Hi readers, Shayla Love here. I’m filling in for Sigal Samuel on Your Mileage May Vary. I love this column because it lets us look at human behavior through philosophy, psychology, and science. Send me your weird questions about emotions, brains, society, or perception. I’m reading everything.
One question stuck with me. The writer is in their 40s. They’re expecting their second child. They feel like time is accelerating. They are terrified that their remaining decades will vanish in a blur. They want to be present for this new human life they are raising. But the days keep flying by.
They have tried everything. Novelty is one of them. New hobbies. New places. They know the brain treats new experiences differently. It doesn’t work. The contraction of experience continues. Mindfulness and meditation haven’t caught on. Daily journaling helps a bit. Social media detoxes help a bit. But time still rushes.
What is happening here? Is it possible to actually slow down the clock?
Prospective vs. Retrospective Time
We need to distinguish between two types of time perception. First, there is prospective time. This is what time feels like while you are living it. Then there is retrospective time. This is how you remember time after the fact.
The reader is struggling with both. They want moments to feel longer right now. They also want their memories to feel substantial later.
Here is the thing: we do not have a specific organ for sensing time. We have eyes for seeing. Noses for smelling. Time? It is a vaguer sense. It is cobbled together from various inputs. Because of that, it is easily manipulated.
The Novelty Trap
Neuroscientist David Eagleman at Stanford University has studied this extensively. He argues that novelty makes time expand. When you see the same image repeatedly, your brain stops paying attention. When a new image appears, the brain wakes up. That new picture feels like it lasts longer, even if it doesn’t.
Childhood feels long because almost everything is new. You are building the map of the world. You are noticing edges and colors and sounds. Then you form habits. You go to the same commute every day. The brain stops recording details. The memory of the week becomes a blank block of gray.
So you chase novelty. You sign up for classes. You travel. But if you do this for the sake of slowing time, you create a new problem.
Time Urgency and The Memory Glitch
Extreme emotions do elongate time. Eagleman had people free fall from a net tower. Participants overestimated the duration of the fall by about a third. They also wore flashing wrist devices. They did not see the numbers flash faster than usual.
Why did it feel like slow motion? Because of memory encoding. Fear activates the amygdala. The amygdala tells the brain to pack in more details. You remember more. Later, looking back at a memory with high density of details, time seems to have stretched out.
Swiss geologist Albert Heim interviewed climbers who nearly died falling off rocks. They reported time expanding. Race car drivers in crashes describe things in slow motion. This is the brain prioritizing survival data.
But you cannot bungee jump your way through parenthood. And you don’t want to live in a state of constant high-alert survival mode.
If you obsess over optimizing for maximum time stretch, you lose the actual experience. You end up with “time urgency.” You are trying to squeeze as much out of life as possible in the shortest window. Anxiety. Burnout. Multi-tasking. This makes time feel faster because you lack the bandwidth to encode rich memories. You are skimming the surface.
The Bitter Sweetness of Presence
Constructing days where time always feels slow means never getting lost in the moment. It means you never look up from a hobby and realize three hours have passed. It means you never catch up with friends until they have gone.
That speed of connection? You have to relish it.
Ancient philosophies remind us of our mortality to heighten our appreciation of life. Stoics use memento mori. I prefer Buddhism’s Five Remembrances. They are mantras accepting change. “I am of the nature to have old age. I cannot avoid it.”
Having children forces this confrontation. You realize you are aging. Time is passing. Giving up the idea that you can stop time is the first step to living in it.
Mundane Mindfulness
Meditation is often treated as a hack. Close your eyes. Listen to breathing. Try to pay attention. That is fine. But real mindfulness is more quotidian. It is about reclaiming everyday life.
Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese monk, wrote about this. When we rush through washing dishes, we are not alive during that time. We are sucked into the future. We miss the present. We become incapable of living even one minute.
Instead of chasing new experiences, try making routine new again. Focus on the sensations. The heat of the water. The texture of the plate. Put the future out of your head.
The Power of Boredom
This seems hard. It takes work to do nothing. But boredom expands time.
Remember those endless summer days? For many of us, boredom was the soundtrack to those long, slow years.
Productivity expert Chris Bailey created a “month of boredom.” He spent an hour a day doing nothing. Staring at a ceiling. Watching a turtle swim. He found that these gaps allowed for creative mind-wandering. Time felt slower when the day wasn’t packed tight.
You don’t have to stare at walls all day. Carve out micro-moments. Pay closer attention when walking to the train. Notice the bricks in the sidewalk. Do chores slowly. This practice makes you aware of how you spend time. It creates space.
What Is Time?
I’ve been reading lately. A Month In The Country is a summer novel about letting time do its thing. Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers explores how we measure time. “The first grand discovery was time,” he writes.
There is also “skill nostalgia.” Philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote writes about our longing for manual skills we were never taught. Woodworking. Gardening. Lock picking. Maybe idealizing labor isn’t the point. Maybe the point is the attention it demands. The way it slows you down.
I’m not always able to achieve that serene state. But I try. I pay attention to the mundane. And occasionally, just occasionally, time feels a little less like a runaway train and a little more like a path I am actually walking.
