When I was a child, life seemed infinite. Weeks were full, days were long. Christmas time was something you had to wait and wait for, and your birthday too. Summertime seemed long enough to last forever. Two years ago seemed like a long time. To be fair, if you’re ten, two years ago is 20% of your life.
I turn 46 this year, which makes two years ago 4% of my life. 20% of my life ago is 9 years. It’s kind of like when I stop and think about the fact that my date of birth is closer to World War Two than today. But then again, if you were born before 1997, your date of birth is closer to the Moon Landing than to today.
So, this post is an old man’s rant about the fact that time flies, and life is short, and we’re all going to die, and things were better when they were worse.
The end.
Actually, no. That’s not it.
Days that leave a mark
Childhood summers didn’t actually last longer. Sure, novelty helps. But another thing that made them feel that way was that each day was distinct. The camping, the beach adventures. The fishing expeditions with my dad or my uncle. The bicycle rides in the pine forests. The fritters or the wild boar stew with polenta at the local sagra. Wasting coins (thousands of Lire) on Mortal Kombat in a bar. The smells of sunscreen and anti-mosquito lotion and ice-cream and pine resin. The trails and paths on the mountains, from the lower, scorching scrubland overseeing the shining sea to the alpine hut trails we hiked as if on a mission to the top. And more and more.
Something happened, something was noticed, something was felt and remembered every day. Every day left a mark.
My grandmother was born in 1922. When the war started, she was 18. Since the war finished, her brother dead in combat, her future husband returned from a concentration camp, her youth gone, she claimed, days started to accelerate.
When I was 12 she turned 70. She said something that stuck with me but at the time seemed like some hyperbolic claim that old people made. She said to me: “I’m seventy. I don’t know where at least the last 50 years went. It’s like they never happened. They flew by.”
And yet, here I am, 24 years from that appointment with life, feeling that she was so fucking right.
Adult days, I think, tend to blur. Monday looks like Tuesday looks like Thursday. When I was in Amazon, there was a saying: days are long, weeks are short. The day seemed to be busy and full and neverending. But suddenly it was Friday.
That, I found, stuck even after. You get to the end of the month and it’s gone. Not unpleasantly, necessarily. It just blinked away. Time passed for you while you were busy with other things.
I think this is what most of us mean when we say time flies. Days happen in the background.
The wrong answer
So why do some days stick and others don’t? Partly it’s novelty: new experiences get encoded more richly than familiar ones, which is why travel makes time feel slow and routine makes it vanish, or even why going somewhere feels longer than coming back on the same route. But it’s also attention. A day you were fully present for, that you actually noticed yourself moving through, leaves more behind than a day you spent on autopilot. Not because more happened, but because you were there for it.
The tempting answer then is to chase novelty: go hike some peak in central Asia, go live in a van or in a southern country for no good reason, try skydiving, or rock climbing, or surfing. Collect more experiences, keep the stimulation coming.
That works up to a point. But it has a ceiling, and it turns you into someone who can only feel alive when the scenery is changing. You’ve just outsourced your sense of presence to circumstance, privilege, or FOMO.
The person who needs to be in a new country every few years to feel like time is real has just raised the threshold. Put them in an ordinary life and they’re lost.
Attention is different. It works anywhere. Even on a Tuesday. That’s also what mindfulness is really about, when you strip away the technique.
The way memory works
Daniel Kahneman spent a lot of time studying how we remember experiences, and he found something counterintuitive: we don’t remember how an experience felt on average. We remember two things: the most intense moment, and how it ended. Everything in between barely registers. He called this the peak-end rule.
The implications are stranger than they first appear. A month with twenty good days and ten average ones, ending badly, will feel in memory like a bad month. A difficult project that finished well will feel, in retrospect, like a good one, even though you might have hated every single moment of it. Your sense of whether a period was worth it is almost entirely determined by its emotional high point and its final chapter. The middle is noise.
This is also, I think, what’s happening with “things were better when they were worse.” Nostalgia is the peak-end rule applied to decades. You remember the peaks of your twenties and compare them to the anxious Tuesday you’re currently having. The comparison feels unfair because it is: you’re not comparing like for like. You’re comparing your first kiss to present tense.
It also helps to explain why childhood felt long. Those years were dense with firsts, with intensity, with moments that stuck. The peaks were everywhere. So the memory is rich, and richness reads as duration.
The dirty windscreen
There’s a second problem, separate from memory, which is that I can’t always tell what I’m feeling while I’m feeling it.
My mood shapes everything: how I read a message, whether a conversation seems threatening or friendly, how optimistic I am about the thing I’m trying to do. In a good mood I’m more creative, more trusting, more willing to take risks. In a bad mood my thinking narrows, I see problems, I say no. None of this is a conscious choice. It’s just the texture of how the world appears from inside a particular emotional state.
The problem is that the mood isn’t always tracking what you think it is. I’ve been passive because I was hungry and didn’t realise it. Grumpy about a decision I needed to make, when what was actually happening was I hadn’t slept. The emotion is real, but the story I tell myself about where it’s coming from is often wrong. And I act on the story, not the feeling.
I can’t catch this from the inside. I’m too busy being in the mood to step back from it. Which means a lot of the decisions I make in any given week are being shaped by an emotional state I’m not even aware of.
Ok, so what do I do?
I thought about this for quite some time. Like for years, on and off. I eventually realised what I actually wanted here: not productivity, not goals, not life tracking. I do that elsewhere, but it doesn’t help for the blur.
So I made something. It’s called Inklin.
Inklin started (a long time ago) as an idea of having a mind-oriented journaling app, but evolved into something much simpler, and I think useful: it gives me a daily moment to notice how I actually am. Journals try to capture everything. This is closer to leaving a fingerprint on the day.
It just asks you to check-in: how are you right now? And a prompt that asks something specific enough to get a real answer in a hundred words or less. Takes about a minute. No streaks, no badges, no gamification. Completely private.
I’m working on data analysis, just because I’m a sucker for insights, but the point for me isn’t the data. It’s the pause. Once a day, before the day disappears, I stop and name how it actually felt, and how strongly so. Not how productive I was, not what I got done. How I was. And why.
That act of naming separates the day from the ones around it. It gives the week some shape. And over time, it builds something the peak-end rule can’t give you: a mood memoir, not a reconstructed highlight reel.
Could I use a notebook? Absolutely, but I found that’s more faff: maybe it’s in my bag, and I’m on the couch, and I’m lazy and just forget. And, I don’t get the insights or reminders.
Looking back
Inklin became one of my goals. I’ve been using it for six weeks. The part I didn’t expect was what looking back would feel like.
A period I’d been mentally filing as a stressy patch had a lot of good bits I’d completely forgotten. A week I’d remembered as fine had some lonely afternoons I’d smoothed over. My memory had already done its usual editing: kept the peaks, weighted the ending, discarded the rest. The record said something different.
I don’t know if that makes the record more true than the memory. Both are real in their way. But having it changes things. It’s harder to construct a misleading narrative about how things have been going when you can actually read what happened. The story becomes harder to edit.
I think childhood summers felt long because we were paying attention. Not in a deliberate, effortful way. Just in the way children pay attention: fully, to whatever is in front of them. Every day was something that was happening, not something to get through. That’s when we actually, automatically, remembered to live.
A daily check-in is a modest substitute for that. But it’s something: one moment where the day becomes a thing you noticed, rather than a thing that happened while you weren’t looking.
I’m not sure it makes time slower. But it makes it more legible. And legible, at least, feels like it was yours.
If you want to try it, it’s at inklin.app. Early access (invite only). Free.