Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
Lesson 4 from: How to Expand Time and Live a Full LifeJohn K. Coyle
Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
Lesson 4 from: How to Expand Time and Live a Full LifeJohn K. Coyle
Lesson Info
4. Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
Lessons
Class Introduction
00:50 2The Earth is Flat: Time is Linear
03:37 3The Antecedents of an Obsession with Time
09:23 4Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
03:40 5The First Law of Chronoception: Contraction
06:12 6The Second Law of Chronoception: Inversion
17:46 7The Third Law of Chronoception: Expansion
05:41 8Designing Event Horizon Moments
09:13Lesson Info
Life isn't Just Short, is is Actively Getting Shorter
Right about this time in my early 30s, I noticed this strange thing that we've described before, time speeding up and slowing down. I'd go to these meetings, they'd seem like forever. Good friend would come out of town and time sped up and the most horrible of all was that summer that used to seem like forever were over in a flash. And it kept getting faster and I was so not cool with this. And I was like, why isn't anybody doing anything about this so I started calling neuroscientists and I was like, hey, what's going on here? Why is time speeding up and it became an obsession and that's why I called all kinds of people and I got a lot of them on the phone. Eventually I ended up with Dr. Phil Zimbardo from Stanford and he wrote the Time Paradox, he's kind of father time and his answer to me was something that's probably the reason I'm here, he said, "Hey John, "it's really well-documented that most adults feel "this time acceleration the older they get," and I said, "Okay, what's the ...
answer? "How do we unwind it, how do we go counter-clockwise?" And his answer to me was, "Well nobody's done that research." And I was like, ding, ding, ding, sign me up. I'm not okay with this, this is not cool, so I'm gonna look into this. So I started researching this about 10 years ago and I have some really bad news for you actually. I've graphed it and it's way worse that you think. When I made this graph, I was 43 years old and so according to the actuarial tables of somebody my height and weight, my life expectancy is 86 years, so at that point I was half done, right, and I look around the room, some of you are approximately age, some younger, but we're all somewhere in the middle there, so we're all about half done right? Wrong, we said before that experiential time accelerates the older we get, that we need to have a different way to graph this and think about it, we need a Y component, meaning start putting a Y axis on the way we actually experience time and when we do that, I can't graph forever, right, so I'm gonna say that summer as an eight year old starts to feel an awful lot like a year as a 20 year old. I think a fair comparison. So it's four times as long, and a year as a 20 year old starts to feel like a decade in middle age. So if you accept this as somewhat the norm, then the math majors in the room, the area under the curve is the remainder of your life. That is not half done, that's a sliver. I'm gonna hold the Y axis constant and let the X axis go logarithmic so we can see just how bad it is. So according to this, we're not half done at 43, we're half done at 18 and we're 92% done at 43. You got 8% left. The fat lady has sung, we are acting and the final bell has tolled. Is anybody besides me horrified? Right, and so we laugh but actually, this is the way we experience time, for most people. And what we need to do is we need to reverse that curve and start to exponentially slow time back down, and how do we do that? Well I'm happy to say that my obsession with this for the last 10 years has led to three laws that I'm going to share with you that will fundamentally help you do exactly this if you take the risks and take on the big rewards to do so. So I'm gonna jump right in with each. The first law is the law of contraction. The second law is the law of inversion, and the third law is the law of expansion. And each one of these has a little physics principle equated with this so we'll jump into each one and each one gets more and more important as we move through.
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Ratings and Reviews
Susan Burks
This is an important class. John reminds us of the incalculable value of filling our lives and those of people we care about with what is truly important - the gift of meaningful time. I loved reflecting on experiences that have truly changed the course of my life. John's stories and the science behind them was so inspiring.
Anastasia Shatalina
Very interesting and inspiring. Thank you.
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