The People Who Have What You've Lost

You know the people I mean. You see them at school pickup or at a weekend barbecue or in the park on a Tuesday afternoon when you're rushing between things. They're roughly your age. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. And yet something about them is different.

They look rested. They move at a pace that suggests they chose it, not that it was imposed on them. They seem to have time for a conversation without checking their phone. They have hobbies that aren't productivity hacks in disguise. They walk their dogs. They smile, and the smile reaches their eyes.

I don't feel envious of these people. I feel curious. What are they doing that I'm not? How do they make it look so effortless? What are they NOT doing that I am? Because from where I'm standing, keeping all the plates spinning while also feeling alive inside the spinning seems like a trick I haven't learned.

The easy answers don't hold up. It's not that they have fewer commitments. Many of them are just as busy. It's not that they earn more, or less. It's not that they've found some morning routine involving cold plunges and journaling that unlocked everything. I've tried those things. Most of them become another item on the to-do list, another thing to remember, another small demand on a limited supply. Take pills. Do exercise. Meditate. Read about productivity. Each one takes energy and gives energy, and honestly, it's hard to tell whether you end up ahead or behind.

So what's actually different?

The research on super-agers offers a clue. Super-agers are people in their sixties, seventies, and beyond who maintain cognitive sharpness that matches people decades younger. Brain scans show they preserve more volume in key regions, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in attention and motivation. Their brains keep doing something that most older brains gradually stop: switching between neural states frequently and distinctly.

This matters because neural state-switching is the mechanism underneath temporal richness. When your brain transitions cleanly between different modes of processing, each moment gets encoded as distinct. When it lingers in one state, moments blur together. Super-agers don't just think better. They experience time with more texture.

But what makes them super-agers in the first place? The research points to a cluster of factors, and none of them are exotic. Continued engagement with learning. Active social networks. Regular physical activity. A sense of purpose. And, crucially, ongoing exposure to novelty. They keep doing things they haven't done before. Not grand adventures necessarily. Just things that are new enough to engage the brain's attention rather than letting it coast.

That cluster of factors starts to paint a picture that looks less like a personality type and more like a lifestyle architecture. The people who maintain sharp temporal experience aren't genetically blessed. They've built, or stumbled into, lives that keep feeding their brains the inputs that prevent compression.

Which brings me back to the people with the bright smiles. I don't think they've found a secret. I think they've reduced something. They carry less friction. They have fewer unresolved drains on their energy and attention. Fewer things they should have dealt with months ago that are still sitting there, consuming mental bandwidth every time they think about them. Fewer commitments they said yes to out of obligation rather than desire.

I recently moved house, partly because the logistics of our old life were eating us alive. Three kids at three different schools, and every morning was a military operation involving car seats, traffic, timing, and stress before 9am. Now we walk. The kids walk to school. I walk to get coffee. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't. That single structural change removed a daily source of friction that had been quietly draining my energy for years. I didn't need more discipline. I needed less drag.

I think this is the key distinction. The people who seem to have time for everything haven't optimised their way to freedom. They've eliminated their way there. They've made structural choices, sometimes big, sometimes small, that reduce the number of things competing for their finite bandwidth. And with that bandwidth freed up, they have the capacity to actually be present. To notice. To form the kind of rich, distinct memories that make a year feel like a year.

There's a concept in Mel Robbins' work that resonates here. "Let them." The idea is deceptively simple: stop spending energy managing other people's choices, reactions, and problems. Let them handle their own lives so you can focus on yours. Every person you're worrying about, advising, fixing, or carrying is a cognitive load. And cognitive load, as we've already seen, narrows your temporal horizon.

Agency matters here too. Research published in 2025 found that personal agency and social connection together predict lower loneliness, but neither alone is sufficient. You need to feel like you're choosing your life, not just surviving it. And you need connection that's genuine, not obligatory.

This all points to a reframe that I find both uncomfortable and liberating. The question isn't "how do I find more time?" The question isn't even "how do I slow time down?" The question is: what would I need to remove, restructure, or release so that the time I already have feels like enough?

What if this isn't about doing more? What if it's about experiencing differently?