I’m borrowing that quip about life’s finish line (that finish line, of course, being death) from her because it’s one of my favorite clichés, and it absolutely rings true. I spent two years after high school getting my Associate degree from a community college while the rest of my friends went onto four-year universities. I finished college a year and a half later than everyone else my age. I was a little self-conscious that I was years older than other interns during and after college.

Things seem to have worked out O.K. since then. And now that I have a little more life experience behind me I look back and think: Who cares?

As we age, we tend to perceive time as exponentially accelerating; the more time that passes, the more we perceive it as running out. This seems natural, and our friends at Scientific American have noted a handful of theories about why. But my favorite is this: As we age, we simply pay less attention to time. When we’re younger and our birthday is approaching, it occupies a disproportionate amount of our attention because we just don’t have that much else going on. But one’s 35th birthday is just another workday to stress over in between worry over paying rent and worry about our phone’s data usage this month.

But let’s come back to life’s finish line. It may seem like the last decade whizzed by, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the present or the future.

Even better, the science is with us: According to the Centers for Disease Control, learning new skills and staying socially engaged in activities as we age can lead to better physical and mental health, and “learning a new activity for older people can provide some ‘insurance’ against memory loss.”