Episode 10: Living a Long Life

Recently, I was listening to a podcast called Help Wanted.
If you've never heard of this show, it's largely a show aimed at professionals and professional workplace sorts of topics, entrepreneur types of topics.
The show is sort of split into two different sorts of shows or sorts of episodes.
Once a week, it's two people, the two co-hosts, tackling some sort of usually listener-submitted topic.
The other day of the week, they release twice a week.
The other day of the week, it's the male host reading typically one of his newsletters from past weeks.
He also produces a newsletter on similar topics.
If you've never heard of it, I'd recommend it.
It's a very good show, well-produced.
Topics are usually very engaging.
I'll put a link to it in the description.
On this particular episode, it was one of the newsletter ones.
He was reading through something that he had written on the topic of perceiving, how to perceive your life as being long.
And as being, in a positive way, how to perceive your life as being a long and also fulfilling type of life.
And he was citing research by a man at Duke, or a professor at Duke who does research there named Philippe de Brigarde.
I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation.
His area, his discipline of expertise is really around memory.
But the point of this particular little anecdote was that the two are very tied.
Your perception of time is heavily tied to the memories you have about that time.
But more to the point, the more unique memories you have over a certain period of time, when you look back at that time, the longer it feels as if that time period was.
So let me make it a little more concrete.
Let's say you have a six-month period of time where you go to five concerts of people or of bands or groups you've never seen before.
You meet up with friends who you haven't seen in a long time, several times.
Every single weekend, you go out and do something new.
You know, one weekend, you try rock climbing.
One weekend, you go for a long bike ride.
I don't know.
Whatever it is that you don't typically do, and you jam a lot of that into a six-month period of time.
Compared to a six-month period of time where you just sort of do what you do on any given day.
You wake up.
You have breakfast.
You go to work.
You don't change jobs.
You come home.
You have dinner.
You watch some TV.
And you go to bed.
When you look back at those periods of time, even though each period in this hypothetical example is six months long,
the one that you filled with lots of different and, importantly, new activities will feel like a far longer period of time
than the six months where you kind of just ground through it.
This is because the way your memory functions is that it sort of segments itself.
So if you go four or five days of the same old, same old, and then on day five or six, you do something brand new,
your brain makes a segment of memory.
And the way he describes it in the podcast is it's sort of like a hatchet or a guillotine slicing that memory path into a smaller segment because something consequential has happened.
And the more of those segments you have, the more smaller segments you have, the longer a period of time feels because, and it kind of makes sense,
if you have a long period of time that's all just the same, same old, same old, same old, same old,
your brain will actually just consolidate that whole period of time and almost summarize it to itself.
Since nothing all that interesting or motivating or fulfilling or new or stimulating happened during that long period of time,
your brain will just shorten it and just tuck it away as almost like a summary.
Compared to, you know, as I said, doing many new things and creating all these little segments, it makes it feel like a longer period of time.
When I heard this, I, I, when I heard this, I, I was fascinated.
Um, I, I have heard, I was vaguely aware of a connect, of this connection between, of a connection between memory and sort of the perceived passage of time.
But I think it was just sort of tucked away.
I never paid it much mind.
I remember, you know, hearing about it and passing at some point in my life.
But this was just fascinating to me.
And, and it makes so much sense.
But it also creates sort of a point of contention within ourselves.
I don't know about you, but I, and I know many people who are more inclined, particularly as they get, I don't know, older.
Uh, I don't think that age is the only factor here, but I'm just kind of using it in broad strokes.
More and more inclined as life goes on to say no to things rather than yes.
Your brain can immediately fire up five, ten reasons why you might not want to do something.
Rather than the simple reason of, you know, why you, why you, why you should.
But I think this may also dovetail into this perception that as, as we get older, time goes faster and faster and faster.
I think we're saying no to more things societally than we should be.
And the dynamic of work, culture, and society, and social norms, and technology, and social media, all of these things, I think, play a role here.
When you have eight, nine, ten hours a day committed to your job, and you're tired, and you know the next day you need to go do that again,
you're going to be a little less inclined day after day to say yes to something new when all you really want to do is sit down and recharge.
Over time, this can easily extend to weekends, or days off, or whatever your particular working schedule and dynamic is like.
I also think that social media and our, our interaction with technology plays a big role here.
For those of you who are doom scrollers, and I think that to some degree, probably many of us are at least at times,
do you really remember those periods of scrolling?
You might spend hours on it a week, or a day, but the memories over time just sort of blur together.
You sort of vaguely remember that maybe you did it for a while, but you don't necessarily know, or can point at any given thing in that period of time.
I know that, you know, that, that phenomenon all too well.
And it behooves the, the companies that run these things to make that happen in that way.
Um, particularly if, in the case that, you know, if you're, if your daily routine becomes stare at social media, stare at social media or web content or whatever it is,
eventually find something that you want to buy, go to Amazon, buy that thing, go back to staring at stuff, get a small dopamine hit.
That's a great pattern for everyone, but you, we could even take it a step further.
And you could talk about, again, I don't know about all of you, but there have been things that have shown up to my house from Amazon.
And I barely remember ordering them.
And I've talked to other people who it's similar.
Oh yeah, this thing showed up.
I kind of forgot ordering it.
Do you remember that, that before all of these platforms going out to the store to buy something might actually be a little bit more monumental of a, or a little more, more memorable of an experience.
Anyway, the point of this is not to necessarily rag on technology or rag on social media.
It just occurs to me that that is one more pattern that absorbs time that's more comfortable to people than saying yes to some random experience.
When in fact, saying yes to that random experience, whatever it is, will actually make you perceive in the long run as if you have elongated your life.
So in some ways, perceptually, by doing these same things every day and engaging in these, these same comfortable behaviors, we are actually shortening our own perception of our own lives.
So I'll leave with this.
But in some ways, as I've, as I've gotten older over the years, I think that the silly movie, Yes Man with Jim Carrey from, geez, I'm not even sure when it was from around 2000, I guess.
I didn't look it up for this.
I think that movie had a lot of wisdom to it.
I mean, I remember watching at the time and remember at that time, technology was not quite as pervasive.
The web, all these things, certainly not phones, any of that kind of stuff.
I remember seeing at the time and being like, this is a, this is a positive message.
But as time has gone on and particularly seeing, you know, or listening to an episode like this podcast, it just brings me back to that.
And I think it's only proven more and more true over time.
We should be saying yes to a lot more stuff, myself included.
I'm guilty of this.
Just coming up with reasons to not do things because that's more comfortable to my brain than just saying yes to the thing.
Which 80, 90% of the time saying yes and then going and doing that new thing has all 80% of the, 80 to 90% of the time is a positive experience.
And even if it's not, it creates us again, a segment in your memory and actually elongates your own perception of your own life.
So I don't know.
If you've never seen the movie, yes, man, go check it out.
Maybe take it to heart.
And next time you're going to say no to something, try saying yes instead.
What's the worst that can happen?