Living in perceived time
"How can 12 numbers contain all of time?"
I was going to an event in Indiranagar. It takes 15 minutes to get to the metro station, 45 minutes in the metro and a 15 minutes walk to reach there
Once I was in the metro, it didnt really feel like time was passing. The 45 minutes felt like 15. I spent it revising my flashcards and I get lost in them. So by the time I reach the event, the entire journey barely felt like an hour!
After a long work day, coming back home and trying to do anything takes a lot of effort. The only thing I have the energy to do is switching the tv on and letting anything play to just pass the time away. And as soon as the episode finishes, an hour has passed by, but mentally it feels like 15 minutes.
There is a layer of abstraction between universal time and perceived time that is obfuscated by mental tiredness, the activity at hand, and the disturbance in the surroundings
What if, instead of arranging the day around universal time, it is structured around perceived time?
Apart from making your co-workers hate you, it would also give you a better idea about what you can get done in a day
We should start off by maximising the amount of perceived time by getting the blood flowing through the body. A quick workout, or just a couple of pushups make the blood flow through the brain. An evening meditation session to refresh the mind and increase that precious after-work before-sleep hour into two. Playing some music while doing the dishes and before you know it they'll be done.
But I wont mess with sleep. The biological clock, unfortunately, is tied to sunlight and consequently to universal time. We have alarms to the rescue to synchronize between the two
I noticed that the translation of UTC to PT happens through the medium of attention. If it is frequently interrupted, the block of time is discontinuous and the flow of whatever you are engaged in is broken. The state of Flow makes time feel faster.
An interesting point raised by vsauce was that looking back at the time spent in flow feels completely different. He gave the example of going on vacation and visiting different monuments. Within the moment, the flow of time feels faster, but when you look back, the richness and diversity of the experience feels like it lasted longer.
Maybe its not true for my metro example. I look back and I dont look at it as a rich and a diverse experience but the cards that I went through do add a hint of newness and flavour to what would have otherwise been a boring journey.
Striving for complete engagement in the day to day makes looking back enjoyable.