Somewhere around the age of 30, I walked into the office on a Tuesday morning and realised I’d been with Jas for five years. Five years. I walked back out, got a coffee, and tried to account for the time. I started counting: trips we’d taken, places we’d lived, birthdays, concerts. There was a lot when I laid out the evidence. But I couldn’t reconcile it with the feeling that the time had been stolen.
I bought a ring that afternoon. The urgency surprised me. But it was the same urgency as the realisation: if time moves like this, stop waiting.
That was the first moment. There were others. My kids got taller than me and I couldn’t account for the years it took. The weekly rubbish collection started feeling like it came every three days. I gave my entire thirties to one job without noticing I was doing it.
I went looking for answers. I read the neuroscience of time perception, the psychology of memory encoding, the philosophy of how we experience duration. I found that the research is scattered across dozens of fields and most of it never reaches the people who need it — people like me, in their late thirties or forties, watching the years compress and wondering if this is just how it is now.
It isn’t. That’s why I wrote this book.
I’m not a neuroscientist or a psychologist. I’m a 47-year-old in Wellington, New Zealand, with a background in technology and business, three kids at three different schools, and a life that was moving too fast for me to feel any of it. I wrote Thickening Time because I needed to read it. The research changed how I structured my days. I hope it does the same for you.