Chapter 22: The Chapter Maker

When I look back on my thirties, the decade compresses into a blur partly because nothing marked the transitions. I changed roles within the company. I learned new skills. The business evolved. But none of these transitions were marked in any way that my memory could use as a boundary.

There were no chapter endings. No beginnings, either. Just a continuous flow of work that blended one year into the next.

The research on temporal landmarks and the fresh start effect tells us why this matters. When your brain encounters a clear boundary, a first day in a new role, a move to a new city, a new year, a birthday, it opens a new mental accounting period. Everything before the boundary gets filed as one chapter. Everything after it starts fresh. The more chapters a period contains, the longer it feels when you look back, because each chapter is a distinct retrieval point.

The problem is that adult life, particularly settled, professional adult life, produces very few natural chapters. You might change jobs every few years. You might move house occasionally. But the weeks and months between these events are undifferentiated. Nothing signals to your brain that one period has ended and another has begun. So the brain files it all under a single header, and the years compress.

The fix is to create chapters deliberately.

A weekly review is the simplest version. At the end of each week, spend ten minutes writing down what was distinctive about it. Not what you accomplished. What was different. A conversation that mattered. A place you went. Something you learned. Something that surprised you. If nothing comes to mind, that tells you something too: the week was templated, and your memory will compress it.

The act of writing it down does two things. First, it creates an explicit retrieval cue. Your brain can now index that week by its distinctive element rather than filing it as "another week." Second, it trains you to notice distinctiveness as it happens. After a few weeks of struggling to identify anything memorable, you start unconsciously seeking moments worth noting. The review shapes the week it reviews.

A monthly ritual takes this further. At the end of each month, look at your weekly notes and identify the month's theme. What changed? What began? What ended? Give the month a name if you like, the way you might name a chapter in a book. "The month I started walking to work." "The month the camper finally sold." "The month I had that conversation with Dad."

The naming isn't frivolous. It's memory architecture. A named chapter is a retrievable chapter. An unnamed one disappears into the mass.

Quarterly, introduce something genuinely new. A first experience of something. Not necessarily dramatic. A new kind of food, a place in your city you've never been, a skill you've never attempted, a person you've never spoken to in depth. The point is to give your brain one fresh encoding opportunity every three months that's vivid enough to serve as a chapter marker.

Journalling fits here, but not in the way most people think of it. This isn't "write about your feelings." It's narrative capture. You're creating a record that your memory can use as scaffolding. The journal entry doesn't need to be long, beautiful, or insightful. It needs to answer one question: what made today different from yesterday?

Paul Ricoeur argued that we experience time through narrative. A life with a clear story, with chapters and arcs and turning points, feels longer and more coherent than one experienced as a series of disconnected events. The narrative doesn't need to be grand. It just needs to exist.

I've started doing this, imperfectly. On good weeks, I manage the review. On bad weeks, I don't. But even the inconsistent practice has changed something. I can now recall the last two months with more specificity than I could recall the last two years before I started. Not because more happened. Because I marked what did.

There's one more piece to this. Chapter endings matter as much as chapter beginnings. When a project finishes, when a school term ends, when a season turns, take a moment to consciously close it. Acknowledge that a period is over. This creates a boundary in memory between what came before and what comes next. Without the boundary, the periods merge.

I never did this at work. Projects ended and new ones began in the same breath. No pause. No marking. No sense that something had concluded. The result was a decade that felt like one long, unbroken project rather than a series of distinct accomplishments.

Your life has chapters whether you mark them or not. The question is whether you're giving your memory the architecture to tell them apart.

Ten minutes a week. One ritual a month. One first experience a quarter. One conscious ending whenever something concludes.

That's the entire protocol. And the return, measured in retrospective richness, is out of all proportion to the effort.