One of the most surprising things I’ve ever learned is that novelty and attention extend your lifespan.
Or, more precisely, attention and novelty slow time. And the opposite is true as well: pattern and distraction accelerate it.
This model explains why time moved so slowly when we were children, and why it streaks by in large gulps as we get older. When we’re young, everything is new. And when things are new, we can’t help but pay attention to them. We’re fascinated by them. And time freezes.
As we get older, we switch to autopilot. We stop paying attention. We wake up, eat the same breakfast, go to the same job. We rut into a pattern. We don’t notice things. We don’t appreciate things. We don’t delight in them the way we used to because very few things are new anymore. In fact we barely notice them at all.
Hard to say exactly, but I think this accelerates time by 2, 5, or 10x. Seasons become years and years become decades.
You think you just took out the garbage and watched a show on NETFLIX, but when you look at the calendar it’s 11 years later.
One way to frame this is the way we already have, i.e., based around the amount of novelty that you have in your life. As in, how new are the activities that you are doing day-to-day?
But perhaps a better way is to think less about the activity and more about how much you’re paying attention to life in general. They tend to go together.
The supernatural power I learned from Sam Harris through his meditation course is that we can actually slow time ourselves by learning to control our attention.
After learning meditation from Sam, I now have a dead simple way of describing meditation itself: There are only two states of living…
- There is aware
- And there is hijacked
Aware is when your attention is alive and observant, which makes the subject of your focus a kind of everyday extraordinary. From breathing to an ankle itch.
Being hijacked is the natural state for all of us. Even Sam or the Dalai Lama. In this state, you are not aware of what you’re thinking or feeling. Instead of observing life, life is happening to you.
You become your feelings. You become your thoughts. The separation between yourself and your inputs dissolves.
A good example would be imagining a work conversation where some guy Chris said something dismissive about one of your projects. In your mind, everyone in the meeting now thinks less of you and your work at the company.
And for the next day—or perhaps multiple days, or maybe it’s been a couple of weeks now—you’ve just been thinking about it.
I can’t believe he said that…Your brain without your permission
Whether you’re driving to do an errand, or eating a sandwich, or sitting on the couch, your brain goes through the scenario thousands of times in different iterations.
you scratch an itch you didn’t realize you had
You imagine different ways you should’ve reacted. What you can possibly do to fix this. Whether or not you should look for another job. You hope that he gets fired.
You are not yourself while this is happening.
There is no you while this is happening.
You have become a cockroach in a garbage can on a freight train, heading towards a distant silly place that does not matter.
How many minutes or hours or days have you spent thinking about that particular thing? The real problem is not even this situation. The problem is that our lives are full of situations just like them. Over and over. Annoyances and ruminations.
If you were to check in on your mind at any particular moment, of any particular day, of any particular year in your life, and you were to see a text transcript of what you were thinking, it would be the ramblings of rumination.
For the hijacked, when we feel emotions we become those emotions. When we have negative thoughts, we become those negative thoughts. This is the state of being distraction. The lack of attention.
Unfortunately, it’s the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time—including me.
There are ways to break free.
- We can learn to meditate. Even a little. Give yourself the ability to get to the Aware state, even if it’s just for brief moments during the day.
- We can build more novelty into our lives. New books. New foods. New art.
- We can bias towards creation vs. consumption. Creation takes focus, which is a type of attention, and often requires novelty as you learn and master a craft as well.
If we quiet our minds, and pay close attention to great food, great friends, great books, and great walks with our loved ones…
If we honor the present moment, and the feeling of her hand in yours—we can turn seconds into lifetimes.
If we create instead of consume.
If we build instead of bicker.
We magnify the quality and duration of the time we have in this life.
Doing this well means 10 years can become 50.
And doing this wrong means you could die at 90 and never have lived at all.
