#2156 Long Days, Fast Years - Harps

I want to be aware. I guess the main thing I want to be around the show and what we put up in the conversations we have or the solos that I do, that I am consistently trying to bring something to the world, whether that's one person or one thousand people or fifty thousand people, whoever listens. I'm trying to bring something that might add value or insight or understanding or knowledge to what you're already working with. And I try to make the subject matter the conversations as

broadly relevant as possible. But if I'm being honest, I am biased. Do I'm biased? Do in that I often just go with things that hopefully tick all the other boxes, but things that have my attention in the moment. And I've spoken about this before, but it's like the context of time or the experience of time, how we interpret experience, interact with, have a relationship with time as a subjective experience versus the objective reality of time, which is time

is a constant. Time is sixty seconds every minute, sixty minutes every hour, bloody twenty four hours a day, et cetera, et cetera. Doesn't change. It's the same. But we're not the same. We're the variable. We are the thing. You know, some hours can feel like a fuck and day, and some days can feel like ten minutes for a range of reasons. And so I started writing something. Firstly, I wrote it host for Instagram, which was very brief, and

it didn't really set the world on fire. That's okay because it wasn't didn't say shit or fuck or cock, which everybody seems to like on Instagram or my followers what is wrong with you, by the way, But my followers on Instagram, I've said this before. If I post two identical posts but one as swearing and one does not, the one we're swearing will ten x the one without swearing pretty much every time. In fact, I've had that happen with my books. My biggest selling book is called

Stop Fucking Around. And so, for whatever reason, good or bad, you're all fucking riff raff. That's it. But sometimes I

open that it's almost like, you know, with comedians. I don't know if you ever listen to comedians how they write and how they work and how they develop what they call bits a bit as a joke, And I'll come out with a bit and it won't really work or a joe, and then they'll take it back, they'll polish it, they'll change a few bits, it'll get a better response, it'll you know, and then eventually that concept as something to make people laugh becomes a really funny

joke over time, but it needs to be developed because we're trying to land with humans who are not us. We're trying to gain some kind of response, and so too with my stuff. I'm always thinking about what will make people laugh, but what will resonate with people? What

will land with people? And if I'm doing a one on one coaching session with somebody, or I'm in front of a thousand people in an auditorium, or I'm talking to you on a podcast, I'm always trying to be cognizant of mindful of what is this like, what is

this idea, this subject, this language, this conversation. What is this like as an experience for the person on the other side of me or the person's on the other side of me, Because I also have to be aware that the only person in the world who thinks like me, exactly like me all the time is me. So I'm not trying to inspire me, I'm not trying to resonate with me. I'm not trying to empower me. I'm trying to do that in some way for you. So I

started writing this piece. So the thing I did on Instagram didn't really fly, which is cool because it's learning. And then I thought, you know what, I'm going to write about it. I'm going to write a piece about it because I think it is irrelevant and sometimes really

helpful idea to construct reality. I put an asterisk next to that reality for us to explore because we all interact and intersect with time and the practical real world reality of time in that it is a constant, and the other reality of time from our point of view is it is something that we navigate, something that we manage, something that we interact with, deal with, prioritize, and also

something that we experience. So there's the practical objective reality of the constant that is time, and then there's the also the reality of the experience of time is you and me. So I want to talk about that. Anyway, started writing, Come on, harps, get your thoughts together. I started writing, and I thought, I'll write like a maybe one hundred to one hundred and fifty word little piece on that, and maybe a few light bulbs will happen. Al so maybe people will think it shit. That's always

a chance. Nonetheless, I started writing, and then by the time I finished writing the brief piece that was three hundred words, I went, fuck it, I can't really post this. It's too long. So I'm just going to keep writing them. When I finish, I'll finish and maybe i'll post it. Maybe i'll start a substack thingy or whatever, which I don't have, and maybe I'll just post it somewhere as a standalone article. And then I thought, I already have an audience, so I thought I would share it with

you now forewarning. I've written what I'm about to read. Nothing so far that I've said, of course, as scripted, and I will freestyle around what I've written. But yeah, I think it's a really interesting if not. You know, will it be transformational for many of you? Probably not, but it is. It's just a really fucking interesting thing I think to ponder and consider and to be aware of.

All right, So this is called long days, fast years, the perceptual juxtaposition, you know, things that kind of go together but don't, the perceptual juxtaposition of time. Have you noticed this weird little human paradox. A Tuesday afternoon can feel like a hostage situation, but somehow ten years disappear in about three and a half minutes. A boring meeting lasts longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, yet your twenties seem to vanish while you're looking for your

phone charger and trying to remember passwords. Long days, past years. It's one of the strangest things about being a human. And no, you're not imagining it. Well, technically you are, because your perception of time is constructed in your brain. But you know what I mean. There's the outside your mind reality of time, as I said in the into a constant, and then there's the inside your mind version of time that is your subjective experience of the constant

that is ever present, the clock that never stops. So that's your subject experience or a story you tell about time, or an interpretation or even feeling. But that becomes your experience, your subjective experience of that objective thing. And of course time itself is a constant. Sixty seconds is sixty seconds, whether your happy, miserable, board terrified, or standing in line at the post office behind someone who apparently wants to

pay their electricity bill in coins. But our experience of time that is widely variable, and that matters because psychologically speaking, your life is not merely what happens to you. Your life is largely what you notice, what you remember, and what your brain decides was important enough to store, which means your relationship with attention is in many ways your

relationship with life itself. Now that kind of sounds philosophical and mildly instagrammable, but there's actually solid neuroscience and psychology underneath it. Because the human brain is not a camera recording objective reality. That's really important. Your brain is not a camera recording objective situation, circumstances, events, what we call reality. It's more likely a highly selective, emotionally biased film editor. It cuts scenes, it highlights moments, It deletes details, it

adds emotional music, it distorts perspectives, it creates narratives. And most of the time, while all that's going on, which goes on all the time, we're not even aware, we're not even driving that that's just happening despite us, not because of us. And one of the most interesting things about human perception is that time is deeply tied to attention and memory. When we are highly attentive, when something is new or emotionally charged or risky, exciting, terrifying, uncertain, meaningful,

the brain records more information. Kind of simplifying this language a bit, but so we've got I guess we could call it more psychological footage, so to speak. And when the brain records more footage, those periods later feel bigger and richer and longer in retrospect, which is why childhood

often feels enormous. Like think of how much of childhood many of us can still recall or talk about, or explore or share stories about versus other periods of your life like twenty to twenty five might be quite different. Because when we were kids, everything was new, Like everything at some point was new and exciting and amazing and incredible, and memory memorable, and it had our focus, and it had our attention, and it had our emotion, and we were very present because it was all new, and this

was awesome. Everything was new, new school, new people, new music, new motions, new fears, new freedoms, new relationships, new experiences. Your brain was laying down fresh neural pathways constantly. The world wasn't predictable yet, because you were just opening the door on your life. You were just opening the door on all there is to be experienced. You were still learning in a way, you were still learning what reality even was. I don't think we still know that, do we.

Novelty stretches perception, then adulthood arrives and we become frighteningly efficient wake up, phone, coffee, traffic, emails, meetings, work, dinner, Netflix, bed, repeat until death, which is a bit dark, but it's also for some people it's kind of accurate, and of

course your lists might be different. But the continuity the ground hog danis the repetition, the doing things that aren't as necessarily amazing or joyful or rewarding, doing those things on autopilot, despite the fact that it's not creating the existence we want. So many of us do that, And the brain loves efficiency because efficiency conserves energy. Your brain's essentially a prediction machine trying to automate as much of

your life as it can. I'm going to say that again, the brain loves efficiency because efficiency conserves energy, and your brain is essentially a prediction machine trying to automate as much of your life as possible, which is great and useful for survival. You don't want to consciously relearn how to brunch brush your teeth every morning like some kind of confused, anxious goldfish. The downside of automation is a

thing that we call perceptual compression. So when days become highly repetitive, the brain stops paying attention to close or to detail because it already knows the pattern. And when attention decreases, memory encoding decreases. And when memory encoding decreases, life feels as an experience like it speeds up. I'm going to say that from two sentences back. And when attention decreases, memory encoding decreases. In other words, we don't

remember stuff much stuff because we're not paying attention. We're not switched on, we're not focused, we're not energetically brought into that thing we're seeing or doing or involved in, and when the memory encoding goes down, life feels like it speeds up, so that five years feels like it was five months. In other words, routine can quietly become an experiential time machine like that or a virtual time machine from our point of view, not because time changes,

of course, but because awareness changes. There's some really interesting research around this idea. Psychologists sometimes distinguish between prospective time perception how time feels while we're experiencing it, and retrospective time perception how long periods feel when we look back at them. This explains another weird phenomenon. Difficult moments often feel slow in real time. It stretches perception. Stress stretches perception,

Pain stretches perception. Waiting stretches perception. If you've ever sat terrified in a doctor's waiting room wondering why it seems like it's taking fucking weeks for your name to be called because you're stressed about what's going to happen. You think there's some impending doom or bad news, or you just take going to the doctor, then you know what I mean that twenty minutes can feel like twenty hours, but later those same stressful months or years can feel

strangely compressed in memory because stress narrows attention. When we're overwhelmed, we often fully stop experiencing life and shift into management mode, survival mode, efficiency mode, get through the day mode. We stop noticing and attention, psychologically speaking, is everything. So William James,

who's quite a famous bloke in American psychology. I think some people called him the father of American psychology, he said, my experience is what I agree to attend to, or we might say give attention to, because you don't have any experience around things that you're not giving focus or energy or attention to. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Now that's a profound idea, because whatever repeatedly captures your attention, well, that gradually becomes your reality.

Your brain literally builds your lived experience from what you

consistently and consciously choose to focus on. Which is why two people can live in the same place, and sit in the same meetings, and have similar conversations, and have the same job in the same or whatever, all the same, except none of them, neither of them are having the same experience, because the experience that perception is not about what's going on, is not about the people around the environment or the situation as much as it is how

each of those two individuals interpret those goings on. So one might notice beauty and humor and connection and learning and challenge and possibility and hope and great things, and the other focuses on outrage and stress and comparison and threatned boom scrolling and all kinds of self induced despair. So same planet, same environment, different reality. Attention is the currency of consciousness, and modern life is aggressively competing for it,

your attention. That is es bestly on social media, especially on Planet podcast. Everyone wants you to listen to their stuff. I get it. And this is important because our brains evolved in environments when novelty was occasional and meaningful. But now in twenty twenty six, novelty arrives every seven seconds via a glowing rectangle in your hand. You scroll, you swipe, you click, you're refresh, you repeat. We're overstimulated but under experienced.

And that's the paradox. We can shew more information than any humans in history, yet many of us many I talk to people every day who feel increasingly disconnected from their own lives, and not only not only their own lives, but their own bodies, their own relationships, because new information

is not new experience. Watching twelve travel videos is not the same as sitting in a tiny cafe and Lisbon trying to order a coffee in terrible Portuguese while wondering whether or not you accidentally just asked for goat milk

and a fork. Real experiences create depth, embodied moments, sensory richness, emotional texture, and it's these moments that expand psychological time because they force us into this present moment to be here now, and presence is really really important, not in the kind of mystical, mythical crystal shop alone Sakra's with the moon frequencies kind of vibe, but I mean in

the simple psychological present. Your mind is present, you are here, actually being where you are while you're there in this moment, not transfixed by what might happen in the future or what happened in the past, but just being here right now. And it sounds kind of ridiculously obvious until you realize that most of us actually don't do it. I'm just rereading as I said recently on a podcast a week or two ago, I'm rereading The Power of Now by Eckhart Toll. And it's an old book, and some people

think it's crap. Some people think it's like the most brilliant piece of writing or insight ever. And I think it depends which mindset or where your mind is at when you're going to read it. But for me, who can be easily distracted, who can be an overthinker, not in a stress way, but in a creative way. Sometimes I'll have seventeen ideas while I'm having a shower, and I'll start to plan four of them before I get

out of the shower. And then I'll get out of my shower and literally do this before I'm even dry. I walk into my office where don't think about this, by the way, and write things on the whiteboard because I don't want to forget them, because I want to turn the ideas into action, the theory into something practical, and so on. But that doesn't always create good outcomes. So back to the book, Power Now, It's really about

for me slowing down and being present. And even when I go for walk now, generally one hundred percent of the time I'm listening to something. Now I've the last couple of weeks, I've been doing every second walk where I don't even take headphones, I have my phone in my pocket. I'm not listening to anything. I'm just paying attention. I'm paying attention to my foot, my feet on the footpath, paying attention to my breathing. I'm paying attention to my posture.

I'm paying attention to the trees that I walk past, to the wind against my face, to the noise or lack of noise in the street that I'm in, and so on and for me. But I'm not there yet by any means. It's still a conscious decision. But I want to make that. I want to make that something that is just my default setting, where I am at least a lot more of the time, truly in the moment, in the place I am, in the time I am,

in the energy that I am. I truly want to be there, because half the time we are mentally replaying yesterday, or we're rehearsing tomorrow, while our actual life unfolds unnoticed in front of us, and then we wonder where the years went. And there's also an interesting biological component to perceive time celeration as we age, and that is partly This is true and interesting. Each year becomes proportionately smaller relative to our total lifespan. So you know, when you're five,

a year is twenty percent of your life. It is twenty percent of the totality of your lifespan to that point in time. But when you're fifty one year is two percent. So we've got twenty verses two, and so as a component, as a fraction, as a percentage of my life, a year seems to go quicker, but of course it doesn't. But as the sixty two year old,

I'm going to be sixty three in a minute. But when you're won, and I'm sure you're not thinking about life or such matters or time, When you won your next birthday, which is two Thanks for explaining that, Craig. I don't know why I said that. Sorry about that. But when you won, your next birthday is literally based on where you're at right now as a one year old. It's literally another lifetime away. It's crazy. But biology doesn't alone.

Biology doesn't fully explain the phenomenon. Lifestyle matters enormously, novelty matters, learning matters, challenge matters, environment matters, attention matters, and we find that people who continue to explore and learn and travel and create and risk and adapt, they often report a richer and psychological slower experience of life. Not necessarily easier, not necessarily calmer, still be chaos, but fuller, because fullness is not the same as busyness, and modern culture confuses

these two things all the time. We've become very skilled at scheduling our lives while accidentally disappearing from them. And many people are productive and busy, but also absent, efficient but disconnected, chronically stimulated, but psychologically somewhere else. We optimize our calendars but neglect our consciousness. And that sounds dramatic, but honestly, have a look around and even have a look within. And again, as I always say, not self loathing,

just self awareness. Like I say all the time to people, in a minute, you're going to be five years older. And of course that's not true, but it's also true. So have a look around. People walking through beautiful parks, staring at phones, Families at dinner not looking at each other, not speaking to each other, either looking at their phone

or looking over someone's shoulder at the TVs. People going to concerts who are not watching the concert, they're filming the concert, and they're looking at the concert through the screen on their phone. Beautiful sunsets and nature interrupted by notifications, Moments half lived because we're busy documenting them instead of experiencing them. And again, this isn't about being anti technology or moving into a forest and making soup from leaves,

although that will be good. You know, I use Wi Fi, I by takeaway dinner. I'm not trying to churn my own butter. But we do need to recognize that attention

fragmentation changes our experience of existence. Constant distraction creates shallow living, and shallow living compresses memory, as we said before, which is perhaps why many adults experience this haunting sense that life is speeding up while simultaneously feeling oddly repetitive, like they're busy all the time, but not fully alive inside

the busyness. And sometimes I think that is that's the price we pay for technology and for all the stuff we dive into, and that's the hidden cost or maybe not so hidden cost of modern life. And not just stress or fatigue, but almost like the gradual erosion of our presence, A life can become incredibly full while at the same time feeling strangely unlived. So what do we do about this? What do we do with all this?

How do we psychologically slow life down? Well, not by literally slowing clocks, obviously, but perhaps by interrupting our autopilot, by increasing conscious attention, by creating more novelty, more firsts, more challenges, more unpredictability, more depth. Travel can help. Learning helps, hard conversations, help creative projects, help, doing scary things, help doing new stuff, just doing new stuff, changing routines, being

ge genuinely curious about things and people. Even small changes matter. Take a different route home, read a different book, talk to different people, learn a new skill, try a new thing it's somewhere unfamiliar, Put your phone away occasionally and raw dog it for twenty minutes. Oh that's a terrible term,

isn't it, And see what happens? Because the goal is not merely to exist for a long time, but to actually experience your existence while you're there, while you're here, And perhaps that's the real issue under the whole long Day's fast year is phenomenon. It's not just about time, It's about consciousness. It's about whether where participants in our lives or merely managers of them. And I don't even

think that. I think sometimes not only are we not participants in our lives or even managers of our lives. I think sometimes our life manages us, because our life has its own kind of energy and life force and

continuity and flow. And it's almost like sometimes we get out of bed and we just step back into that ritual, that habit, that pattern that really doesn't even work, and there's very little consciousness about what we're doing because we're always trapped in the minutia, and or we're often trapped in the minutia and the micro of the ritual and

the thing that we do. We need to wake up for our existence, not just administrate it, because one day, and yes this got expectedly existential, you'll realize that the thing you call your ordinary life was actually your life. Not the future version, not when things settle down, not when work gets easier, not when the kids are big, not when you lose ten k's, not when you finally

get organized. Just this, just now, the messy middle, the unfinished version, the imperfect Tuesday, that was it, that is it, and maybe the challenge is not to learn how to control time. In fact, it's definitely not that, but learning how to stop abandoning moments while you're having them, while you're in the middle of them, because ultimately the years

don't disappear, we disappear from them. Maybe the art of living is to learn how to return to attention and awareness and presence in this moment, because another decade quietly slips past while we're refreshing our emails and wondering where the bloody time went. See you next time.