Good morning,

Welcome back!

It’s beginning to cool down here in Atlanta. How about where you are?

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. Sun is the same, in a relative way—but your memories aren’t. Help me with my emerging concept of Atomic Novelty. ⌚⌛

• You have to check this out. How retirement reshapes brain health. 🧠

Are you ready to jump in? 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Time is the same, in a relative way.

Einstein was a physicist and a romantic.

As you know, he thought a lot about the nuances of time.

In a letter to a family friend one month before his death, he said, “For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

People have taken that to mean he believed “time is an illusion,” but “there is nothing in Einstein’s theory of relativity to support any of these claims.”

He believed time was relative, not an illusion.

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute,” he said.

I doubt I’ll ever fully understand the special theory of relativity, but I viscerally understand (and love) that quote.

Just as I can feel time speeding up as I age.

Can’t you?

It’s disconcerting. Me no like-ee.

Here’s what I’d like to better understand:

• Why does time appear to move faster as we age?

• Is there anything we can do about this? If so, what?

The good news: I believe I have a tenuous grasp on the answers to these questions.

But first…

Second Act Creator: confessional interlude.

This is the 41^st issue of the Second Act Creator newsletter.

When I started this project in November 2024, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I had a lot of thoughts about the preciousness and brevity of life bubbling up in my head. I was bored professionally, but knew I wanted (and needed) to keep working. My body had more aches and pains than ever before, but I knew I wanted to get fitter and stronger.

Turning 50 felt like an inflection point. For some, it seemed like the beginning of a slow downhill turn. I wanted to make this period of my life the initiation of an upward trajectory.

I realized my college years and the start of my career had been the launchpad of my first act.

Could my 50s be the launchpad of my second act?

Could I take everything I’d learned at work and in life and use it to make the most of the rest of my life?

That many seem like an ambitious mission, but it began as a directionless newsletter. I thought it would be helpful to force myself to articulate my fuzzy and shifty thoughts each week.

I was curious if there was an audience of people with similar interests, fears, and desires.

Over 40 of these letters, my curiosity led me down new paths—some rich with insights, some dead ends.

I’ve had friends ask, “What’s your plan with this project?” I’ve had a few tentative visions of an answer, but the most honest one has always been, “I’m not sure.”

The truth is, I’m still not sure.

However, I’ve noticed I keep coming back to a few questions:

• When you’re asked if you’re happy with your life overall, what goes into the formulation of your answer? How does your brain think back across your life and assess your satisfaction or disappointment with how things have gone? I wrote about this in Two Selves on Vacation.

• How are memories formed? What do we remember (very little) and what do we forget (most things)? Which discrete events are bundled into single memories? How and why do we blur and distort our memories over time? Why do most moments in people's life stories occur between the ages of 10 and 30? I wrote about this in Rose-Colored Distortions, Your Cultural Life Script, and Editing Life to Boost Happiness.

• How do we experience time? Can you truly manage your time (the way you manage finances)? How and why does time seemingly speed up and slow down, in the moment and in retrospect? I wrote about this in On Time and Attention.

Writing this week’s letter to you began to distill these questions down to:

1. Why does time appear to move faster as we age?

2. Is there anything we can do to slow down perceived time, in effect extending our lives, in a relative way?

3. Are there certain ways of living that translate into better retrospective assessments of life satisfaction? Said differently, what ways of living today will cause you to look back in 5, 10, 25 years and say, “I’ve had a great life. I’ve loved my life.”

My Spidey sense kicked in as I worked on this: there is something here. This idea is bigger than a single weekly newsletter.

Here is what Einstein said about a period in his life, “When the Special Theory of Relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts... I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.”

To be clear, I am in no way comparing my thoughts to those of the most famous genius of our time. I am quite sure the ideas germinating in my mind are 0.01% as complex and perhaps 1% as important.

But I think Eistein was trying to say his Spidey sense kicked in. The problem is he had this feeling 60 years before there was a Spider-Man. He was a genius, not a soothsayer.

Where am I going with this confessional interlude?

Atomic Novelty.

That’s what I’m calling this bigger-than-a-single-newsletter idea.

Here is a summary of the vaguely connected ideas germinating in me:

• We experience both prospective time (in the moment) and retrospective time (looking back). Some events feel slow in the moment and yet seem to have flown by in retrospect, and vice versa.

• Your relative perception of the speed of time is determined by the density of memories created in that period of time. A two-week vacation packed with memories will feel much longer than two typical weeks at work.

• Novelty creates memory density. New experiences (activities, emotions, relationships, skills, etc.) accelerate the rate of memory formation.

• Taken together, more novel experiences create more memories, which slows down our perception of time.

• Early life is full of novel experiences (higher memory density), so time appears to move slowly.

• Novel experiences repeated become familiar. Many become habits. Transitioning progressively more of life’s activities into habits produces many benefits, but it may come with a hidden cost.

• Habitual behaviors do not form memories.

• Later life is full of habitual activities (lower memory density), so time appears to move rapidly.

• Memories distort over time, becoming more positive in retrospect (rosy retrospection).

• Life satisfaction is judged by your “remembering self”, which involves assessing everything you remember about your life at that moment in time. This is a process of looking back at memories. As Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis explain, this is “the self that keeps score and maintains records.”

• Increasing memory density increases life satisfaction.

Here’s the most important final idea:

All of the above ideas, some of which sound philosophical or wonky, can be translated into easy-to-use life guidance.

I'd like to create a larger piece of work that presents the ideas above and the science behind them, connected to practical how-to advice.

I need your advice.

Periodically, in these letters, I ask you to send me a reply email.

About 2,000 people currently receive my letters each week, and about six in ten people open them.

But no one ever replies to me! 😢

Now, I could take this personally, but my better guess is that no one thinks I’m actually looking for a reply.

This time I am. I really would like your advice.

Would you be willing to reply to me?

Perhaps you could simply reply with a number on a scale of 1 to 5—where 1 means “meh, I really don’t care” and 5 means “wow, I’m fascinated to learn more” to this question:

• To what degree do the Atomic Novelty ideas I listed above resonate with you? How interesting are these ideas to you personally?

And, if you are willing, could you also let me know which of the points above:

• Are the most interesting.

• Are the most confusing to you right now.

As you might imagine, these are just ideas in my head.

My goal is to translate them into something helpful to you.

Pink Floyd outro.

As I wrote this letter today, I thought of Pink Floyd's song Time.

I love it when I have hard lyrics for decades, but never really listened to them.

Here are two sections from Time:

The first is time as experienced by a younger person:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain

And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today

The second half is an older person’s realization time is zooming by:

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

Sun is the same, in a relative way, but you're older

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines

My summary:

Time is the same, in a relative way.

Thanks for reading every week and coming along on this journey with me.

I’m going to take next Sunday off for the long weekend.

I’ll see you back here in two weeks, my friend.

Enjoy the rest of your day and have a great Labor Day.

Kevin

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