on time

Time is strange. It goes fast when we want it to go slow, and slow when we want it fast. When I play games online with my friends, three hours evaporates in what feels like thirty minutes. But when I’m stuck at the DMV, or waiting for someone to text me back during an intense conversation, time feels sluggish and heavy, filled with more cracks and folds in which psychic grime can accrete.

But, of course, there are activities that buck these trends. There are times where we are amazed, looking back, at how many good moments filled a day. Days where one might go to work, talk to family on the phone, attend a workshop, work on a hobby, meditate for thirty minutes, hang out with a roommate, and grab a late dinner. These days feel slightly supernaturally long, in a warm way. If we have two huge activities in one day: say, a beach trip in the morning followed by an evening barbecue and a night spent relaxing alone, we often get the unshakeable impression that two days have passed instead of just one.

And there are times where the opposite is true: no matter what you do, weeks or even years can pass as if they were single, sluggish days. This is often coupled with the experience of deep, unrelenting depression. And I think these two qualities are linked, interdependent. When time speeds up, we find ourselves more easily slipping into the painfully un-melancholic fugue for which depression is known.

I recently talked to a friend who made an observation about hyper-optimizing rationalist types: they desire complete lack of friction in their lives, but in order to tell if it’s actually making their lives better, you can just look at the state of their bedroom. And rationalists often have messy bedrooms.

In this case, she posits, the normies have it right. Cleaning your room, washing your sheets regularly, getting up at an hour that feels good to you, keeping your home organized, taking time to cook for yourself, caring for your surroundings, walking your dog yourself, these are all behaviors that are largely interdependent with wellness.

And I believe that the reason that they correlate (and cause) wellness is that they increase the number of days we experience per day. I think, for rationalists, and those of us with our mental focus too far inward, we have an experienced-time:real-time ratio of <1. But the more we engage in these behaviors that we consider distractions or chores, the better that ratio gets. Life is not meant to be frictionless, because in many ways, life is friction. That’s been my experience anyway. If you disagree hard enough, I trust you can find me.