Does time feel like it moves fast or slow for you?
The answer for me has changed recently since traveling on the road full time.
When I was living in my apartment in SF and Denver, I felt like time moved incredibly quickly. Not only that, but that time moved quickly and I had nothing to show for it.
Days would fly by and what did I have to look back on? Did I improve in some way? Make progress towards some goal? Learn something new?
The answer became a resounding no.
That was another wake up call for me that something needed to change.
But I was chatting with my cousin the other week and the question came up again. I sat and thought about it. Here are my thoughts.
Time still moves quickly for me now. Those feelings of “wow the days have just been flying by” or “I can’t believe I’ve been here since X” still exist. But the other side has emerged as true for me as well. I started to think, “it’s only been about a month and I’ve already been to all these places” or “I was in Colorado only a 6 weeks ago.”
It’s amazing how many new experiences I have, how many new places I’ve been in less than 2 months. I used to explore new places every couple of weeks (i.e. weekends) or months and now it’s happening every couple of days. It’s like I’m pouring a JUG of new experiences and memories into my mental cup rather than slowly trickling them in. (How I’ll deal with and reconcile having a jug of experiences poured into my mental cup will be something I’ll have to deal with in the future…)
Having novel experiences is something that Derek Muller (Veritasium) talks about as contributing to making time seem slower in this video. I can now relate to how this can be true.
So that’s my answer now. The implications of this answer will be up for interpretation in the future, but that’s a problem for future-Peter to sort out.