Don't let time go faster as you age
Don't let time go faster as you age
Time is much too precious to let it slide through repetitive boring days.
Hello there beautiful people! My name is Ash Lamb, and this is The Visual Growth Letter. An illustrated newsletter about life and creativity.
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Time goes faster as you age.
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When you're a child, everything is new. You get fascinated by the simplest things, like a butterfly flying in the garden or a stormy night.
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As you grow older, you slowly normalize all those little details that once made life so fascinating.
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Before you know it, you start to complain whenever it rains or you're too busy staring at your phone to pay attention to a fleeting butterfly.
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Your life quickly becomes bland, and your days all merge together, creating a big indistinguishable blur.
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What once felt like an eternity now only lasts a few seconds.
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"What? It's really been 6 years since I hiked that mountain in California?"
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The issue is that your day-to-day tasks will probably feel slower, as chances are you don't really enjoy them. However, as soon as you zoom out, you'll find out that in contrast, the years have passed really damn quickly.
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The solution? Simple, yet not easy.
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Journal often
Record your thoughts on a daily or weekly basis. Find things to be grateful for and look back on your entries every now and then.
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Acquiring the habit of journaling will take quite a bit of discipline, but I promise you it will pay off.
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Not only will it be a very therapeutic activity, but it will also help you get to know yourself much better by spotting patterns.
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If you don’t see yourself writing full entries you can explore micro-journaling, which consists of limiting each entry to a few short lines.
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Novelty is the cure
Schedule at least one new experience every month.
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It doesn't have to be anything expensive or crazy. Just do something out of the ordinary, maybe with a friend or two or a family member. Explore your city. Go for a hike. Take a different path to work. Find a new hobby like chess or live sketching.
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You'll be amazed by how much fun your life can be if you make a small effort to step out of the ordinary.
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The goal is to avoid the graphic below which unfortunately happens to be a reality for most people.ㅤ
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A philosophical concept that helped me understand this situation better is "objective time vs subjective time."
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Objective time is the actual time that has passed during an activity, weekend, year, or lifetime.
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Subjective time, which is much more important, is the amount of time that you feel has passed during the activity.
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Imagine it's finally Friday, and you decide to step out of your comfort zone and travel to a different city for the weekend.
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As soon as you arrive at your destination, you start approaching people that look interesting and spark different conversations.
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Then you invite someone you've met at the park to have dinner with you at a cool Mexican restaurant you've found online, and the following day you take your first surfing lesson at the nearest beach.
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What an experience! And it's only been two days! Just a weekend.
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If you had stayed at home binge-watching Netflix and eating takeaway, time would have passed much faster, and on Monday, you would've felt like you didn't even get to take a break.
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However, because you've taken this trip, you now feel like it's been a whole week, if not a month, since Friday.
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"How is it possible that I've lived so many different experiences in such a short span of time?"
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If graves could reveal how much time someone truly lived, as opposed to how much time someone merely existed, people would cultivate a much better sense of urgency and courage.
Today I’m launching Calm Tab Beta!
My friend Pere and I have built a very simple Chrome extension that turns your browser's new tab page into a minimal time tracker and breathing box.
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It's totally free for early-bird users.
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We still have so much work to do as this is only an early beta to test the waters, but if the product gets traction we'll take it to the next level by adding more useful features.
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I truly appreciate your readership and support. Without you, this project wouldn't be the same. :)
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Great love and respect,
Ash Lamb
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