Not seeing this in any of the comments but may have missed it: To me the obvious answer here is increased screen time across the board, precipitated by the pandemic. It's easy to see why this would lead to a perceived faster flow of time; do you form memories of your screen time? Personally I have next to no distinct memories of consuming content on the internet, especially of doom scrolling. Also interestingly, as far as I can tell we never dream about consuming content, or our devices really. If we are going into a trance like state consuming content for a larger proportion of our lives, the time when we actually are cognizant / conscious / forming memories will feel less voluminous overall, thus making perceived time feel faster. The more I think about it, the more this seems like one of the most important issues facing humanity currently... AI doomers should probably be very worried about this in the near term.