Photo by Jordan Benton on Pexels
These final months before the November US national elections feel like the slowest months ever. It’s funny, because as I’ve gotten older, the rest of my time just continues to fly by me at increasing speeds.
I used to try to escape from the stressful political news, and from the stress of aging, by doomscrolling. But no matter how many one-minute social media videos I watched, the time they filled flew by lightning quick. No matter how many funny memes, hook-filled dances, tasty recipes I viewed, none of them could slow down the time around me.
I’ve been hearing on recent podcasts that the way to slow down your perception of time is to do new things. This is not a new concept. NBC wrote about the concept of stretching time out back in 2018. As it turns out, we actually do experience time flying past us faster and faster the older we get. And when we engage in habitual things, our brain processes the time spent doing that in an ephemeral way. It doesn’t need to spend any more time on that memory because we have already done the activity a hundred times before.
When we do new things, our brain has to work harder to learn how to do that new thing and, because of that, that memory leaves a lasting impressing. Our brain remembers that time as taking longer because it is remembering more of that new activity.
So, this weekend, I said yes to more things. I said yes to a friend inviting us to a book launch party at a local bookstore. I said yes to going to a local town fair and eating hot dogs and roving up and down local booths. I said yes to going to a UU church service, and I said yes to a Sunday evening yoga class. All of these yeses put me in the position of meeting new friends and having new experiences with old friends.
As I sit here writing down what I remembered of this weekend, I didn’t feel like the weekend had flown by. Because I was experiencing new things, my weekend extended to encompass community and experience. Whenever I engage more with community, I’m bound to have new experiences, and I feel less lonely. A win-win.
And so, I have decided that I am a magician when it comes to time. Instead of making it disappear like a rabbit in a hat by scrolling endlessly online, I’m going to commit to making new friends and having new experiences over the weekend and during my free time. Watch, you’ll see that I’m soon going to be able to make it so that the time that I have to spend freely is exponentially longer than the time I spend working.
Magic.
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