Long Days, Short Years: Why time speeds up when nothing goes wrong

Ask someone how the last five years went and they will say gone. Ask >Both answers are correct, and almost nobody notices that they contradict each other. If time were speeding up, this afternoon would be racing. It >Nothing has happened to your time. Something has happened to the record. You have two clocks. One measures the hour you are in and it runs on attention. The other measures the year behind you and it runs on memory, and it does not count hours at all. It counts differences. A week you cannot tell apart from forty other weeks takes up almost no space in it, so when you look back, the week is not there. It did not go quickly. It >Which leads somewhere uncomfortable. The things that erase your years are not distraction, or your phone, or a failure to be present. They are competence. Routine. A house you know in the dark. Work you can do without fear. A relationship where you no longer have to work out what the other person means. Everything you >A settled life is one in which fewer things require you to be there for them. That is what settled means, and it is why the years began going at >LONG DAYS, SHORT YEARS explains what happened to the decade you cannot find, using what is actually known about memory and duration rather than what is usually repeated. Why a summer at eight lasted forever. Why the drive home is shorter than the drive out. Why almost nobody can date 2020 and 2021. Why the most retrievable year of most lives is also the >And then what to do, on the assumption that you have a job, obligations, no spare money and no free evenings, and no intention of dismantling a life that works. The answer is smaller than the usual advice and it does >This is not a book about managing your time. It argues against that entire shelf, since efficiency is compression and every routine you >It will not give the years back. Nothing will. But there are more of them coming, and how findable they turn out to be is not fixed by anything except what you do next.