Blinking Through the Jurassic Period

You're wasting more time than you realize.

2 summers ago, I led tours on a coffee farm in Hawaii.

During my opening spiel, I’d make a joke:

“The trees on this farm were planted in 1994 — that makes them about 28 years old. I am also 28 years old.

“These trees remind me that I’m not going through a quarter-life crisis by quitting my corporate job to be here. They remind me that we’re simply growing — together.”

The guests would inevitably remind me that, at 28, it was more like a 1/3rd-life crisis than a quarter-life crisis.

We were both wrong.

It was a midlife crisis.

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In 2017, Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI, posted a tweet.

The key here: “The subjective increase in how fast time passes.”

When you were a kid, everything took an eternity. 

• Magellan circumnavigated the globe in the time it took your parents to drive to the beach.

• The gap from December 21 and December 25 could’ve spanned the Grand Canyon.

• The Jurassic period fit between your 9th and 10th birthdays.

When you were 5 years old, 1 year was 20% of your life.

If you’re 30, like me, 1 year is now 3% of your life.

A year is still a year. But it doesn’t feel like it, because our perception of time speeds up as our absolute timeline extends.

Check out this insane project by Austrian designer Maximilian Kiener: “Why Time Flies”.

Kiener writes, “Your summer vacation in your first year in college will feel as long as your whole 76th year.”

You’re way, way further along in your life than you think you are. 

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Warren Buffett is worth $135 billion, but he’s also 93 years old. You wouldn’t trade lives with him.

Nothing is more valuable than time.

And nothing kills time more than routine.

Routines don't give your brain the opportunity to process new information. When your days are on autopilot, your brain is, too.

This robs you of time in two ways:

1) Memory compression

When you live Tuesday just like you lived Monday and you live Monday just like you lived Friday, your brain stores fewer details about each individual day. It’s all a big blended blur of blah.

2) Time perception

When you’re living automatically, your brain fills in the gaps. It doesn’t have to pay attention to what you’re doing, so it goes into power-saving mode.

The key to living life — the key to slowing things down — is to try to replicate the fascination of childhood when everything was new by making everything new.

When you grab today and force it to be different than yesterday, your brain has no choice but to stop filling the gaps and to start focusing on each individual second.

Time still moves at the same speed.

But it starts to feel a lot slower.

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So yes, you’re way, way further along in your life than you think you are.

But all you have to do is look at your clock — really study it.

And pay closer attention as the hands tick forward.