The other day on a podcast I heard a very accurate analogy about how short life is, and the perspective we have on the time we’ve got.
And it’s so jarring that if you pay attention, it might actually help you, if you know how to use it to your advantage.
Listen to this:
For a 5-year-old, if you tell them they have to wait a year, it feels like forever, but for a 40-year-old, a year goes by in the blink of an eye.
I don’t know how old you are, but if you’ve been on this planet for more than 30 years, you know this is true.
It hurts, it pisses you off, but it’s true.
They say this happens because for a 5-year-old, one year equals 20% of their life. However, for a 40-year-old, one year is 2.5% of their life.
In psychology, this can be explained by three things that are connected to each other. Take notes:
First, by what they call future time perspective, and what’s known as socioemotional selectivity theory. Basically, when your mind stops experiencing the future as open and endless, time changes value (you’re not 20 anymore, with that feeling of “having your whole life ahead of you”). A year is no longer “a year”, it’s a chunk of what you’ve got left. And that’s where the sense of finitude shows up, the “I’m not young anymore”, and the rage about wasted time.
Second, by how that feeling gets built when you look back. You don’t remember time, you remember what happened inside time. If you’ve lived through a period with little novelty, little variation, and lots of autopilot, that period leaves fewer traces in memory (what really leaves an imprint are events with emotional weight, more on that in another newsletter!). And then, when you replay it in your head, it feels like it evaporated. That’s why there are years that “don’t exist” in your mind, even though you lived them.
Third, by the way the brain segments experience into “events”. With age, in general, fewer changes or “boundaries” between events get registered, which makes experience feel less fragmented, more continuous, more uniform. And when a stage is uniform (more the same, more repetitive), it also goes faster, because there are fewer cuts, fewer internal milestones that force you to notice time passing.
That’s why I’ve made you a gift, completely free, so you can use time to your advantage, instead of letting it work against you.
This way, you’ll stop feeling like the years are flying by, and feeling crushed inside, with frustration, sadness, or despair, because the life you long for has nothing to do with how your days actually unfold.
And the days, time, your life, keep passing.
For that to change, you have to stop and reflect. There’s no other way. There are no shortcuts to a meaningful life. Either you give it care and attention, or we keep going like this. Meaning: on autopilot.
If you want to use the time you’ve got in this lifetime to your advantage, it’s here.
If you want to keep wasting your time and then complain about it, go to TikTok, or get hooked on the latest Netflix series aka distraction.
All is well.
Love,
Noemi
P.S.: here to download the free annual review template.
