Magnifying Time

Some thoughts on how novelty and attention magnify the time that we have. 

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:18):
One of the most surprising things I've ever learned is
that novelty and attention extend your lifespan, or more precisely,
attention to novelty, slow time. And the opposite is true
as well. Pattern and distraction accelerate it. This model explains
why time moves so slowly when we were children, and
why it streaks by in large gulps as we get older.

(00:39):
When we're young, everything is new, and when things are new,
we can't help but pay attention to them. We're fascinated
by them and time freezes. As we get older, we
switch to autopilot. We stop paying attention. We wake up,
eat the same breakfast, go to the same job. We
rut into a pattern. We don't notice things we don't appreciate,
things we don't delight in them the way we used

(01:01):
to because very few things are new anymore. In fact,
we barely notice anything at all. Hard to say exactly,
but I think this accelerates time by like two, five,
or maybe even ten X seasons become years and years
become decades. You think you just took out the garbage
and watched a show on Netflix? But when you look
at the calendar, it's like 11 years later. One way

(01:24):
to frame this is the way we already have, which
is based around the amount of novelty that you have
in your life. As in, how new are the activities
that you were doing day to day? But perhaps a
better way to think about this is less about the activity,
and more about how much you're paying attention to life
in general. They tend to go together. The supernatural power

(01:48):
I learned from Sam Harris through his meditation course waking up,
is that we can actually slow time ourselves by learning
to control our attention. After learning meditation from Sam a
number of years ago, I now have a dead simple
way of describing meditation itself, which is kind of hard
to describe. There are basically only two states of living.

(02:10):
There is aware and there is hijacked and aware is
when your attention is alive and observant, which makes the
subject of your focus kind of everyday extraordinary. From breathing
to an ankle itch, whatever you're focusing on, being hijacked
is the natural state for all of us, even Sam

(02:31):
or the Dalai Lama or whoever. In this state, you're not.
At it. In this state, you're at it. In this state,

(02:53):
you're not aware of what you're thinking or feeling. Instead
of observing life. Life is happening to you. You become
your feelings. You become your thoughts. The separation between yourself
and your inputs dissolves completely. A good example would be
imagining a work conversation where some guy named Chris said
something dismissive about one of your projects in your mind,

(03:15):
Everyone in the meeting now thinks less of you and
your work at the company. So you basically think about
this constantly for like the next day, perhaps multiple days.
Maybe it's been a couple of weeks now. You've just
been thinking about it over and over. Can't believe he
said that. Why would he say that? I can't believe
you know Julie believed him or whatever. Whether you're driving

(03:35):
to do an errand or eating a sandwich or sitting
on the couch, your brain goes through the scenario thousands
of times in different iterations. You imagine different ways you
should have reacted what you can possibly do to fix it,
whether or not you should look for another job and
you hope that Chris gets fired, you just keep thinking
about different ways he could be fired or whatever. You

(03:57):
are not yourself. While this is happening, there is no you.
While this is happening, you've become a cockroach in a
garbage can on a freight train heading towards a distant,
silly place. That does not matter how many minutes or
hours or days have you spent thinking about this one
particular thing? The real problem is not even that. One

(04:20):
particular thing with Chris that you're thinking about. The problem
is that our lives are full of situations just like these,
over and over, annoyances and ruminations about them. If you
were to check in on your mind at any particular moment,
of any particular day, of any particular year in your life,

(04:40):
and you were to see a text transcript of what
you were thinking, it would be the ramblings of rumination
for the hijacked. When we feel emotions, we become those emotions.
When we have negative thoughts, we become those negative thoughts.
This is a state of being distracted. The lack of attention. Unfortunately,

(05:02):
it's the vast majority of people, the vast majority of
the time, including me. So where does this leave us? Well,
there are ways to break free from this. We can
learn to meditate even a little bit. Give yourself the
ability to get to the aware state, even if it's
just for a brief moments during the day. Number two,

(05:23):
we can build more novelty into our lives new books,
new foods, new people, new art. And third, we can
bias towards creation versus consumption. Creation takes focus, which is
a type of attention and often requires novelty as you
learn and master a craft as well. If we quiet
our minds and pay close attention to great food, great friends,

(05:46):
great books, and great walks with our loved ones, if
we honor the present moment and the feeling of her
hand in yours, if we create instead of consume, if
we build instead of bicker, we magnify the quality and
duration of the time we have in this life. We
can turn seconds into lifetimes. Doing this well means ten

(06:06):
years can become 50, and doing this wrong means we
could die at 90, never having lived.