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Quick question that’s been bugging me lately:
Where, in the absolute, ever-loving fuck, did this decade go?
Does anyone else feel like massive chunks of their lives have disappeared? Like maybe you’re a 42-year-old who feels like they’ve been alive for like, 8 years in total?
Yes, right? I’m not crazy, am I? We all have a tendency to look back at our lives and go, “Whoa, when the fuck did all of that happen?” don’t we?
I’m 31. Ten years ago–a fucking decade ago–I had just finished up my last semester of college. That feels like it was like, three years ago, max.
If I take that same unit of time–that, again, feels like nothing–and I push it back another 10 years, I’m 11. Shit, when I was 11, I was still years–YEARS–from my first pube.
Push that back ten more, and I’m fucking 1? ONE? There’s a good argument to be had you’re not technically a living human yet when you’re 1.
Fuck me. I’ve only got like 50 years to live if I’m lucky–which sounds like a long time, but keep in mind, I’m on a mental timeline here of ten years=three years. So in terms of perception, I’ve got like fifteen years to live here.
Fuck!
My brain and the passage of time are in cahoots to screw me out of perfectly good years here, and I’m not having it. How do we get time to cut this shit out? Who do I have to kill to make this life thing slow down a little bit?
Let’s look into what we can do about this.
How To Try to Slow Time Down
Time is mostly just a meth-fueled Hell’s Angel taking you along for a never-ending joy ride through life, and he’s moving so fast that if you try to jump off his ride, you’ll die, and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it.
But I think there are some things you can do to help slow how you’re interpreting the ride…slightly…maybe…a little.
One thing I’ve found is that our brains tend to measure time by how many new memories we register. This is why when you commute the same route to the same job over and over, or you eat the same Kind bar every morning, or you order Starbucks from the same screenwriting major for six years, in the long term, your brain kind of combines those all into one memory. So when this happens, your brain remembers thousands and thousands of hours of your life as, like, a few minutes.
The result of this is after five decades of living a repeating simulation, you’re like, “So I’m like 14, right?”
Conversely, this is why three days on a vacation can feel like a month–you do the same amount of new things in those days that you do in a typical month. Your brain is constantly adjusting to new sights, and registering all of the weird shit you saw in France, and cataloguing memories, and you just made a ton in a short period of time, so it feels like more time has passed.
So the idea here is that the less your brain can summarize your life, the fuller your life will feel.
So as shown with the vacation example, the real key here is in having as many memories as possible, which means two things: 1) Doing things that stand out in your mind, and 2) Cataloguing the absolute shit out of your life.
Instagram and Cataloguing Life
Instagram almost gives us the right idea in this respect. It moves us into the “do new things and catalogue them” direction, but before we lean into this too much, it’s important to remember three areas of living a conscious, full life that Instagram totally fucks up.
1) We don’t enjoy these things as much as we could because of Instagram .
2) Cataloguing on Instagram generally sucks.
Here is an example of a catalogued memory on social media:
“Here I am showing my teeth in front of a famous monument. That reminds me of me standing there and showing my teeth in front of a famous monument #OOTD.” Cool fucking story.
I mean truly, what the fuck kind of memory is any staged picture? Imagine that being your mental scrapbook.
“Oh yeah, that was when I carefully chose an outfit, and then ask-told some local who didn’t speak English to take rapid fire pics of me walking down the Spanish Steps while tucking my hair behind my ear and looking down at the ground. What an amazing memory.”
Terrible. You’ve held onto nothing important here. Your life will continue to blow by you and feel stupid because the thing you’ve catalogued is boring.
Cataloguing your life is great, but you won’t remember things by posing next to them, or by staging moments that will show up in the algorithm. You’ll remember things by writing them out thoroughly after you experience them.
So here’s my thought on what to do instead: journal. Write down the feelings you had when you experienced life, and the weird details, and who was there. Journal your life in a way that’s so specific and personal, that it would be weird to share on Instagram, and then hold onto it for yourself, and reflect on it later in life.
3) Unfortunately if we have Instagram, we also tend to browse it.
For every new experience Instagram nudges us towards, it saps away hours of time that could be used towards, oh, literally any-fucking-thing else.
Your phone absolutely destroys time. It renders time nonexistent. It is to your time what human behavior is to icebergs. Your phone is the main reason that in 5 years, you’ll still be like, “Yeah, it’s like 2017 right now, right?”
So the real key to combat all of this besides drop-kicking your phone off of a cliff is to live as consciously as possible.
The more you live on autopilot, the more your memory is just sitting there for five years while your plane flies itself. The more you’re brought into the moment and made to actually physically and mentally experience things, the more you can reflect on your life, and you can realize just how much you’ve lived it.
But, with all of this said…
We Kind of Inevitably Suck at This, and Time Will Fly By Regardless of What We Do, So Like, Get Used to That
So it turns out, I’m not completely talking out of my ass. There’s actually a scientific basis for this phenomenon.
Professor Adrian Bejan found in his research that as we age, we interpret fewer new things (regardless of what’s actually happening in our lives), and as a result, time feels like it flies by more and more as we get older. This inability to slow time down is why old people in your neighborhood yell “slow down” at cars doing 15, and why 44-year-old men buy Mustangs and cheat on their wives. Bet you didn’t think those things had the same cause, did you? Learn something new every day.
So we should probably start by accepting this reality. Sure, journal, try to create memories, take in the moment, all of that shit. But know that regardless of what you do, time is going to rocket past you in your life, and despite your best efforts, you will 1000% blink and find yourself in you 70s, wondering when your gross body got THAT wrinkly.
Given that inevitability, the only real solution is to try to live a whole hell of a lot right now.
Live Life to the Fullest (But not like THAT)
When you think of the term “live life to the fullest,” you probably rightfully groan. Usually when people say this, they mean it in the dumbest way possible.
But have no fear (of being that douche). Living your life to the fullest doesn’t have to mean eating spiders, cliff diving, and trying to jump your Bird scooter over a dumpster. It doesn’t mean just finding whatever makes you feel good and doing that over and over. That’s just being a heroin and jerkoff addict.
Living your life to the fullest means that you decide what would be your best course of action, you fully commit to your decision, and put all of your energy in that direction. You remain fully there for every moment, and you squeeze every bit of juice out of it that you can until that moment is a raisin.
So that means going balls to the wall at work you care about. It means actually taking the risky action that could change your life. It means trying your best at parenting, or at a chess match with your grandpa, or thinking of how to delicately word a rejection text. It means fully letting loose on vacation, fully savoring that bottle of wine, and watching the living crap out of that rerun of Law & Order.
It means deciding what in your life matters, and then treating it like it matters.
If you do this…time still won’t slow down that much. There’s not a ton you can do about that. Time will forever be that meth-addled Hell’s Angel dragging you on a joy ride, and you’ll always be like, “Hey what was that?” and time will be like, “Mt. Rushmore. You should’ve been paying closer attention. We’re in Minnesota now.” The ride will always be chaos.
But if you live intentionally, consciously, and you make real memories, at least the chaos will seem a little bit less stupid.
