Why your life is slipping by so quickly

a lifelong concern of mine has been running out of time we're not having enough time well i guess it was what would you do managing this complicated topic of time the preciousness and shortness of life it feels like a curse sometimes to want so much out of life to live as fully as possible to be so curious about everything when i was 13 years old i had an existential crisis uh of course because that's who i am and i was like [ __ ] before i know it my life is going to be over it felt like the entire time i was a kid i was hearing adults talk about how as you get older your life speeds up and this was a terrifying thought to me i didn't want to think about it i was in denial about it for the longest time and i think i'm no longer in denial about it i've come to realize that life moves damn quickly and the conventional answers that are available on the internet on how to handle this i just don't buy them they don't feel like complete answers that's why i'm making this video and yes i am a silhouette in front of a cityscape because i thought that would be a cool visual metaphor of the speed of modern life i don't know i'm trying to be creative [Music] there are two main explanations i've heard for why we feel like time is accelerating as we get older the first is that each new year or month or week of your life represents a smaller percentage of the life that you've lived so it's kind of like in the full database of your life each new moment is a smaller part of it a smaller percentage okay and the other explanation which is sort of related to the first thing that i already said is that our brains seem to pay more attention when there's novelty right when something new is happening as in time seems to slow down when you have new experiences like your first kiss or the first time that you traveled abroad and the theory basically goes that as you start to run out of these first experiences these new experiences time speeds up so the clear and obvious conclusion to this is have more experiences right go chase new experiences and time will slow down and i think that's true to an extent for a certain period of time and then that stops working okay so i'm calling [ __ ] and i'll tell you why i chase experiences for a living if you've been following my channel for any amount of time you've seen that i'm all over the place i try to travel as much as possible i try to throw myself into the unknown as much as possible i want to live life as fully as i possibly can and so for a long time i thought okay if i throw myself into as many new experiences as i possibly can life won't feel like it's flying by so quickly spoiler alert it's still flying by pretty quickly i say that because i'm not claiming to have all the answers but i think i'm on to something here because i've realized that constant novelty which is how i've lived my life for a long time now alone is not the answer there's another bigger issue here at play in fact what i found and this is where i start to go a little bit out there okay so i hope you can follow is that anything in life can be a distraction including new experiences and there have definitely been periods of my life where i have been chasing new experiences as a way to run for myself run from something within me that i don't want to face my demons in fact there had definitely been times where the passage of time has accelerated because of my focus on having no experiences you see there is no cookie cutter answer to this problem if there was we would have all already adopted that answer and this is why this is such a universal human experience and i have three propositions to counter this acceleration of time that so many of us feel like we're experiencing i kind of think about these things that i'm about to share with you as lifelong practices we're really not talking about something that is like a one and done oh i found the solution now i can move on to something else that being said i love talking about these kinds of things i mean this is the kind of conversation that i'd love to have at a dinner party so if you'd be so kind as to give me a few minutes to hear me out let's dive in the thing that i've most strongly felt since as early as i can remember is this constant feeling of urgency life feels so precious there's so many things i want to do but as i get older i'm realizing that rushing is the opposite of what you should be doing it's the best way to waste time you're not going to get anywhere by rushing and this was best put by andre the shields got to fix the lav it's so simple slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be oh my god light bulb moment it's just a very simple wording of a very powerful idea less is more trying to do it all at once is not a good idea so my first answer to this question of how to not let life slip by is to stop running and i know that sounds counterintuitive and that's why i say that these answers are not easy it turns out it's infinitely easier to run from yourself than to face your demons i'm coming to realize and this is still a really hard one to say and to own fully but my unhappiness is nobody else's fault my unhappiness comes from fighting the way that things are mind happiness happens when life does not correspond with how i want things to be uh and i get stuck on that you know if anything this is sort of a reminder to myself because i still get so hung up sometimes when things do not go the way that i want i'll be honest with you here's just a vulnerable example i'm still affected by the performance of my videos i know i shouldn't care i know the numbers don't matter but when i work so hard on something that i'm super proud of i've spent a million hours working on it i want as many people as possible to see it i can't control what's going to be interesting to people i can't control how the algorithms are going to go but it's still a struggle for me and i just mentioned that just to make the point that like i'm not saying this from the point of view of like a guru you know i'm trying to figure this out for myself as well but what i can tell you with confidence is that this is definitely a massive time killer it's like the amount of energy and effort that i lose when i get hung up is incomparable wow this is really hard to do in public i'm trying to do this to change it up a little bit but i definitely feel a little bit like an influencer out in the wild and people are looking at me look at this shot honestly the tree of life is behind me i should use this lens a little bit more it's i love the wide-angleness okay getting a little bit distracted back to what i was saying going in circles is one of the real culprits for losing life all that rumination you know getting stuck in negative cycles and seneca one of the stoics actually wrote about this he wrote a book called on the shortness of life and he actually believed that life is long we just waste a lot of it and this is like a prime example of that my second answer for not letting life slip by is to be very wary of comfort and comfort is another one of those tricky shape-shifters it can look like many different things it can look like routine and stability but it can look like many other things too it can look like constantly traveling constantly seeking out experiences so you don't have to face your demons as i mentioned before that's the thing i feel like so many people misunderstand and that i misunderstood for a long time because i thought i was doing everything right by throwing myself out there going to foreign countries and whatnot and i don't think that's bad but i think what matters are the intentions behind your decisions you know my search for constant novelty was my way of running for myself especially during a few pretty dark periods of my life so basically in summary just doing what spikes your adrenaline is not the full answer it's not going to fix this problem of life moving so quickly okay vlogging in public i had a moment of clarity recently when i was talking to somebody who was sharing with me their experience of vipassana [Music] for those of you that don't know vapasana is like this 10-day meditation retreat where you don't do pretty much anything other than meditate including like talking you don't have your phone you don't have distractions you just have all day to meditate and this is remarkably difficult i have quite a few friends that have done this and not all of them have made it through the 10 days and this person was describing it to me by saying that those 10 days felt like 10 months and i just had a moment of clarity when he said that because it made me realize like there's the answer you know if you really want life to slow down go do something like this this is true discomfort it's not sexy it's real life which is a great tagline honestly if there are any vipassana marketers out there feel free to hit me up i'm just kidding vipassana is not for profit anyway you can actually do vapasana for free and it's definitely something that i would like to do at some point it's ironic isn't it that i continue to use the excuse that it's hard to find 10 days to block out to do something like this it's that kind of thinking i feel like that leads to a life that goes by so quickly i am ultimately the one that decides if i have time for something like that or not i mean it's literally free anyway this is a warning against comfort and its many forms do not fall into the most comfortable version of yourself it's not worth it and here comes a sentence that might not make a ton of sense when you first hear it but constant discomfort can be a form of comfort and that's like the point i'm trying to make here okay just for a little bit of context on where i am for those of you that are curious this spot is called fuente de civeles in mexico city really a very cool spot so my final point is just a little reminder on the power of mindfulness i'm not a zen master i'm not a guru but i find it helpful to receive reminders from my own community other people that i know to stick with meditation to stick with slowing down and being mindful and i think a really great layman definition of mindfulness is just doing things one at a time we're not made to be multitaskers and we live in a world that likes to pretend that we can this constant attention shifting constant information bombardment i think we all have to make a conscious decision to fight against that or it risks taking over your life and the wonderful thing is that just like how i said pretty much anything in life can be a distraction i think there are many things that can be a meditation once again it depends on the energy that you bring to each task the energy and attention that you bring to each moment so i hope that you found that helpful i think i'm going to do more videos on time in the future it's just one of my favorite topics okay so i came back to this tree of life spot because i i just love this plot so much i love this tree while i have your attention i did want to mention that i just recently released merch for the very first time in my life and it's only available for a week we are two days into that week already but if you're interested it's still available if you're seeing this within that week amor fati is a phrase that has been just extremely personally meaningful to me it's a love of one's fate that's a loose translation i take it to mean making a conscious decision in every moment to be as open as possible i don't feel like philosophy has to be stuck in thousands of years ago you know i feel like these are very relevant ideas to the world that we live in today so yeah there's a hoodie there's a few different shirts maybe you saw this earlier in the video i'll leave a link to it down in the description below if you're interested in checking it out this is a huge way to support me and my work if this drop does well i will do more in the future and i have tons of ideas this clothing is sustainably made it's in collaboration with seek discomfort which was created by the yes theory guys and they've made a huge effort to make things carbon neutral to use recycled and organic materials and i just recently released on this channel a short little video explaining a little bit more on what this phrase means to me oh no this is falling so yeah i just want to share my gratitude to all of you for all of your support and i'd love to hear from you on if you have any other ideas or contributions to this conversation about not letting life slip by i think it's something that we should all talk about more if you want to help me out in the algorithms consider giving this video a like and i'll see all of you very soon [Music] you

Channel: Nathaniel Drew

Views: 257,239

Keywords: new york, new, york, city, why, why your life, why your life is slipping by, slipping by, why your life is passing by, life is passing by, time, why time, why time is speeding up, time is speeding up, why your life is going by so quickly, life, life moving quickly, presence, intentionality, mindful, mindfulness, mindfulness practices, meditations, meditation, advice, living intentionally, travel, slow travel, how to get more out of life

Id: 3aR_Uo2lipc

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2022