Notes on and suggestions for making time feel slower. Idea from niplav.
Time is the most valuable commodity bar none. Most things can be replenished: money, bodies, objects. Once time has passed, it is gone, never to return. It only makes sense to want to get the best experience out of available time as possible. While time going fast is sometimes advantageous (holding a plank for 5:00 min is rarely considered a fun time), slower is generally better. We never want our time with family or friends to end; we never want to leave the park during beautiful weather; we want our weekends to feel as long as possible before the dreaded Monday rears its ugly head.
Making both short- and long-term time feel slower is a major life improvement, hence this post.
Below are notes from a variety of sources—academic, blogs, forums—about making time feel slower. These are for personal reference, but are used to form the Suggestions section.
Link: Tips for a longer life
First, routine is the enemy of slow subjective time. It will speed up subjective time enormously. No doubt you’ve felt the feeling “where has the year gone?” and “time speeds up as you get older”.
This is because of routine. Working the same job at the same place for the same hours week in and week out is what causes a year to flash by.
Days blend in with one another and it's difficult to tell them apart. Variety (also known as the spice of life) makes days more memorable and thus distinguishable from others.
Novelty is what slows time down, and a routine is an engine for eliminating the unexpected, thereby eliminating novelty.
Novelty is what slows time down, and a routine is an engine for eliminating the unexpected, thereby eliminating novelty.
Stories allow us to live an entire lifetime in the shoes of a character, but consuming the story takes only a couple of hours. Drugs can speed up or slow down mental time, psychedelics being the most notable for slowing time down (likely due to the novelty of the senses during that time). Being bored is excruciating. We will do anything for distraction. But boredom’s ability to slow down the minutes, every moment like dragging through treacle, can make an hour or day seem very long. The downside of boredom is that we’re unlikely to keep strong memories of it, unless something surprising happens.
I don't necessarily agree with the stories statement, as reading/watching generally feels short but takes a long time. Never tried psychedelics, but I know this is a common experience. Boredom is true, but I am only concerned with enjoyable time, not unenjoyable (i.e., bored) time.
Link: Why Time Slows Down When You’re Traveling
Back in 1890, the beloved American psychologist William James wrote that “the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory’s content.” When you’re a kid, you’re experiencing new things every hour of every day. But with the routine brought along by adulthood, the days and weeks smooth out into “contentless units,” he writes. “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day,” he writes. “Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out.” That’s the magic of travel: being in bewildering, enchanting places awakes that childhood wonder. Immersed in novelty, you pay attention to more, and the days get longer. Life expands.
Another point for novelty, except this time it gets backed up with science. The temporal oddball effect is the tendency to "overestimate the duration of rare events embedded in a stream of homogenous events" or, in other words, time feels slower when something novel happens during a routine. The novelty/routine may be long-term (working day-in-day-out and going on vacation) or short-term (in the moment something happens that is unexpected).
And travel is a perfect example, assuming it's a place that's new. All experiences are probably firsts. First type of food, first time going there, first time seeing that, and so on. Novel stimuli everywhere for days on end.
The oddball effect "is a perceptual phenomenon whereby novel or unexpected stimuli result in longer perceived time durations" and is directly supported by the following anecdotes.
Wittmann et al.'s Subjective expansion of extended time-spans in experienced meditators examined 42 seasoned meditators and found that:
mindfulness meditators experienced less time pressure, more time dilation, and a general slower passage of time. Moreover, they felt that the last week and the last month passed more slowly
Kramer et al.'s The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception had similar results:
Mindfulness meditation increased perceived duration, therefore slowing time.
(I know this is from the "Highlights" section of the webpage and not the paper, but it does a better job than copying many sentences.)
visarga distinguishes between two types of time's speed in this HN thread: present moment speed and remembrance speed.
I have independently 'discovered' the relation between novelty, the momentary feeling of time passing and the retrospective feeling of time passed when I was a teenager.
They go in opposite directions:
- novelty -> time flies in the moment but seems much expanded when you remember it
- boring and repetitive activity -> time seems to crawl in the moment but in memory it seems to vanish
Another way to increase the subjective feeling of time is to be a parent.
I don't think it can be described any better. Everyone's been in both situations. Fun times with friends fly by and boring workplace tasks take forever.
Parenting also comes up in another comment by Waterluvian:
Have kids.
Not everyone would make a good parent or want to be one. That’s fine. There’s so many ways to live a whole life. But for me, becoming a parent made time simultaneously slow right down and race by.
I’m typing with one thumb as I rock my youngest to sleep so I’ll keep it short: you do countless things every single week that you probably never would have done again. And as they grow up those things constantly change. Variety keeps my weeks feeling absolutely loaded with meaningful segments. But it also flies by given how fast they grow as people.
Off the top of my head, this weekend only: climbed a playground, ran through a sprinkler, sidewalk chalk, played Mario 2, made trains from construction paper, remembered how to draw a star with one stroke. I danced and I sang.
It truly does slow life right down subjectively. I’m cherishing every moment. I didn’t think it was going to be this fulfilling.
This holds with the novelty theory and visarga's insights into the two types of speed.
oh_sigh makes a point that I first thought of soon after hearing about novelty and routine's affect on speed:
Just do new things. Go to new places, talk to new people, try new things. It can be as simple as not taking the same route to work/grocery store/etc every time. Mix it up.
Some claim that time feels quicker as you get older because each passing minute is a smaller and smaller portion of your life(e.g. summer for a 6 year old is 5% of their life, whereas it is only half a percent of the life of a 50 year old). But I don't buy that.
Time goes quicker as you get older because people get stuck in the same routine, and it is quite easy to compress memories together when you do the same thing every day. So, go explore, every day, even if it is just mental exploration through books or music, and time will surely slow down.
I see my coworkers who have settled into their routines of life and all claim that time go faster and faster as they get older and older. But their problem is their lifestyle, not their age. They wake up at the same time, go to work for ten hours, go home, spend some time with their family or pursuing hobbies, then do it all over again the next day, week, year, and decade. Novelty mostly comes from vacation for two weeks every year and rarely from day-to-day activities, which is where most people lose their time.
01100011 inadvertently provides some relationship advice that I resonate with. The last relationship I was in started out strong and novel, but petered out due to what I believe was routine. Work had me exhausted most of the time and they weren't particularly eager to go out and explore, so we often ended up just hanging out with each other at either apartment. And time passed just as visarga said it would: the days with each other felt a bit slow, but the duration of the relationship flew by.
Another vote for novelty. When I met my wife, she was pushing us to do new things all the time. It seemed like every day we would try a new cafe, a new restaurant, see a new part of town, explore a new trail... There was a 6 month period that felt like it could have been years.
Since moving to the valley and getting absorbed in work, we've stopped doing things. We'll try a new restaurant every week, and maybe go on a day trip every few months. We're coming up on our two year anniversary of moving here and frankly I feel like we could just move on and forget the entire chapter of our life. The last two years feel like 6 months, and that's only because we got married last year and took a week long honeymoon.
If I look back through my photo album, there is a startling difference in the number of pictures I've taken too. I've started forcing myself to just take random pictures now and then just so I don't end up without a record of this time in my life.
I posit that visarga's comment is the root of what most people want when they say they want time to slow down: slow when having fun and long and fulfilling when remembering. I believe it is possible to achieve this.
Enjoy the moment. That's it. When experiencing any type of joy or excitement, take a five second pause to think about how great the moment is. This has helped me be more present and get more satisfaction from the experience. And it works in all situations: meals with friends, sporting events, athletic endeavors, and so on.
Trigger-action plans are a good solution to help with this. Learn to associate joy and excitement with pausing to think about how nice the moment is. How to do this is up to the individual, but setting an hourly "Be present!" reminder on my phone for a couple of weeks put it at the forefront of my mind. I also review a single Anki card with "Be present!" every day.
To avoid memory compression (i.e., life goes by in a flash because everything seems the same), novelty is required, as proven by the anecdotes and other sources. Novelty need not be exclusive to physical places or experiences. Here's a list of novel things everyone can branch out into. Note that repeating an experience can be, but is not always, detrimental to slowing time.
Taking pictures has slowed my life down significantly. Over the past 18 months I've taken 1,500+ pictures compared to 500 in the five years before that. While time goes by faster in one sense (caused by my normal daily routine), reminiscing on my past life is much more "full". I have evidence of what I've done, evoking memories I would have forgotten otherwise. Those five years of minimal pictures seem empty, like I didn't make as many memories as I am now. It may be true to an extent, but not to the degree that it feels as empty as it does.
My suggestion is simple: take more pictures. Do it when alone and bored, do it when with friends, do it any time that feels appropriate. I use a low barrier for a picture qualifying and don't shy away from similar pictures, as they are still separate memories in my mind.
Journaling has also slowed my life down for the same reason as pictures: it captures memories that would otherwise be lost. Journaling complements pictures well. Words can describe the memory a different type of detail, and can also express any memories that weren't captured on camera.
My daily journaling practice consists of writing down what I did, anything that I felt or thought, things I need to change. It's useful not only for slowing time, but reviewing oneself. I often look back for reference or nostalgia and am thankful that I chose to write everything down.