How to Slow Down Time Theory
The past 10 days have felt like a month. Each week feels like two.
Why slow down life?
Conventional wisdom says that as you age time flies by. Before you know it, you’re married with kids. Then they’re out of the house.
I found myself in one of these life periods where months flew by. I blinked and I didn’t know where the time went. “Time Flies”… No. Unacceptable.
I want the most life possible. I want my life to feel 10x as long as an average life. I want a life full of juice, vitality each day, and vivid experiences.
A man on the brink of retirement wants to go from 8 hours of free time per day to 16 hours of free time per day. What if I doubled my experience of time so I could live as much life as a retired person in my free 8 hours? What if doubling my experience of time led me to enjoy my working time even more too?
I resolved to read everything I could about slowing down time, and started paying attention like a hawk to what made my days and weeks fly by vs. what encased each moment in honey, froze it, and tied a huge weight around its neck.
What changes did I make to slow down time?
1. My mind only focuses on novel experiences. “Same old...” and “Routine” get chunked together and time flies by.
I decided to intentionally create the chunks for my life versus passively receiving them. I also resolved to add more chunks.
I moved to NY for 10 days, then DC for 2 months. I spend time in SF, but then at my grandmother's as well. I visited friends on weekends and stayed at their places.
When I was in a new place, I focused on the unique aspects of that location. I focused on eating at the best bagel places in NY, went for walks among the tallest buildings, and searched for the most unique architecture I could find. I sought out the variety of museums in DC and spent time with my DC friends. I have a list of SF-only favorite restaurants, SF-only activities, etc.. I have these unique lists for each city I visit, and I expand the list with each visit.
Creating my own chunks of unique experiences compounded the 'memory volume' within life periods. My mind was forced to conclude something along the lines of: "there was so much experience there, that must have been a month". My mind was recording a month worth of experience, and therefore assuming a month passed. Whether it took a few days, a real month, or 6 months to accumulate that much memory was not factored into the equation.
Experienced time and passing time were two independent axes. I pumped my life full of novel experiences and my experienced time dilated.
- "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. So to slow time we need to create details -- moments that stand out from the constellation of the everyday. Details are: taking part in new experiences, meeting new people, trying new activities, learning new things. If you pack your life with these you get a much more detailed view of the time that has passed."
2. My mind pays special attention to change. The more changes I can experience, the longer my perception of time. Switch up routines to lean into day-to-day pleasant change.
My brain likes to conserve energy. If everything's going according to plan my brain will lull and blur things together. My mind takes the easy route of saying "etc. etc.".
I read that disrupting my habits would force my mind to pay attention to the changes, adding to my perception of longer days. I began waking up and going for a walk before breakfast and my mornings felt way longer. Before I could settle into that habit, I shifted to another activity upon waking. The key to long mornings was to have a core routine, but break the routine with other activities as often as I felt necessary. This gave me the benefit of my core routine as well as the pleasure of longer days.
Eating local, seasonal food, made time feel longer as the different fruits coming into season every few weeks attuned my brain to how much time was passing in the world.
Going for a walk for 15 minutes after a meeting made my workday feel much longer. On the walk I would focus on the world's small, ever-changing details - whether those were turning leaves or new luxury landscaping on one of the pacific heights mansions.
I rotated my desk around the room to switch up my routine, and also work from the couch or another chair at different times of the day.
I shaved and grew out my beard. Beginning to look old and grizzled after a week or two made me acutely aware of the time that passed, leading to experienced time feeling 2-3x longer than usual.
3. Carve out moments. The more moments I have in a day, the longer I remember the day to be.
Working was a moment that could last >8 hours. Lifting weights was an hourlong moment each day. A day could be fully filled with just 3-4 moments total, even if those moments were optimal for my goals.
Adding a few more moments could double my 'moments per day' and greatly increase my perception of time. My brain did not discern the difference between short and long moments. The number of significant moments per day added up to my perception of how long the day was.
To put this into practice, I would stop everything for 15 minutes and just stare out the window at the tree swaying in the wind or the golden grass. Nature-watching was as significant to my brain as weight lifting, increasing the number of moments recorded by my brain that day.
I spent periods on the weekend without a clock around and being entirely intuition-led. I would step out to walk without a phone. I would play a video game and when I felt like stopping, I'd lie on my bed waiting to see what I wanted to do next. I watched black-and-white movies. I sat in the sun with my eyes closed and listened to a podcast. These 1-2 hour strings of 5 moments felt like half of an entire day.
Each day's structure really lengthens the day. Being up for sunrise and sunset optimizes for having so many life periods in between, especially if you live in a place that allows you to experience the variety of nature, alone time, socialization, business, and more. I didn’t miss the sunset any day.
I restructured some days to jump out of bed and do an activity for 3-5h and then relax with a meal in the sun, then take time to run, then take time to read, then take time to relax alone, then read at night, then a engage in a night activity feels. These days were really long. Socializing in the morning, then afternoon, then at dinner, all with different people felt like a really long day.
4. Goal-oriented living: rotate your goals to live a longer life.
I noticed the mere fact that I wanted to work out every day was blurring my mind with all the other days I wanted the same thing.
Looking back on the past two years going to the gym felt like basically the same thing. When I would go to the gym, both the experience and the desire was the same, making my life feel shorter.
I began generalizing my goals - lifting weights became "maximize fitness" and I added different sub-goals that levered up to maximizing fitness.
I spent a month with a goal of getting my mile time lower and lower each day. This month felt like a year.
I wanted to eat healthy, but at some point my goal transmuted into "eat fish or meat + vegetables and don't get bored". After checking the box with ~7 rotating meals 100 times, those experiences started to blur together.
As a result, I changed the sub-goal to "eat something new and healthy as often as possible". I then set off learning the difference between 7 and 12 year-aged balsamic vinegar for my brussels sprouts.
I started shifting to thematic goals. I spend the first half of Saturday discovering new rock songs, then the night learning Spanish dancing. I found leaning into the unique goals I could set within different life periods added a huge number of new moments and exponentiated my life experience.
5. Rotate the timelines of your goals and note your progress.
At some point I grew into having mostly long-term goals. All of these goals had virtually a forever timeline - maximize healthspan, maintain relationships forever, etc.. Much like running for a long distance, looking off way into the distance was making me progress towards my goals with methodical precision, but I was not experiencing every step of the way there.
Even when I wasn't looking off until forever, I was making sure I was on my way each week and each day. The consistency and normalcy of my timelines made these weeks and days blur together. I've been investing for more weeks than I can count...
I began rotating my progress checks from "what did I do this week" to "how much did I achieve in the last 10 days". This arbitrary timeline change made me feel like two weeks or more had passed. My mind was seeing the world with new detail.
Two years of lifting weights may have blurred together, marked by the daily enjoyment of working out. But in those same two years I could have set a new squat record, improved my cardio to box for 5 5-minute rounds, achieved a sprint speed that would have qualified me for the NFL combine, etc..
Some goals may have taken a week of intense effort to achieve, others 3 months. I may have hit the same level of fitness over two years of lifting weights, but increasing the density of goal accomplishment and recording the wins on different timelines would have multiplied the surface area of time. The perception of time during 2 years of weight lifting vs. 12 personal fitness goals achieved is not the same.
- "There is a journal where you write the entries for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 all on the same page for April 11th, or whatever. If I asked you what your memories of 2019 were, you would tell me three to five things and then say, "Wow, that year flew by." But if you asked me, I would have an archive of 365 memories that would blossom out in front of me. 2019 explodes with memories for me -- each line in the book unfurls in my brain reminding me of more moments of the event or the evening it describes. I see 2019 in overwhelming detail. I just think of it as a hobby of collecting memories."
6. Embrace Pain.
I started thinking back to my school days. Wasn't the class I disliked the most the one that lasted the longest?
A cold shower is a really long moment to add to my day. Sprinting around the block can add an hour to my experienced time. Sometimes I would eat my cooking without any seasoning. Negative affect served the goal of elongating time.
After understanding this I became happy on a boring commute or a waiting at the DMV. I began accepting and potentially even leaning into time-slowing effect of negative emotions and excruciating moments.
7. Empty my mind to experience more moments and more of each moment.
"A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time." I noticed how being goal-oriented or having many items on my mind would make the day fly by.
I ensured I was emptying the mind in the following ways:
- Experience without words.
- The mind is like a curling hand. The mind finds something that gives it happiness and jumps to curl around it. It tries to possess and repeat it, over and over to squeeze all of the happiness it can out of that. This curling happens around ice cream, your lover, working, every source of positive affect --> the mind is curled around like a mangled claw creating a loop and loop of thoughts.
- Most thoughts are fears, and most fears stem from the fear of death. Be ok with dying to achieve peace.
- You will spend most of your life with one thing missing. It’s important to be able to cope with that vs. always trying to solve it.
- Every moment is a moment of ULTIMATE sacrifice. You can only do one thing in that moment and you must be willing to lose all other options by decision.
- All pleasure comes from thought and sensation. Not being present and aware of these two things leads to a life of endless pleasure seeking because there is no other way to experience pleasure. You will always be lacking and moving towards pleasure yet you will never arrive.