By the time you finished high school, you had already used up about 93% of the in-person time you will ever spend with your parents. The math is simple and it hurts. For 18 years you see them nearly every day. Then you move out, and it drops to a visit every month or two. If your parents live into their 80s, everything after graduation adds up to a few hundred days total. Childhood alone was over 6,000. His mom's line explains the other half. 84 years felt short to her for the same reason 54 feels short to him. Your brain doesn't measure time with a clock. It measures it in memories, and it mostly records what's new. At 8, everything is new, so one summer feels endless. At 54, the days repeat, whole years get compressed into a few snapshots, and a decade passes in what feels like eighteen months. There's a proportional effect stacked on top. A year at age 5 is 20% of your entire life. A year at 54 is under 2%. The denominator grows every birthday, so the ride keeps accelerating no matter what you do. The clock is fixed. Memory density is the only lever you actually hold, and most of it comes down to who gets your ordinary days.