s Law, by which point I’d read more than half of Psychology Today’s article on the subject.

Time is a funny thing. It speeds up and slows down. It is relative and potentially infinite. It is something we all wish we had more of. The longevity movement, although problematic in many ways, recognises that we could all benefit from a few more years on Earth. Some of these, one hopes, will go more slowly than this one.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.