41–50 of 272 posts
I think mediation and gratefulness is a good way around this too. If your take explicit time to recognize and examine the world around you, even in your backyard, time seems to stretch and you notice and retain more. I’m lucky enough to have lots of different colored birds show up in my backyard, so sometimes I sit out there and wait for them. It’s not exciting, but every time I see one it’s a new memory and those ne…
I've always rationalised it as: When you're one years old, 1 year is your whole life. When you're 100 years old, 1 year is 1/100th of your life.
Notice how when you have to wait for an hour, you’re bored, time seems to pass slowly, yet for those last ten minutes time passes more quickly because there’s only 1/6 hours le— yeah exactly, no, that doesn’t happen. The whole hour passes slowly because that whole fraction theory is bunk.
I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc…
These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked and played with , in the evening "...
What are you journaling on a daily basis?
1. Time is, literally, relative. We have nothing to compare things to when we are young, so everything takes for-ev-eeeeer. 2. The brain optimizes for storage. Our day to day is very consistent; we have routines. Those routines blur because why remember details if the details are very similar. Combine the two and as you age, things just feel like they fly by.
This is one of those things that seems true, but is it? They’ve presented no evidence whatsoever. Even the question itself carries with it an assumption. Does time seem to pass faster as we age? I bet you could find some people for whom it does not.
I'm also obsessed with this and have mostly countered it so far by moving house every few years, living and studying in several countries and trying new things. The negative being that I don't have any stability.
Do you have any sort of home base you can always go back to?
I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc…
Pain extends time. Pleasure decreases it. Do things that are painful. Find pleasure in the painful like discipline and stuff that is uncomfortable.
I've been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife's rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc…
I am trying journaling as well but most days I don't know what to write...most days I'm not really doing special things, I have no special feelings. These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked and played with , in the evening "... What are you journaling on a daily basis?
- “I could have handled X better by doing Y.”
- “Seeing A made me curious about B; maybe look into that.”
- “I really tried at K, but oof didn’t work out; let’s try L tomorrow!”
- “I did really good at P, Q, and R today — I’ll get a treat tomorrow and start on S.”
Mostly just internal monologue kinds of things, but there’s three benefits I’ve noticed:
- I don’t think about frustrations as much if I write them down.
- I am better at self-compassion when I externalize the monologue.
- I slowly adjust my monologue to reflect how I word it in writing, eg how I choose to frame things or what kinds of things I notice.
I think this blog post of mine from 2007 gives a better (or at least more succinct) answer to this question: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life
Any explanation that doesn’t say anything about the mind is just baloney. Time here is an experiential phenomenon. It’s not fractions. Insert your pet theory in a context where adults have the same mindset as children and retain memories perfectly and have no reason to discard/compress memories them—you see that it’s totally irrelevant whether your life is 2/3 or 1/8 over. It has everything to do with how the mind works, not how numbers work.
Bonus points for the “unscientific representation of your potential cumulative effect”… which is very self-aware-useless.