Chapter 12: You Can't Slow Time

If you've read this far hoping I'll eventually reveal the secret to slowing time down, I have bad news and better news.

The bad news: you can't slow time down. Not in any literal sense. The clock ticks at the same rate for everyone. No amount of meditation, cold plunges, or forest bathing changes the speed at which Tuesday becomes Wednesday.

The better news: slowing time down was never the right goal.

Think about the best moments of your life. Not the calmest. The best. The ones where you were fully alive, completely absorbed, doing something that demanded everything you had. A conversation where you lost track of the hours. A project where you looked up and it was midnight. A day with your kids where the afternoon seemed to vanish because you were so deeply inside it.

In those moments, time didn't slow down. It sped up. The hours evaporated. And yet, when you look back on them, they feel enormous. They occupy more space in your memory than entire months of ordinary living. They have weight. Detail. Texture.

This is the paradox that unlocks everything.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied this for decades under the label of "flow." His research showed that during optimal experiences, people consistently report that time seemed to pass faster than normal. Hours felt like minutes. The sense of duration collapsed. And yet, retrospectively, those experiences feel like the most substantial and vivid periods of people's lives.

Flow doesn't slow your prospective clock. It actually speeds it up. But it massively enriches your retrospective clock. The brain, when fully engaged, encodes at high density. Every moment is processed deeply, stored richly, and indexed distinctly. When you look back, there's so much material to retrieve that the period expands.

This is what I mean by thicker time.

Thick time isn't slow time. It's dense time. Time where the ratio of conscious experience to minutes elapsed is high. Where your brain is processing, encoding, feeling, and storing at full capacity. The minutes might fly by. But the memories they leave behind are substantial.

Thin time is the opposite. It's time where very little is being processed, encoded, or stored. The minutes might actually feel slow, the way a boring meeting feels endless. But when you look back on a week of thin time, it's gone. There's nothing to retrieve. The week compresses into a vague impression of having been busy.

Most of us are living in thin time and calling it fast time. We think the problem is speed. It's not. The problem is density.

This reframes everything.

Instead of asking "how do I slow down?" ask "how do I thicken up?" Instead of "I need more time," try "I need richer moments." Instead of "time flies," consider "my moments feel thin."

The shift matters because "slow down" is terrible advice for ambitious people. If you're building a business, raising a family, pursuing meaningful work, you don't want to slow down. You want to be fully inside the speed. You want the intensity without the blur. You want to look back on a decade of building and feel every year of it, not just the highlights reel.

A 2024 paper on the "distinctive features of experiential time" formalised this by separating time into three dimensions: duration (how long it takes), speed (how fast it seems to pass), and event density (how much happens within it). Most discussions of time perception focus on duration and speed. Almost nobody talks about density. And yet density is the dimension that determines how your life actually feels when you look back on it.

The research term is "temporal density," and it describes the amount of information, experience, and processing packed into a unit of time. High temporal density creates the subjective impression of a long, full period. Low temporal density creates the impression of a short, empty one.

You can have a ten-hour day of high density that feels, in memory, like it contained more life than a month of low density. This isn't an illusion. It's how memory works. The brain stores what it processes. Process more per moment, and the moment leaves a bigger footprint.

This is why the people with the bright smiles don't seem to be moving slowly. They're not. They're moving at full speed. But they're moving through thick time. Their moments are dense with engagement, novelty, presence, and meaning. And when they look back on their week, it feels like a week, not like a blur.

The goal of this book, then, isn't to put the brakes on your life. It's to change the density of the material flowing through it. To make each moment leave a deeper imprint. To ensure that when you look back on the next five years, you can feel every one of them.

You can't slow time down. You can make it thicker.

That's not a consolation prize. It's the whole game.