I came across a clever little trick someone wrote about recently: speeding up videos before transcribing them to save on costs. (OpenAI charges by the minute, so why not make those minutes shorter?) Ingenious. You’re not changing the content, just compressing the timeline so you extract the same value in less time.
It got me thinking. While we can’t really manipulate time in the physics sense, we do constantly shape our experience of it. Sometimes, being around someone whose energy resonates with you makes time vanish. Hours pass like minutes. It’s disorienting. Beautiful, but slightly unsettling too, because personally, I can feel like I’m losing my grip on time itself.
The inverse is true too. Five minutes waiting for a train can feel like a small eternity. This isn’t about relativity. What I’m interested in is the illusion of time control. Not in the scientific sense, but in the cognitive one.
Remember summer breaks as a kid? Three months felt endless. That’s because each day brought something new. Novelty stretches time. Our brains record the differences. Fast forward to adulthood, where routines reign. Days blur. Unless there’s a deviation, there’s little to mark one from the next.
It’s like our minds compress uneventful days to optimize memory space. A form of internal data compression. That’s why looking back, entire months feel like they vanished.
So maybe the only way to slow down time, even if artificially, is to pack your days with small bits of novelty. Tiny deviations from the expected, taking a different route home, trying a new breakfast spot, calling someone you haven’t spoken to in a while. That’s the real-life time hack.
And maybe that’s also why time disappears when you’re with someone who energizes you. Your brain is too busy recording new things to realize the clock is ticking. Just a thought. 🤔
And maybe one day I’ll write about the “Is this jar full?” analogy too—a classic that ties more into prioritizing and optimizing time. But that’s a thought for another time.
Update (November 22, 2025): Today I was talking about this post with a friend and shared the original article. That’s when I realized George and I actually met in person more than 12 years ago, we had Turkish tea and coffee in Sarayburnu. I didn’t notice it when reading the blog post or scrolling through Hacker News, but seeing the address bar on iOS suddenly triggered the memory. Life works in such mysterious ways sometimes…
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