I recently wrote a piece on Time for the March edition of the Art of Mastery magazine. You can find it on page 6. Here is the reader, or you can download the pdf here.

I was inspired by some recent psychology studies, and this fascinating podcast episode about clocks.

Some spoilers:

  1. Conventions around time-keeping were mostly invented in order to deal with the modern transport system.
  2. It turns out that you can expand your perception of time’s passing by filling your life with new experiences, which become mnemonic markers for the way that you recall your day.
  3. And you can also make the years zip past by allowing your life to become dominated by mundane routine.
  4. Most non-english-speaking Christians actually refer to the feast of ‘Easter’ as the Passover. Which, when you think about it, makes a lot more sense.
A Time-ly Extract

If you’re wondering why I chose to share it today,:

As we age, the rate at which we encounter the unexpected slows. Our environments are familiar; our relationships, established; our lives, settled. We shift gear from learning to earning. And as the pattern of our lives becomes both habitual and habituated, we encounter fewer anchoring moments for our brains to notice the passage of time.

And so, it washes overt us: atomic half-life by atomic half-life. And before you realize it, the dollops of time are so large that the shops are already putting up their Christmas decorations. “But it was just Easter!” we exclaim, while we inattentively go on with the ordering of gammon and the purchasing of gifts. Then it will be another Easter, another Christmas, then Easter again.

Enjoy.

And best wishes for all those celebrating this weekend.

Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.