Dear Time Traveler,
Do you remember how long time felt when you were a child? I certainly do. I remember summer break stretching out endlessly; a whole eternity captured in one hot July afternoon. It’s no wonder that we respond with panic as we get older and weeks snap by so fast no matter what we’re doing — vacation, working, or as you are, growing a family.
There are two ways to think about time: the way it feels when you’re living it, which is called “prospective time.” And then how you remember time, known as “retrospective time.” It sounds like you’re struggling with both. You want moments to feel longer as they’re happening, and to look back and feel like time didn’t just slip through your fingers.
What’s interesting about our perception of time is that there’s no specific organ dedicated to sensing time. Our eyes see, and our noses smell, but feeling time is a vaguer sense, cobbled together by the combination of various inputs. It is also more easily manipulated.
I took a close look at the work of David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and has studied what makes time feel slower or faster. On a basic level, you’re right, novelty does make time expand. When researchers show people a series of the same images over and over, a new picture thrown into the mix feels as though that new image is presented for longer — even if it’s not. He’s argued that this is one of the reasons why childhood feels so long. So much of what you experience is new when you’re younger. Then we create habits and routines, and time starts to accelerate. If you have the same commute each day, it’s easy for it to feel so familiar that parts of it may not even register in your memory on any given day.
Extreme emotions can elongate time too. In one of Eagleman’s more daring experiments, he asked people to free fall from 15 stories above the ground (they fell into a net). When the people were asked later to try to recreate how long the fall was by estimating it on a stopwatch, they overestimated the duration by about a third. He also had them wear a device on their wrists that rapidly flashed images and numbers while they fell. If their other senses had also slowed during their fall, like Neo in The Matrix, they should have been able to see some of the images flashing before them. They didn’t. The sensation that time slowed down didn’t mean much practically, it was simply a feeling.
When time appears to slow, it is perhaps more helpfully explained by how our memory works. Doing something scary or dangerous activates the amygdala, which tells the rest of the brain to pay attention to what’s going on, to remember more of the details later, which makes time seem to stretch out. Swiss geologist Albert Heim once interviewed people who fell while mountain-climbing. He found that while people were plummeting to what they thought was a certain death, time also expanded. When a race-car driver was launched 30 feet into the air after a crash, he told researchers at the University of Iowa that “It seemed like the whole thing took forever. Everything was in slow motion.”
Some access this feature of our minds when they take up bungee jumping or skydiving. Or, like you, tamer new experiences that the brain takes its time registering more details of. Other people have turned to drugs like hashish or LSD, which can make minutes or hours feel like whole days.
But the real issue comes down to a question of how you want to be spending that very time you feel passing you by. Is it obsessing over optimizing for activities that promise maximum time stretchage? I think that might degrade your experience of the life you have in front of you.
As you note yourself, adding novelty for the sake of novelty doesn’t seem to be helping your life feel more time-rich. In fact, it sounds like you’re ending up with “time urgency,” or trying to achieve as much as possible in as short of a period of time as possible. Being anxious, burnt out, and multi-tasking can, in some cases, make time feel more sped up. This is because you don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention and build detailed memories around what you’re doing.
Plus, constructing days where time always feels slow means never getting caught up with friends or children, or being engrossed in a well-loved hobby, where you look up at the clock and discover hours have passed in what felt like no time at all. There’s something bittersweet about that, but something to relish too. In fact, there is useful wisdom in acknowledging the difficult fact that as we get older, our time is running out.
Many ancient philosophies advise to remind yourself of death in order to focus on the importance of life. In Stoicism, this is called memento mori, or remembering that you will die. I slightly prefer Buddhism’s Five Remembrances, which are mantras about accepting that change is inevitable and it’s our destiny to grow older. There’s nothing like having children to make you confront that reality. “I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape old age,” is the first remembrance. We might add onto it: “And I cannot escape the passage of time.”
If you give up trying to slow down time to a halt, it doesn’t mean you can’t find some more spacious ways to live in the time you do have left. Meditation is often pulled off the shelf as a trick for paying more attention, but rather than sitting with your eyes closed and listening to your breathing, I suspect a more quotidian mindfulness would help you.
Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, wrote about taking back the time spent on everyday life through being mindful when doing the stuff that we tend to rush through.
Nhất Hạnh reminds us that these things are also our life. When we wash dishes, for example, we might find ourselves thinking only about our list of what we’re going to do next. Then, “we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes,” he wrote. Instead, “we are sucked away into the future — and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.” Rather than adding another new class or going on another trip, try making parts of your routine life new again. When doing the dishes, Nhất Hạnh suggested putting the future out of mind, and focusing on the sensations of washing, of each cup and each plate. He also recommended reserving one day per week to do as little as possible, called a lazy day.
These days are actually hard work because it can be difficult to do nothing, but within them something else opens up and expands time: boredom. (Remember those endless summer days as a kid? For me, at least, boredom certainly was a common tune in making that time — for better or worse — feel so long.)
Several years ago I heard about a productivity expert named Chris Bailey who created a “month of boredom,” where he spent an hour each day doing the most boring thing he could think of: staring at the ceiling or watching his turtle swim back and forth in her tank. He found that creating gaps in the day with dull activities sometimes led to creative mind-wandering and the feeling that time was indeed ticking by more slowly than if his day was filled to the brim.
I’m not always capable of carving out time to actually watch grass grow as Bailey did or of achieving the serene state while doing the dishes that Nhất Hạnh described. But I do try to force myself to be bored in micro-moments throughout my day and pay closer attention when I’m doing routine things, like walking to the train, or doing chores. This practice makes me more aware of how I’m spending my time, and occasionally even makes that time feel a little more expansive.
