How to make the most of your life

So, what’s the secret to making the most of life?

The secret is to understand something very important…

As we age time seems to fly by faster. It’s not just a feeling. There’s a reason…

When you’re a 2, a year is 50% of your life. That’s massive. Next year really is a lifetime away. When you’re 40, a year is only 2.5% of your life. It’s much less significant.

In youth, everything is new — school, places, faces, challenges. Novelty forces the brain to lay down dense, vivid memories.

By adulthood, most days look the same. You drive the same route, speak to the same people.

Your brain stops recording the details because it’s seen them all before. When you look back, the months blur together. The illusion of speed is really the absence of diverse memories.

A 2019 study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that time feels slower when we’re fully present and faster when our attention is fragmented.

Modern life is fragmentation on overdrive — notifications, multitasking, constant mental noise. We’re rarely fully in the moment, so the moments slip by unnoticed.

Time feels faster because we stop filling it with new experiences and stop anchoring it with meaningful memories.

In other words, we stop paying attention to the incredible thing that’s life. We literally forget we’re alive.

If you want time to start living a life you won’t regret, you have to start living like each moment really matters: Break the routine. Seek novelty. Pay attention. Be present. Do things that scare you. Fill your days with things worth remembering. Life doesn’t accelerate. We just fall asleep at the wheel.

But how, in practice, do you adjust adult life to be richer in this way, like it is for an excited child on Christmas morning?

Avoid ‘the preparation trap’: that’s what I’ll explain in the next post.