How to make life feel longer
Hack time
Time is a funny old thing.
It flies when you’re having fun. A good party or a promising date always comes to an end too soon.
Yet time slows to a crawl when life is dull. Think how the minutes move like molasses when you’re ticking boxes at work or listening to a boring lecture.
Memory further messes with our metronomes. As the Italian poet Cesare Pavese put it: “We don’t remember days, we remember moments.” In other words, when you look back on your life, the boring patches barely register.
In her book, Time Warped, psychologist Claudia Hammond argued that moments rich with novel and engaging experiences stretch out in the memory. So the more memorable moments you have, the longer your life feels in retrospect.
The great Thomas Mann agreed. He sang the praises of novelty and warned against too much repetition and routine: “When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short.”
That's what happened during the pandemic. Lockdowns killed off novelty, condemning many of us to long stretches of repetition and routine. Result: the hours passed painfully slowly at the time yet when we look back now it seems unbelievable that the pandemic lasted as long as it did.
It was the worst of both worlds, where time dragged and left little mark. Is there a way to dodge this double whammy?
Travel can help. Done right, it serves up a memorable feast of novelty.
Research suggests that when looking back on two weeks of our ordinary routine we can recall on average six to nine events. When you travel, you can rack up that many Kodak moments in a day – eating unfamiliar food; encountering foreign sounds, smells, architecture; meeting new people; grappling with another language; driving on the other side of the road.
Travel can therefore turn the tables on repetition and routine. By cranking up the novelty, it passes swiftly at the time but then stretches out later in the memory. Which makes life feel longer.
But hitting the road can only help up to a point: Mann warned that the novelty of travel loses its punch after six to eight days
Here's an easier solution: recreate the enriching thrill of travel by injecting some novelty into your normal routine at home:
Chat to a neighbour you've hitherto ignored. Cook unfamiliar recipes. Walk or cycle through a remote part of town. Eat lunch in a new place. Commute to work using a different form of transport. Vary your route to the supermarket. Take a weekend class, join a book club or attend a food tasting.
You might find that time passes a little more quickly in the moment. But that your life feels richer – and longer.
Not a bad trade off…
Hey Carl, a characteristically thought provoking post. This is a powerful reminder that time isn’t just something we spend—it’s something we shape.
If we want our lives to feel longer, we need to stop thinking of time as a passive force that simply happens to us. Instead, we must take ownership of it. How can we do that? By designing a life filled with meaningful, novel, and memorable experiences.
This is why purpose matters so much. People who wake up every day with a reason to be excited, to contribute, to grow, experience time differently. They don’t just go through life. They engage with it. They create moments that matter, and as a result, their lives feel longer and richer. This is something I’m coming to appreciate as I approach “level .
Too often, we fall into the trap of believing that curiosity, adventure, and reinvention are for the young. But that’s a false narrative. The people who live the longest-feeling lives are those who never stop learning, never stop challenging themselves, and never stop injecting novelty into their everyday routines.
Thanks, Carl 🙌
I think there are many things in our daily lives where we can inject some excitement, change, inspiration, and "moments". I always find some change and special memory when meeting with a friend and having a good conversation.