The Day I Noticed — Thickening Time

I'd just walked into the office when it hit me. Not gradually, the way most realisations arrive. More like a trapdoor.

I wanted to marry Jas. That part wasn't new. I'd been thinking about it for a while, the way you think about something that feels inevitable but not yet urgent. But that morning, standing in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder, I did the maths. We'd been together five years.

Five years.

I put my bag down. Picked it back up. Walked out.

Wellington is a good city for walking when you need to think. It's compact enough that you can cross the whole centre in twenty minutes, and hilly enough that the walk feels like it's doing something to you. I got a coffee. I sat on a bench. And I tried, seriously tried, to account for where five years had gone.

I started counting. The trips we'd taken. Birthdays celebrated. Gigs we'd been to. The places we'd lived, because we'd moved more than once. Anniversaries. Holidays. There was a lot, when I laid out the evidence. Years' worth of evidence, in fact. That was the problem. The evidence was all there. I just couldn't feel it.

It was like reading someone else's diary. Yes, these things happened. Yes, I was there. But the felt experience of five years, the weight of it, the texture, the length? Gone. Compressed into something that felt closer to one.

The counting made it worse. Each thing I remembered was another piece of proof that real time had passed, which only widened the gap between what I knew and what I felt. Five years of a life I'd actually lived, with a person I loved, and my emotional register said: maybe eighteen months, tops.

I sat there with my coffee going cold and thought: is this the new pace? Is this just how it works now? Will I never get to feel the sunshine again?

I went and bought a ring that afternoon. Because if five years could vanish like that, I didn't want to lose another day being casual about the things that mattered.

That was a few years ago. The feeling hasn't gone away. If anything, it's sharpened.

My kids are growing up fast. My plants too, for that matter. Some of them, kids and plants alike, are taller than me. It feels like it's happened too soon. Like I went to sleep one night with small children and woke up with teenagers. I'm missing a good five years somewhere in the middle, and I don't know where they went.

The weekly rubbish collection seems to come every three or four days. I put the bins out, blink, put them out again. Seasons change before I've adjusted to the last one. Someone tells me they've been in their job for three years and they say it like it's a long time, and I think: I stayed more than a decade. I basically gave my whole thirties to one company without ever consciously deciding to do that. I joined thinking I'd be there a couple of years. Blink. I'm 45.

Don't get me wrong. I don't regret the work. I built something real. I travelled the world doing it. I was on the road about a quarter of every year for a long stretch, sometimes away for a month at a time. I was proud of what we built. But somewhere along the way, life at home became the gaps between the trips. Everything, family included, got arranged around the work. Not ideal. But it felt necessary at the time.

Looking back, I can see how it happened. Head down. Servers crashing at 3am when the company was young and the customers were big. The next flight, the next crisis, the next quarter. None of it felt fast while I was in it. But none of it left a mark, either. The years accumulated without thickening. They stacked up like identical coins, and when I finally stopped to count them, I couldn't tell them apart.

I notice certain people. People roughly my age who seem to have time for everything. Not retired. Not idle. Busy, in fact. But there's an ease to them. They walk their dogs. They look healthy. Their smiles are brighter. They get things done without the frantic edge I recognise in myself. I don't feel envious of these people. I feel curious. What are they doing differently? How do they make it look so effortless?

I've tried the usual recommendations. Take supplements. Exercise more. Meditate. Read about productivity. Every single one of those things probably works, in theory. But every single one also becomes another thing to remember, another thing to fit into an already full day. They take energy and they give energy, and it's hard to know whether you're ahead or behind. I've tried them. They've faded. All of them.

I want something different. I want to understand what's actually happening. Not the self-help version, the real version. The science of why five years can feel like one. The mechanics of how a decade disappears. And, if it exists, the evidence for how to get the feeling back.

I want to notice my life while I'm living it. I want to experience it, not just complete it. I want less blur when I look backwards. I want things to slow down. I want to feel.

I'm writing this book because I want to read it.

I've got plenty of life ahead of me. I know that. But I want the next decade to feel like a decade. I want to build things again, ambitious things, without losing myself inside them. I did it before and I'd do it again. I just need to figure out how to do it without the blur.

So I went looking for answers. I read the neuroscience. I read the philosophy. I talked to researchers and athletes and monks and people who seem to have cracked something I haven't. I ran experiments on myself, because that's the kind of person I am. And what I found surprised me.

It turns out, you can't slow time down. But you can make it thicker.

This book is about how.