Chapter 14: The Awe Advantage

If I had to pick one intervention from all the research, one thing that thickens time faster and more reliably than anything else, it would be awe.

Not gratitude. Not mindfulness. Not exercise, though exercise is close. Awe.

Dacher Keltner, who runs the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, has spent years studying what awe actually is and what it does. His definition is precise: awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding. The vastness can be physical (a mountain, an ocean, a night sky) or conceptual (an idea that reshapes how you see the world, a piece of music that exceeds what you thought music could do, an act of kindness that defies what you expected from people).

What makes awe different from other positive emotions is the "need for accommodation." When you experience awe, your existing mental frameworks can't contain what you're encountering. They have to expand. Your brain has to reorganise, even if only slightly, to make room for what it's taking in.

This is exactly the kind of processing that produces thick time. The brain is working hard. Encoding is dense. The experience doesn't fit a pre-existing template, so it has to be stored as something new. And new, richly encoded experiences are the building blocks of a substantial retrospective life.

But the most striking finding isn't about memory. It's about behaviour.

In 2012, Lani Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker published a study in Psychological Science that tested what awe does to people's relationship with time. Across three experiments, they found that people experiencing awe reported feeling they had more time available. Not after a holiday. Not after a week off. After a brief awe induction in a laboratory. A few minutes of awe made people feel time-rich.

And the behavioural shifts were immediate. Awe-experiencing participants were more willing to volunteer their time to help others. They showed a stronger preference for experiences over material products. They reported greater overall life satisfaction. They were less impatient.

The mechanism, the researchers argued, is that awe brings you into the present moment. It collapses the mental chatter about past and future and anchors you in the now. And being fully in the present underlies awe's capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying.

Think about what that means in practice. A single experience of awe doesn't just feel good. It changes how you allocate your time (more generously), what you spend your money on (experiences rather than things), and how satisfied you feel with your life (more). And it does this through a temporal mechanism. Awe makes time feel abundant, and time abundance changes everything downstream.

Now compound that. If you experience awe once, you get a brief shift. If you experience it regularly, the shifts accumulate. You make slightly different decisions each week. You choose the walk over the scroll. The concert over the purchase. The deep conversation over the surface one. Over months, these choices reshape your life architecture. And a life architecture that produces more awe creates more temporal richness, which produces more awe-friendly decisions. The flywheel spins.

The tragedy is that most adults have stopped looking for awe. Not deliberately. It just fades. When you're a child, awe is everywhere. A puddle is fascinating. A tall building is breathtaking. A thunderstorm is the most dramatic thing that's ever happened. As you accumulate experience, fewer things exceed your mental frameworks. The bar for awe rises. And eventually, you stop expecting it entirely.

But Keltner's research shows that awe isn't rare. It's just overlooked. In studies where participants logged daily experiences, awe was reported more frequently than people predicted. It showed up in nature, obviously, but also in music, in watching someone display extraordinary skill, in moments of unexpected human connection, in ideas encountered while reading, in a child doing something surprising.

Awe doesn't require a trip to the Grand Canyon. It requires paying attention to things that are bigger, more complex, or more beautiful than you expected.

I've started deliberately seeking it. Not as a practice, exactly. More as an orientation. When I walk, I look up. When I listen to music, I listen properly, not as background noise. When my kids say something that surprises me, I let it land instead of rushing to the next thing. When I read something that genuinely shifts my thinking, I stop and sit with it.

None of this takes extra time. It takes redirected attention. And the return on that attention, in terms of temporal richness, is disproportionate.

Awe is free. It's available daily. It requires no equipment, no subscription, no new habit to remember. It just requires you to stop treating the world as a solved problem and start treating it as a place where things can still take your breath away.

That, as far as I can tell, is the cheapest and most powerful path to thicker time there is.