Time is an unrelenting m’fer.

The more trips we’ve had around the sun, the faster we feel like we’re going around it.

“Where did the week go?”

“We were there just last year! Right?”

“That kid graduated from college already?”

Time ticks at a constant, measurable speed.

Yet we feel like time passes faster as we age.

The best visual explanation I’ve found on this phenomenon:

A bar of ten equal segments with the most recent year highlighted.
At 10, one year is 10% of everything we’ve known.

When we were young, every year that passed was a significant part of our life experience.

Many of us can remember specific — and what felt like endless — summers.

I was sixteen at my first summer school experience away from home. Those six weeks felt like six months.

A bar of fifty equal segments with the most recent year highlighted as a thin sliver.
At 50, one year is just another slice.

By mid-life, every passing year is now just a tiny slice of the multi-year pie.

And if our experiences from year-to-year aren’t profoundly different, the years start to blend together. The regular commute, routines, and work — we might’ve become masters of it all, but it’s all too familiar. Time was fast.

The human brain likes to be efficient and lazy. No new input, no new wiring.

So if our brains dictate how we experience time, how can we decelerate the perception of it?

Applying the brakes comes down to a few habits.

Conjure awe

Awe is an awkward and cheesy word. But it blends reverence with a touch of fear. A bit of wonder with a bit of dread. When we think about awe, we might imagine it’s about getting ourselves to the top of the Grand Canyon and staring at the natural wonder. But the dependable awe is in the everyday. It’s in appreciating how we’re just one blue dot when staring at the night sky. It’s the deep conversation we have with a friend that leaves us satiated and inspired. It’s the embrace of a loved one after a long day. Journaling these moments is one way I’ve discovered that helps me stay attuned to these everyday awes.

Learn new skills

The brain slows time down when it’s forced to pay attention. When we force our mind and body to learn new ways of moving and balancing, such as taking on a new sport or playing a new musical instrument, we recruit our brains to learn new motor pathways. And the more we enlist our brains to encode new learnings, the more we decelerate our perception of time.

It’s been incredibly fun to unlock limb independence. More importantly, it’s lodged a drum stick into my timeline. A little something to hold onto to fight the blurring.

Avoid time dumping

I first heard the phrase “time dumping” from Benedikt Fischer, the author of In Search of Lost Time. In this beautifully designed book, he explores the relationship between technology and people’s perception of time. His learnings came from a thesis project where he studied the time cultures in Silicon Valley vs. Taungoo, Myanmar in 2015. Tech-rich cultures are ironically time scarce, and tech-poor cultures are time rich.

In a tech-rich culture, we crave free time yet so freely dump it through scrolling. But social media is cheap calories. Numbing hits of dopamine with pseudo awe and no new memories. A passive, consuming brain only accelerates our experience of time.

The passage of time is constant, but the brakes are up to you.

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Some awe-inspiring resources: