Latest / The You Project / #2156 Long Days, Fast Years - Harps

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#2156 Long Days, Fast Years - Harps · The You Project

0:00
Speaker 1: Good Day, Champs has hope you bloody great another solo today,
0:03
Speaker 1: So if you're not a fan of the solos, see
0:06
Speaker 1: it another day. If you are stick around, you might
0:09
Speaker 1: like this. I don't know if this is a good
0:11
Speaker 1: strategy or not. In fact, should I be strategic with
0:13
Speaker 1: the podcast? I don't think so a little bit, But
0:17
Speaker 1: I want to be aware. I guess the main thing
0:19
Speaker 1: I want to be around the show and what we
0:21
Speaker 1: put up in the conversations we have or the solos
0:24
Speaker 1: that I do, that I am consistently trying to bring
0:27
Speaker 1: something to the world, whether that's one person or one
0:31
Speaker 1: thousand people or fifty thousand people, whoever listens. I'm trying
0:35
Speaker 1: to bring something that might add value or insight or
0:38
Speaker 1: understanding or knowledge to what you're already working with. And
0:45
Speaker 1: I try to make the subject matter the conversations as
0:49
Speaker 1: broadly relevant as possible. But if I'm being honest, I
0:54
Speaker 1: am biased. Do I'm biased? Do in that I often
1:01
Speaker 1: just go with things that hopefully tick all the other boxes,
1:05
Speaker 1: but things that have my attention in the moment. And
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Speaker 1: I've spoken about this before, but it's like the context
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Speaker 1: of time or the experience of time, how we interpret experience,
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Speaker 1: interact with, have a relationship with time as a subjective
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Speaker 1: experience versus the objective reality of time, which is time
1:32
Speaker 1: is a constant. Time is sixty seconds every minute, sixty
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Speaker 1: minutes every hour, bloody twenty four hours a day, et cetera,
1:39
Speaker 1: et cetera. Doesn't change. It's the same. But we're not
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Speaker 1: the same. We're the variable. We are the thing. You know,
1:46
Speaker 1: some hours can feel like a fuck and day, and
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Speaker 1: some days can feel like ten minutes for a range
1:52
Speaker 1: of reasons. And so I started writing something. Firstly, I
1:59
Speaker 1: wrote it host for Instagram, which was very brief, and
2:05
Speaker 1: it didn't really set the world on fire. That's okay
2:11
Speaker 1: because it wasn't didn't say shit or fuck or cock,
2:14
Speaker 1: which everybody seems to like on Instagram or my followers
2:17
Speaker 1: what is wrong with you, by the way, But my
2:19
Speaker 1: followers on Instagram, I've said this before. If I post
2:23
Speaker 1: two identical posts but one as swearing and one does not,
2:26
Speaker 1: the one we're swearing will ten x the one without
2:29
Speaker 1: swearing pretty much every time. In fact, I've had that
2:32
Speaker 1: happen with my books. My biggest selling book is called
2:35
Speaker 1: Stop Fucking Around. And so, for whatever reason, good or bad,
2:41
Speaker 1: you're all fucking riff raff. That's it. But sometimes I
2:46
Speaker 1: open that it's almost like, you know, with comedians. I
2:48
Speaker 1: don't know if you ever listen to comedians how they
2:51
Speaker 1: write and how they work and how they develop what
2:53
Speaker 1: they call bits a bit as a joke, And I'll
2:56
Speaker 1: come out with a bit and it won't really work
2:59
Speaker 1: or a joe, and then they'll take it back, they'll
3:01
Speaker 1: polish it, they'll change a few bits, it'll get a
3:03
Speaker 1: better response, it'll you know, and then eventually that concept
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Speaker 1: as something to make people laugh becomes a really funny
3:15
Speaker 1: joke over time, but it needs to be developed because
3:18
Speaker 1: we're trying to land with humans who are not us.
3:20
Speaker 1: We're trying to gain some kind of response, and so
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Speaker 1: too with my stuff. I'm always thinking about what will
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Speaker 1: make people laugh, but what will resonate with people? What
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Speaker 1: will land with people? And if I'm doing a one
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Speaker 1: on one coaching session with somebody, or I'm in front
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Speaker 1: of a thousand people in an auditorium, or I'm talking
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Speaker 1: to you on a podcast, I'm always trying to be
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Speaker 1: cognizant of mindful of what is this like, what is
3:48
Speaker 1: this idea, this subject, this language, this conversation. What is
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Speaker 1: this like as an experience for the person on the
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Speaker 1: other side of me or the person's on the other
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Speaker 1: side of me, Because I also have to be aware
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Speaker 1: that the only person in the world who thinks like me,
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Speaker 1: exactly like me all the time is me. So I'm
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Speaker 1: not trying to inspire me, I'm not trying to resonate
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Speaker 1: with me. I'm not trying to empower me. I'm trying
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Speaker 1: to do that in some way for you. So I
4:19
Speaker 1: started writing this piece. So the thing I did on
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Speaker 1: Instagram didn't really fly, which is cool because it's learning.
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Speaker 1: And then I thought, you know what, I'm going to
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Speaker 1: write about it. I'm going to write a piece about
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Speaker 1: it because I think it is irrelevant and sometimes really
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Speaker 1: helpful idea to construct reality. I put an asterisk next
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Speaker 1: to that reality for us to explore because we all
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Speaker 1: interact and intersect with time and the practical real world
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Speaker 1: reality of time in that it is a constant, and
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Speaker 1: the other reality of time from our point of view
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Speaker 1: is it is something that we navigate, something that we manage,
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Speaker 1: something that we interact with, deal with, prioritize, and also
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Speaker 1: something that we experience. So there's the practical objective reality
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Speaker 1: of the constant that is time, and then there's the
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Speaker 1: also the reality of the experience of time is you
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Speaker 1: and me. So I want to talk about that. Anyway,
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Speaker 1: started writing, Come on, harps, get your thoughts together. I
5:39
Speaker 1: started writing, and I thought, I'll write like a maybe
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Speaker 1: one hundred to one hundred and fifty word little piece
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Speaker 1: on that, and maybe a few light bulbs will happen.
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Speaker 1: Al so maybe people will think it shit. That's always
5:51
Speaker 1: a chance. Nonetheless, I started writing, and then by the
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Speaker 1: time I finished writing the brief piece that was three
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Speaker 1: hundred words, I went, fuck it, I can't really post this.
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Speaker 1: It's too long. So I'm just going to keep writing them.
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Speaker 1: When I finish, I'll finish and maybe i'll post it.
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Speaker 1: Maybe i'll start a substack thingy or whatever, which I
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Speaker 1: don't have, and maybe I'll just post it somewhere as
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Speaker 1: a standalone article. And then I thought, I already have
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Speaker 1: an audience, so I thought I would share it with
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Speaker 1: you now forewarning. I've written what I'm about to read.
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Speaker 1: Nothing so far that I've said, of course, as scripted,
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Speaker 1: and I will freestyle around what I've written. But yeah,
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Speaker 1: I think it's a really interesting if not. You know,
6:36
Speaker 1: will it be transformational for many of you? Probably not,
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Speaker 1: but it is. It's just a really fucking interesting thing
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Speaker 1: I think to ponder and consider and to be aware of.
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Speaker 1: All right, So this is called long days, fast years,
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Speaker 1: the perceptual juxtaposition, you know, things that kind of go
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Speaker 1: together but don't, the perceptual juxtaposition of time. Have you
7:04
Speaker 1: noticed this weird little human paradox. A Tuesday afternoon can
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Speaker 1: feel like a hostage situation, but somehow ten years disappear
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Speaker 1: in about three and a half minutes. A boring meeting
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Speaker 1: lasts longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, yet
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Speaker 1: your twenties seem to vanish while you're looking for your
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Speaker 1: phone charger and trying to remember passwords. Long days, past years.
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Speaker 1: It's one of the strangest things about being a human.
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Speaker 1: And no, you're not imagining it. Well, technically you are,
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Speaker 1: because your perception of time is constructed in your brain.
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Speaker 1: But you know what I mean. There's the outside your
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Speaker 1: mind reality of time, as I said in the into
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Speaker 1: a constant, and then there's the inside your mind version
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Speaker 1: of time that is your subjective experience of the constant
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Speaker 1: that is ever present, the clock that never stops. So
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Speaker 1: that's your subject experience or a story you tell about time,
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Speaker 1: or an interpretation or even feeling. But that becomes your experience,
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Speaker 1: your subjective experience of that objective thing. And of course
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Speaker 1: time itself is a constant. Sixty seconds is sixty seconds,
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Speaker 1: whether your happy, miserable, board terrified, or standing in line
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Speaker 1: at the post office behind someone who apparently wants to
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Speaker 1: pay their electricity bill in coins. But our experience of
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Speaker 1: time that is widely variable, and that matters because psychologically speaking,
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Speaker 1: your life is not merely what happens to you. Your
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Speaker 1: life is largely what you notice, what you remember, and
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Speaker 1: what your brain decides was important enough to store, which
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Speaker 1: means your relationship with attention is in many ways your
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Speaker 1: relationship with life itself. Now that kind of sounds philosophical
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Speaker 1: and mildly instagrammable, but there's actually solid neuroscience and psychology
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Speaker 1: underneath it. Because the human brain is not a camera
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Speaker 1: recording objective reality. That's really important. Your brain is not
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Speaker 1: a camera recording objective situation, circumstances, events, what we call reality.
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Speaker 1: It's more likely a highly selective, emotionally biased film editor.
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Speaker 1: It cuts scenes, it highlights moments, It deletes details, it
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Speaker 1: adds emotional music, it distorts perspectives, it creates narratives. And
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Speaker 1: most of the time, while all that's going on, which
9:31
Speaker 1: goes on all the time, we're not even aware, we're
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Speaker 1: not even driving that that's just happening despite us, not
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Speaker 1: because of us. And one of the most interesting things
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Speaker 1: about human perception is that time is deeply tied to
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Speaker 1: attention and memory. When we are highly attentive, when something
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Speaker 1: is new or emotionally charged or risky, exciting, terrifying, uncertain, meaningful,
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Speaker 1: the brain records more information. Kind of simplifying this language
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Speaker 1: a bit, but so we've got I guess we could
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Speaker 1: call it more psychological footage, so to speak. And when
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Speaker 1: the brain records more footage, those periods later feel bigger
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Speaker 1: and richer and longer in retrospect, which is why childhood
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Speaker 1: often feels enormous. Like think of how much of childhood
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Speaker 1: many of us can still recall or talk about, or
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Speaker 1: explore or share stories about versus other periods of your
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Speaker 1: life like twenty to twenty five might be quite different.
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Speaker 1: Because when we were kids, everything was new, Like everything
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Speaker 1: at some point was new and exciting and amazing and incredible,
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Speaker 1: and memory memorable, and it had our focus, and it
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Speaker 1: had our attention, and it had our emotion, and we
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Speaker 1: were very present because it was all new, and this
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Speaker 1: was awesome. Everything was new, new school, new people, new music,
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Speaker 1: new motions, new fears, new freedoms, new relationships, new experiences.
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Speaker 1: Your brain was laying down fresh neural pathways constantly. The
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Speaker 1: world wasn't predictable yet, because you were just opening the
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Speaker 1: door on your life. You were just opening the door
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Speaker 1: on all there is to be experienced. You were still
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Speaker 1: learning in a way, you were still learning what reality
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Speaker 1: even was. I don't think we still know that, do we.
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Speaker 1: Novelty stretches perception, then adulthood arrives and we become frighteningly
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Speaker 1: efficient wake up, phone, coffee, traffic, emails, meetings, work, dinner, Netflix, bed,
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Speaker 1: repeat until death, which is a bit dark, but it's
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Speaker 1: also for some people it's kind of accurate, and of
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Speaker 1: course your lists might be different. But the continuity the
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Speaker 1: ground hog danis the repetition, the doing things that aren't
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Speaker 1: as necessarily amazing or joyful or rewarding, doing those things
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Speaker 1: on autopilot, despite the fact that it's not creating the
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Speaker 1: existence we want. So many of us do that, And
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Speaker 1: the brain loves efficiency because efficiency conserves energy. Your brain's
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Speaker 1: essentially a prediction machine trying to automate as much of
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Speaker 1: your life as it can. I'm going to say that again,
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Speaker 1: the brain loves efficiency because efficiency conserves energy, and your
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Speaker 1: brain is essentially a prediction machine trying to automate as
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Speaker 1: much of your life as possible, which is great and
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Speaker 1: useful for survival. You don't want to consciously relearn how
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Speaker 1: to brunch brush your teeth every morning like some kind
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Speaker 1: of confused, anxious goldfish. The downside of automation is a
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Speaker 1: thing that we call perceptual compression. So when days become
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Speaker 1: highly repetitive, the brain stops paying attention to close or
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Speaker 1: to detail because it already knows the pattern. And when
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Speaker 1: attention decreases, memory encoding decreases. And when memory encoding decreases,
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Speaker 1: life feels as an experience like it speeds up. I'm
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Speaker 1: going to say that from two sentences back. And when
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Speaker 1: attention decreases, memory encoding decreases. In other words, we don't
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Speaker 1: remember stuff much stuff because we're not paying attention. We're
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Speaker 1: not switched on, we're not focused, we're not energetically brought
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Speaker 1: into that thing we're seeing or doing or involved in,
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Speaker 1: and when the memory encoding goes down, life feels like
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Speaker 1: it speeds up, so that five years feels like it
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Speaker 1: was five months. In other words, routine can quietly become
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Speaker 1: an experiential time machine like that or a virtual time
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Speaker 1: machine from our point of view, not because time changes,
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Speaker 1: of course, but because awareness changes. There's some really interesting
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Speaker 1: research around this idea. Psychologists sometimes distinguish between prospective time
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Speaker 1: perception how time feels while we're experiencing it, and retrospective
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Speaker 1: time perception how long periods feel when we look back
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Speaker 1: at them. This explains another weird phenomenon. Difficult moments often
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Speaker 1: feel slow in real time. It stretches perception. Stress stretches perception,
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Speaker 1: Pain stretches perception. Waiting stretches perception. If you've ever sat
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Speaker 1: terrified in a doctor's waiting room wondering why it seems
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Speaker 1: like it's taking fucking weeks for your name to be
14:54
Speaker 1: called because you're stressed about what's going to happen. You
14:57
Speaker 1: think there's some impending doom or bad news, or you
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Speaker 1: just take going to the doctor, then you know what
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Speaker 1: I mean that twenty minutes can feel like twenty hours,
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Speaker 1: but later those same stressful months or years can feel
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Speaker 1: strangely compressed in memory because stress narrows attention. When we're overwhelmed,
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Speaker 1: we often fully stop experiencing life and shift into management mode,
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Speaker 1: survival mode, efficiency mode, get through the day mode. We
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Speaker 1: stop noticing and attention, psychologically speaking, is everything. So William James,
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Speaker 1: who's quite a famous bloke in American psychology. I think
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Speaker 1: some people called him the father of American psychology, he said,
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Speaker 1: my experience is what I agree to attend to, or
15:49
Speaker 1: we might say give attention to, because you don't have
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Speaker 1: any experience around things that you're not giving focus or
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Speaker 1: energy or attention to. My experience is what I agree
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Speaker 1: to attend to. Now that's a profound idea, because whatever
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Speaker 1: repeatedly captures your attention, well, that gradually becomes your reality.
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Speaker 1: Your brain literally builds your lived experience from what you
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Speaker 1: consistently and consciously choose to focus on. Which is why
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Speaker 1: two people can live in the same place, and sit
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Speaker 1: in the same meetings, and have similar conversations, and have
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Speaker 1: the same job in the same or whatever, all the same,
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Speaker 1: except none of them, neither of them are having the
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Speaker 1: same experience, because the experience that perception is not about
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Speaker 1: what's going on, is not about the people around the
16:42
Speaker 1: environment or the situation as much as it is how
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Speaker 1: each of those two individuals interpret those goings on. So
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Speaker 1: one might notice beauty and humor and connection and learning
16:55
Speaker 1: and challenge and possibility and hope and great things, and
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Speaker 1: the other focuses on outrage and stress and comparison and
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Speaker 1: threatned boom scrolling and all kinds of self induced despair.
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Speaker 1: So same planet, same environment, different reality. Attention is the
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Speaker 1: currency of consciousness, and modern life is aggressively competing for it,
17:23
Speaker 1: your attention. That is es bestly on social media, especially
17:27
Speaker 1: on Planet podcast. Everyone wants you to listen to their stuff.
17:31
Speaker 1: I get it. And this is important because our brains
17:34
Speaker 1: evolved in environments when novelty was occasional and meaningful. But
17:40
Speaker 1: now in twenty twenty six, novelty arrives every seven seconds
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Speaker 1: via a glowing rectangle in your hand. You scroll, you swipe,
17:48
Speaker 1: you click, you're refresh, you repeat. We're overstimulated but under experienced.
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Speaker 1: And that's the paradox. We can shew more information than
17:57
Speaker 1: any humans in history, yet many of us many I
18:02
Speaker 1: talk to people every day who feel increasingly disconnected from
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Speaker 1: their own lives, and not only not only their own lives,
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Speaker 1: but their own bodies, their own relationships, because new information
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Speaker 1: is not new experience. Watching twelve travel videos is not
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Speaker 1: the same as sitting in a tiny cafe and Lisbon
18:27
Speaker 1: trying to order a coffee in terrible Portuguese while wondering
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Speaker 1: whether or not you accidentally just asked for goat milk
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Speaker 1: and a fork. Real experiences create depth, embodied moments, sensory richness,
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Speaker 1: emotional texture, and it's these moments that expand psychological time
18:46
Speaker 1: because they force us into this present moment to be
18:50
Speaker 1: here now, and presence is really really important, not in
18:56
Speaker 1: the kind of mystical, mythical crystal shop alone Sakra's with
19:00
Speaker 1: the moon frequencies kind of vibe, but I mean in
19:05
Speaker 1: the simple psychological present. Your mind is present, you are here,
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Speaker 1: actually being where you are while you're there in this moment,
19:16
Speaker 1: not transfixed by what might happen in the future or
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Speaker 1: what happened in the past, but just being here right now.
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Speaker 1: And it sounds kind of ridiculously obvious until you realize
19:27
Speaker 1: that most of us actually don't do it. I'm just
19:30
Speaker 1: rereading as I said recently on a podcast a week
19:33
Speaker 1: or two ago, I'm rereading The Power of Now by
19:35
Speaker 1: Eckhart Toll. And it's an old book, and some people
19:40
Speaker 1: think it's crap. Some people think it's like the most
19:43
Speaker 1: brilliant piece of writing or insight ever. And I think
19:47
Speaker 1: it depends which mindset or where your mind is at
19:51
Speaker 1: when you're going to read it. But for me, who
19:54
Speaker 1: can be easily distracted, who can be an overthinker, not
19:59
Speaker 1: in a stress way, but in a creative way. Sometimes
20:02
Speaker 1: I'll have seventeen ideas while I'm having a shower, and
20:04
Speaker 1: I'll start to plan four of them before I get
20:07
Speaker 1: out of the shower. And then I'll get out of
20:09
Speaker 1: my shower and literally do this before I'm even dry.
20:13
Speaker 1: I walk into my office where don't think about this,
20:16
Speaker 1: by the way, and write things on the whiteboard because
20:19
Speaker 1: I don't want to forget them, because I want to
20:21
Speaker 1: turn the ideas into action, the theory into something practical,
20:24
Speaker 1: and so on. But that doesn't always create good outcomes.
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Speaker 1: So back to the book, Power Now, It's really about
20:32
Speaker 1: for me slowing down and being present. And even when
20:39
Speaker 1: I go for walk now, generally one hundred percent of
20:41
Speaker 1: the time I'm listening to something. Now I've the last
20:45
Speaker 1: couple of weeks, I've been doing every second walk where
20:49
Speaker 1: I don't even take headphones, I have my phone in
20:51
Speaker 1: my pocket. I'm not listening to anything. I'm just paying attention.
20:56
Speaker 1: I'm paying attention to my foot, my feet on the footpath,
21:00
Speaker 1: paying attention to my breathing. I'm paying attention to my posture.
21:04
Speaker 1: I'm paying attention to the trees that I walk past,
21:08
Speaker 1: to the wind against my face, to the noise or
21:11
Speaker 1: lack of noise in the street that I'm in, and
21:15
Speaker 1: so on and for me. But I'm not there yet
21:20
Speaker 1: by any means. It's still a conscious decision. But I
21:24
Speaker 1: want to make that. I want to make that something
21:27
Speaker 1: that is just my default setting, where I am at
21:30
Speaker 1: least a lot more of the time, truly in the moment,
21:33
Speaker 1: in the place I am, in the time I am,
21:37
Speaker 1: in the energy that I am. I truly want to
21:40
Speaker 1: be there, because half the time we are mentally replaying yesterday,
21:45
Speaker 1: or we're rehearsing tomorrow, while our actual life unfolds unnoticed
21:50
Speaker 1: in front of us, and then we wonder where the
21:53
Speaker 1: years went. And there's also an interesting biological component to
21:58
Speaker 1: perceive time celeration as we age, and that is partly
22:04
Speaker 1: This is true and interesting. Each year becomes proportionately smaller
22:09
Speaker 1: relative to our total lifespan. So you know, when you're five,
22:13
Speaker 1: a year is twenty percent of your life. It is
22:18
Speaker 1: twenty percent of the totality of your lifespan to that
22:21
Speaker 1: point in time. But when you're fifty one year is
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Speaker 1: two percent. So we've got twenty verses two, and so
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Speaker 1: as a component, as a fraction, as a percentage of
22:33
Speaker 1: my life, a year seems to go quicker, but of
22:36
Speaker 1: course it doesn't. But as the sixty two year old,
22:40
Speaker 1: I'm going to be sixty three in a minute. But
22:43
Speaker 1: when you're won, and I'm sure you're not thinking about
22:46
Speaker 1: life or such matters or time, When you won your
22:50
Speaker 1: next birthday, which is two Thanks for explaining that, Craig.
22:55
Speaker 1: I don't know why I said that. Sorry about that.
22:57
Speaker 1: But when you won, your next birthday is literally based
23:01
Speaker 1: on where you're at right now as a one year old.
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Speaker 1: It's literally another lifetime away. It's crazy. But biology doesn't alone.
23:10
Speaker 1: Biology doesn't fully explain the phenomenon. Lifestyle matters enormously, novelty matters,
23:16
Speaker 1: learning matters, challenge matters, environment matters, attention matters, and we
23:23
Speaker 1: find that people who continue to explore and learn and
23:26
Speaker 1: travel and create and risk and adapt, they often report
23:31
Speaker 1: a richer and psychological slower experience of life. Not necessarily easier,
23:38
Speaker 1: not necessarily calmer, still be chaos, but fuller, because fullness
23:44
Speaker 1: is not the same as busyness, and modern culture confuses
23:48
Speaker 1: these two things all the time. We've become very skilled
23:52
Speaker 1: at scheduling our lives while accidentally disappearing from them. And
23:57
Speaker 1: many people are productive and busy, but also absent, efficient
24:04
Speaker 1: but disconnected, chronically stimulated, but psychologically somewhere else. We optimize
24:12
Speaker 1: our calendars but neglect our consciousness. And that sounds dramatic,
24:17
Speaker 1: but honestly, have a look around and even have a
24:20
Speaker 1: look within. And again, as I always say, not self loathing,
24:23
Speaker 1: just self awareness. Like I say all the time to people,
24:26
Speaker 1: in a minute, you're going to be five years older.
24:29
Speaker 1: And of course that's not true, but it's also true.
24:34
Speaker 1: So have a look around. People walking through beautiful parks,
24:39
Speaker 1: staring at phones, Families at dinner not looking at each other,
24:42
Speaker 1: not speaking to each other, either looking at their phone
24:45
Speaker 1: or looking over someone's shoulder at the TVs. People going
24:49
Speaker 1: to concerts who are not watching the concert, they're filming
24:52
Speaker 1: the concert, and they're looking at the concert through the
24:55
Speaker 1: screen on their phone. Beautiful sunsets and nature interrupted by notifications,
25:00
Speaker 1: Moments half lived because we're busy documenting them instead of
25:04
Speaker 1: experiencing them. And again, this isn't about being anti technology
25:10
Speaker 1: or moving into a forest and making soup from leaves,
25:13
Speaker 1: although that will be good. You know, I use Wi Fi,
25:19
Speaker 1: I by takeaway dinner. I'm not trying to churn my
25:24
Speaker 1: own butter. But we do need to recognize that attention
25:27
Speaker 1: fragmentation changes our experience of existence. Constant distraction creates shallow living,
25:36
Speaker 1: and shallow living compresses memory, as we said before, which
25:40
Speaker 1: is perhaps why many adults experience this haunting sense that
25:43
Speaker 1: life is speeding up while simultaneously feeling oddly repetitive, like
25:50
Speaker 1: they're busy all the time, but not fully alive inside
25:53
Speaker 1: the busyness. And sometimes I think that is that's the
25:58
Speaker 1: price we pay for technology and for all the stuff
26:01
Speaker 1: we dive into, and that's the hidden cost or maybe
26:04
Speaker 1: not so hidden cost of modern life. And not just
26:08
Speaker 1: stress or fatigue, but almost like the gradual erosion of
26:17
Speaker 1: our presence, A life can become incredibly full while at
26:22
Speaker 1: the same time feeling strangely unlived. So what do we
26:27
Speaker 1: do about this? What do we do with all this?
26:29
Speaker 1: How do we psychologically slow life down? Well, not by
26:34
Speaker 1: literally slowing clocks, obviously, but perhaps by interrupting our autopilot,
26:40
Speaker 1: by increasing conscious attention, by creating more novelty, more firsts,
26:46
Speaker 1: more challenges, more unpredictability, more depth. Travel can help. Learning helps,
26:52
Speaker 1: hard conversations, help creative projects, help, doing scary things, help
26:58
Speaker 1: doing new stuff, just doing new stuff, changing routines, being
27:02
Speaker 1: ge genuinely curious about things and people. Even small changes matter.
27:08
Speaker 1: Take a different route home, read a different book, talk
27:10
Speaker 1: to different people, learn a new skill, try a new
27:15
Speaker 1: thing it's somewhere unfamiliar, Put your phone away occasionally and
27:19
Speaker 1: raw dog it for twenty minutes. Oh that's a terrible term,
27:24
Speaker 1: isn't it, And see what happens? Because the goal is
27:26
Speaker 1: not merely to exist for a long time, but to
27:30
Speaker 1: actually experience your existence while you're there, while you're here,
27:35
Speaker 1: And perhaps that's the real issue under the whole long
27:38
Speaker 1: Day's fast year is phenomenon. It's not just about time,
27:41
Speaker 1: It's about consciousness. It's about whether where participants in our
27:46
Speaker 1: lives or merely managers of them. And I don't even
27:50
Speaker 1: think that. I think sometimes not only are we not
27:53
Speaker 1: participants in our lives or even managers of our lives.
27:57
Speaker 1: I think sometimes our life manages us, because our life
28:02
Speaker 1: has its own kind of energy and life force and
28:05
Speaker 1: continuity and flow. And it's almost like sometimes we get
28:11
Speaker 1: out of bed and we just step back into that ritual,
28:15
Speaker 1: that habit, that pattern that really doesn't even work, and
28:19
Speaker 1: there's very little consciousness about what we're doing because we're
28:25
Speaker 1: always trapped in the minutia, and or we're often trapped
28:29
Speaker 1: in the minutia and the micro of the ritual and
28:32
Speaker 1: the thing that we do. We need to wake up
28:36
Speaker 1: for our existence, not just administrate it, because one day,
28:43
Speaker 1: and yes this got expectedly existential, you'll realize that the
28:47
Speaker 1: thing you call your ordinary life was actually your life.
28:51
Speaker 1: Not the future version, not when things settle down, not
28:54
Speaker 1: when work gets easier, not when the kids are big,
28:57
Speaker 1: not when you lose ten k's, not when you finally
29:00
Speaker 1: get organized. Just this, just now, the messy middle, the
29:04
Speaker 1: unfinished version, the imperfect Tuesday, that was it, that is it,
29:10
Speaker 1: and maybe the challenge is not to learn how to
29:12
Speaker 1: control time. In fact, it's definitely not that, but learning
29:16
Speaker 1: how to stop abandoning moments while you're having them, while
29:20
Speaker 1: you're in the middle of them, because ultimately the years
29:23
Speaker 1: don't disappear, we disappear from them. Maybe the art of
29:27
Speaker 1: living is to learn how to return to attention and
29:31
Speaker 1: awareness and presence in this moment, because another decade quietly
29:37
Speaker 1: slips past while we're refreshing our emails and wondering where
29:41
Speaker 1: the bloody time went. See you next time.