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When I first started Modern Wisdom I was obsessed with why life felt like it was going so quickly and how to slow it down. Time to revisit the topic.

Why do some days feel like years and some years feel like days?

As we get older, life feels like it's moving faster and faster.

We look back on a year and can't really remember where it went.

Months start to pass like minutes, and we begin to feel so helpless against the passage of time that it almost seems as if we're an observer of our lives, not a participant any more.

The answer to slowing down time is simpler than you might think.

The first thing to know is that no matter how boring the Zoom call, exciting the holiday or old you are, time always passes at exactly the same rate for you.

You have the same number of hours in the day as you ever have, and they’re always moving at the same pace.

Even if you were circling a black hole or moving near the speed of light, YOUR experience of time would remain the same.

One second is one second, always.

So if this is the case, why do we feel like time changes speed?

Well, there is a difference between Present Time and Remembered Time.

You experience time differently in the moment versus when you recall it.

Your Present Time will always remain at the same speed but your Remembered Time can vary widely.

So when we say that time is speeding up, we don’t mean it ACTUALLY passed more quickly, but that it seems to have passed more quickly when we recall it.

It’s not “that week went so quickly” but “I don’t recall what I did during that week”.

Memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and re-experiencing our time.

We remember our time with respect to what we were doing, where it was, who we were with and the emotions we had.

So here's the first key insight - the more memories you have from a past experience, the more that experience gets expanded in time.

Think back to a holiday you went on 5 years ago.

Even though it was a long time ago, you’ll probably still be able to recall a lot of details, making it seem like it lasted for longer and time moved more slowly for that week.

So if time is memory and we want more time, then what we really want is more memories.

But this still doesn’t explain why our recollection of time speeds up with age, until you consider why memories are made…

Your brain is lazy.

It wants to do as little work as possible and conserve as much energy as it can.

This is why it likes routines, habits and thought patterns because once it’s done that thing a few times, it needs to think less and less about doing it again.

The thing is - when you’re young, almost EVERYTHING is new information.

This is the first time you’ve been to the park, or school, or swam in the big pool, or kissed a girl, or been on a boat… Your brain is constantly recording.

Think about how much you can remember from the first day you moved to where you live now compared with any day from last month.

Or think about what happened on your first ever driving lesson, I’m guessing you can recall quite a lot from that, perhaps even the route you took and the car you drove.

Yet if you try to remember experiences in your car from last Monday, you may not even be able to remember where you drove it at all.

This is the most important lesson to know about slowing down time.

Your subjective experience of time is based on your memories, and the best way to ensure that your brain remembers what you’re doing is with two things - novelty & intensity.

When something new or intense happens, your brain doesn’t know what it needs to remember, so it just holds onto all of it.

It’s never encountered this before, so it doesn’t know if it will need this information in future.

Therefore, it starts recording what’s happening.

This is why holidays are such a good example to show how time and memories are linked because there’s lots of new things AND lots of intensity happening.

I took a trip to Africa in 2018 and can still remember the shape of the worn leather shoes that the hotel porter had on, and the ornithology book he was carrying, and the sound of his feel on the steps down to our hotel room.

This is the Holiday Paradox - time flies while you’re having fun, but feels long in retrospect.

As we age, our adult life gets into routines, where we do the same actions day after day after day, we drive the same route to work, speak to the same people and even think the same thoughts.

We allow ourselves to become dominated by monotonous routines, paths of least resistance and habituated thought patterns.

TLDR: routines compress time.

Habitual behaviours are processed with less cortical effort, meaning less attention and fewer stored episodic memories.

Childhood is rich with “firsts,” which become rarer with age, Novelty Saturation Theory is the idea that as we age, we experience fewer new things, so our brain stops encoding as many detailed memories, which makes time feel like it’s passing faster.

And this is the uncomfortable truth.

As we get older, days move quickly because we can’t remember them, and we don’t remember our days because we haven’t done anything memorable with them.

Our days are forgettable, therefore we forget them.

This is why I hate it when people say “that’s just the way I am and always will be” - that’s someone who has internalised the monotony of their thought patterns so deeply that they literally identify with them.

Monotony is the enemy of a well-remembered life.

So, in order to slow time down, you MUST give your brain a reason to pay attention.

Leading a full life means having lots of varied experiences, that will later be memorable.

This means you need to start saying yes to more new things and no to more of the same things.

Even if you've never wanted to try salsa dancing or yoga or an open mic comedy night, saying yes will guarantee that you create some novel, and potentially intense memories.

Sure it might be easier to stay on the couch instead of going out, but you know that you won’t recall a single thing if you spend yet another night watching Netflix, whereas you'll have tons of new memories if you go and do something new.

Which in retrospect, makes time pass more slowly.

Doing novel and intense things is entirely within your control.

Allow yourself to be immersed in the things you spend your time doing, regularly plan new experiences, talk to different people, say yes to adventures wherever you can, walk the dog on a new route, visit a different town, eat at a new cafe.

These are all memory investments, that future you will be able to draw dividends from.

Each day you can ask yourself “What did I do today that will stand out in my memory?” - the more you can answer this clearly, the slower your time will move.

Eventually you are going to be looking back on your life, the choice is between viewing a beautiful varied art gallery stretching as far as the eye can see, or a grey monotonous hallway peppered with the ghosts of TikTok dances and Netflix series.

If you make your life memorable, you will remember it.

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MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ramichandran - a wild insight into the history of Hollywood, impact of smartphones on teen mental health and cutting edge technology which is fighting back. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Rick Hanson - one of my faves. Beast of a neuroscientist and mindfulness teacher on how to let go of rumination and overthinking. Don’t miss.

Saturday.
Dr Michael Eisenberg - how to protect and improve your fertility as a man. Sperm count and testosterone level insights. Mandatory listening for all men.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Perfection is impossible.

Roger Federer played 1,526 singles matches across his career.

He won nearly 80%.

But he only won 54% of all the points he played.

Which means that even one of the greatest to ever do it lost nearly every other point.

Treat every iteration like it matters, then let it go.

Whether it’s an unforced error or a perfect winner, it’s still just one point.

One failed relationship, one embarrassing interaction, one late wakeup time.

It’s still just one point.

What matters most is how quickly you reset, and where you finish in the end.

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2.
​Heat waves kill more people in Europe than the number of Americans who are killed by guns.

The UN estimates 100k+ people die due to heat waves every year in Europe.

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3.
​“Men just need to open up more” isn’t working.

“91% of middle aged men who died by suicide sought help by the services that we tell men to always turn to.” — George from The Tinmen

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LIFE HACK

Naval Math.

A friend bought resale Oasis tickets and I commented that they were very expensive.

“If you price in how long the original purchaser waited in the queue and use Naval Math, it’s actually a bargain.

Gonna use “Naval Math" anytime the missus tries to get me do something low leverage that I can outsource.”
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Big love,
Chris x

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It's been a rough few weeks. Please send good vibes.