The Surprising Reason Life Feels Like It's Speeding Up

Chris explains that routine and energy conservation are the reasons time speeds up — the brain stops paying attention to repeated experiences. By actively tracking the approach of a future event and its recession into the past, you break that automaticity. He uses multiple countdown apps on his phone, some counting up from past events (e.g., 152 days since a big party) and some counting down to future concerts or milestones. He says this practice is so important that he’s been doing it for over a decade. When Spotify asked him how they could help people with time, he mapped their interface to temporal feelings, and countdowns were central. The practice also creates ‘synchronicity’ — by looking every day, you notice the journey instead of the blur.

Chris argues that between 2012 and 2015 the social internet shifted from being a tool for connection to a passive consumption engine. People now scroll through friends’ lives as if they were content, without genuine synchronous exchange. He says the richest conversations — like the podcast itself — happen in real time and cannot be replaced by asynchronous texts or comments. He implemented this block with his spouse 15 years ago; they have never seen each other’s online lives. He also does not connect to people on social media at all unless it’s a business connection he has first met in person. He only follows groups or pages that align with his values. The practice removes the false sense that you are keeping up with someone and returns the relationship to deliberate, intentional communication.

Chris is nearly 60 but has the energy and appearance of someone 20–25 years younger. This creates a disasociative gap: when he meets people his own age who look old, his conditioning tells him to treat them like ‘old people’, yet he has to remember he is their peer. To bridge that split and avoid the day when he looks in the mirror and can’t recognise himself, he practices asking for help that he doesn’t strictly need. He’ll ask a store clerk to put things in his car, ask someone to read something for him, all in a spirit of accepting the reality of aging. He emphasises that self‑judgment kills faster than anything, and this practice is a way of removing that judgment by aligning expectations with reality.

Chris ties this to his time‑interface framework: unlike maps and reminders that create anxiety, a deliberate future note sitting untouched for a full year pulls attention into a longer, more spacious temporality. He says that when the appointment pops up, it’s often completely forgotten, and the synchronicity of receiving a message from your past self is a powerful reminder of how much life has happened, making the year feel fuller rather than a blur. He has used this technique for years and claims that whatever you write tends to come true, simply because you set an intention and then let go.

Chris, who time‑blocked his entire life and automated everything, realised that without external chaos he could become disconnected from everyday life. When he got married in 2018, he made a deliberate choice to welcome his spouse’s completely different way of living — undocumented, unplanned, unexamined — as a counterbalance. He calls this a ‘chaos agent’ and says even a puppy can serve this purpose if you don’t have a partner. The idea isn’t to stop your tracking, but to have a human or animal who keeps you in the messy, unpredictable present so that your time isn’t all spent in a controlled, expedited flow state.

Chris describes his current system as light‑years beyond his early quantified‑self setup. He now has a pendant (Limitless AI) that captures all his speech. Combined with Apple Watch/phone data, credit card spending, and calendar entries, his system pulls everything together each night and morning. In the morning, an AI ‘coach’ reviews his entire life’s data and suggests what he should focus on that day. Throughout the day, it sends personalised affirmations based on his history. He even built whimsical add‑ons: an AI tarot reading that uses the day’s data, and a ‘deity sub‑routine’ that can summon gods from various religions to answer his questions. He says this brings back the mirror‑like feedback he originally created with much cruder tools, but now it’s effortless.

Chris spent years mapping how different technologies ‘make your mind consider something’ in a specific temporal window. He describes a chart he created showing that apps anchored in the ephemeral (things that disappear, like Snapchat or one‑time codes) or in the very near future (maps showing how close you are, reminder alerts) generate a constant background anxiety. Moving outward to Google listings that tell you when a place is busy moves you into a zone where you can actually plan, reducing anxiety. Further out, the far future and death become more abstract but still shape behaviour. He stresses that the recent‑past apps (the phone shows what you just did) and ‘life‑summary’ features reinforce a sense of time rushing. This framework leads to his practical advice: deliberately using ‘slow apps’ — countdown timers, count‑up apps, and future calendar appointments — to shift your brain away from the anxious next‑few‑hours and into a longer, richer experience of time.

He says that somewhere around 2012–2015, social platforms collapsed the distinction between active, synchronous social relationships and passive content consumption. As a result, people began to treat each other’s lives as content feeds rather than as sources of real‑time, reciprocal connection. He notes that many people boast about having lifelong friends as a badge of honour, but this can be unhealthy — the quality of a relationship should be about the immediacy of the moments shared, not the sheer number of years. He gives the example of an hour‑long conversation with a stranger at an airport bus station that can be one of the best friendships you ever have. His solution is radical disconnection: he and his spouse have never seen each other online, and his closest friends are blocked on all social media. He only connects to ideas (groups, pages) and will only link to someone in a business context after meeting in person.

Chris, who is nearly 60 but looks and sounds decades younger, finds it disassociative to meet peers who appear old. He was raised with an automatic ‘treat them like an old person’ response, and then has to remind himself that he is also that age. To integrate his biological age with his self‑image, he practices asking for assistance that he could easily manage on his own — lifting groceries, reading labels, anything that lets him inhabit the felt‑sense of being older. The core danger, he says, is the catastrophic shock of suddenly one day realising you can’t do something you used to do effortlessly; that shock itself ‘will probably kill you’. The practice also removes self‑judgment, which he calls the fastest way to deteriorate. He extends this to accepting that you will never feel like a ‘grown‑up’ — our brains are always our brains, and the illusion of one day feeling like an adult is false.

While many biohackers pursue ‘longevity escape velocity’ and treat death as a condition to be cured, Chris believes this framing is pathological. He explicitly mentions that unlike figures such as Brian Johnson, he does not see death as a disease. He has moved to a state where assisted dying is legal and green burial is available, reflecting a full embrace of mortality. His reasoning ties back to time perception: the finitude of life is what gives temporal experience its richness; if you try to engineer an infinite lifespan, you rob time of its texture. He is careful not to attack individuals directly, but he labels the belief that death is a mistake as ‘a disease’. He also notes that accepting his own eventual death, which he will face alone regardless of his loving spouse, forced him to become truly okay with his own mind.

Having spent years in heavy meditation, 10‑day silent retreats, and isolation tanks, Chris acquired a capacity for absolute presence. He found that when he is fully attentive in social settings — eyes locked, fully tracking the person — it creates a discomfort that feels like an assault to the person he is with. This is because most people are used to fragmented, asynchronous, distracted interaction, and true attention confronts them with a level of intimacy they are not ready for. In crowds, he consciously feigns distractedness, glancing away, breaking eye contact, just to lower the perceived intensity. He likens it to the deep eye lock of an intimate moment — that level of mindfulness can easily be creepy if not contextually appropriate. The core point is that attention is a powerful tool that must be wielded sensitively, and over‑tuning it without social calibration can damage human connection.

Chris meditated heavily from 2014, doing isolation tanks, then 10‑day silent retreats, and eventually a couple of hours a day. He says hands‑down there’s nothing more important than a relationship with your mind, but there is a line you can cross where awareness of awareness becomes terrifying — the ‘dark night of the soul’. For someone used to being distracted, sitting with their own mind for the first time can feel like an assault. He describes returning after 10 days of no speaking, no watches, no reading — just a yogi job and meditation — to a friend’s kitchen. Standing there trying to open a jar, he couldn’t remember the motor sequence of holding and twisting. He had become so detached from everyday reality that a mundane task was incomprehensible. His friend, experienced in retreats, calmly reassured him. The takeaway: meditation is essential but should be approached with caution, especially for those with no prior practice.