On: Time
Greetings All.
I think a lot about time. Yes, I know I have been taking some time away from writing recently, but I am jumping back into a weekly cadence now. To me, the past month and a half went by very quickly because there was a lot going on. But to many of y’all, time was moving very ssslllloowwlllyy, because my writing is an extremely important spike of dopamine in your life that I was depriving you of. Acknowledging some of the physics and biology around time, and our perception of it are critical, as it creates an interesting heuristic that we can apply to things such as investing, progress, and achievement of goals, core tenets of whatever it is we are all doing on my Substack channel.
A few ground rules we should all know:
1. Time doesn’t exist outside of our perception of it. One of Einstein’s monumental theories, relativity, can be measured with instruments as simple as a well-calibrated watch and a plane. Away from the center of the Earth, a watch will tick faster, indicating that more “time” has passed during the same amount of “time”. The inadequate language we have to describe such phenomena points to how new and difficult to grasp this still is for all of us.
2. Time is an increase in entropy, or disorder in the universe. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that entropy in a closed system increases over time. Our perception of entropy, the sensory “change” we see unfold before us in the world, gets logged into our brains, and creates the “arrow of time”. You can use energy to increase order (the opposite of entropy) in small pockets of the universe (think: diamonds), but you cannot reverse the arrow of time.
3. Higher frame rates of events appear to make time move faster. Studies have shown that people watching high-FPS videos will feel as though time moved faster. The same feeling can be achieved via blinking faster. More “things happening” within a relative period of “time” make it feel as though more time has passed. “Things” can be marked with a single blink or frame, or whatever event triggers a dopamine release, bringing credence to the saying “time flies when you’re having fun”. Conversely, increased levels of serotonin can make time appear to move more slowly.
Putting aside the Einstein macro gravity and Christopher Nolan Interstellar concepts of time that help to prove and visualize relativity, we are left with the more tangible heuristic of: we can’t reverse time, but we can change the way we perceive it. And if we play within this system, what can we do to optimize it?
As an anxious-avoidant adolescent, I used to actively try to make time pass faster in school. I remember bragging to my friends that by putting my head down and daydreaming, I could essentially “skip” the first two periods instantly and wake up for 3rd period gym class. In retrospect, skipping portions of life may not be healthy or advisable, but we all develop our own tools to cope with reality.
For the most part, as normal adjusted people, we all sort of want time to move more slowly. Or rather, we want to live as long as possible (assuming we are healthy), because there never seems to be enough time. Sure, immortality would be a curse, but on an infinite timescale one could have more positive experiences, more happiness, more life. The inverse of that extreme would be suicide. Now, there is a difference between living longer in measurable years and our perception of how long we lived within those years, but therein lies the innate conundrum of life.
Doing more things increases entropy and moves forward the arrow of time, accelerating our demise, shortening both our biological and our perceived lifespans. And yet, doing lots of things leads to what one would consider a more full life. Our biological clock starts ticking the moment we are born, whether we like it or not. We can’t realistically “freeze” our entropy as science fiction often likes to portray as a method of sending people on long space missions without aging. We can, however, utilize this heuristic on a micro scale, to take more control of our life within the closed system we are a part of.
Longevity has become a popular topic lately as the next frontier of science. Being healthy = living longer has been an obvious statement for many years. Just as an athlete resting for a game helps him or her play longer in the future, abstaining from drugs and alcohol abuse can keep you around longer, for sure. But despite all the evidence about health and diet, when scientists analyze the correlation of Blue Zones, they often find a bunch of 110-year old ladies who smoke cigarettes, eat fried food, and drink wine daily. Interestingly, the most prominent correlation found in human longevity was having a sense of community. Blue Zones often occur in small towns and villages, with a church at the center of the societal structure. Something about compounding time in a community must increase serotonin exponentially, driving these happy centenarians further and further into the future. This, plus what we know about quantum particles and how they behave differently under observation, begs the question: is perception driving reality?
Thought experiment: if you don’t perceive an increase in entropy, does entropy increase? Are the old ladies in the Blue Zones actually living longer? Or have they sufficiently decreased their frame rate of life, regulating their dopamine cadence, maximizing their serotonin to simply slow down their own local entropy and thus time, relative to everyone else?
Globalization and internationalism seem antithetical to the longevity cause in this regard to entropy. While the speed of technology increases connectivity between humans, we don’t yet know how much of the “special sauce” needed for Blue Zone type longevity is lost via digital versus physical interactions. Apple just unveiled their plans for their “spatial computing” headset at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Meta famously head-faked a pivot to hardware and the Metaverse 2 years ago, but still remains very bullish on their Oculus VR goggles. Google Glass was released over a decade ago. Perhaps with each iteration of digital connectivity the quality of information transmitted starts to rival in-person communication, potentially paving the way for online communities to flourish in the same way as Blue Zones. Balajis probably didn’t have longevity in mind when he wrote The Network State, but it offers a silver lining for traditionalists opposed to the all-digital future he is cultivating.
Quick thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro announcement: I think that this is a big long-game win for Apple. Meta has tackled VR from an affordable, gamer-focused perspective, but they lack the hardware chops as well as the brand equity to get consumers excited about a paradigm shift. Apple is just ever so slightly dipping their toe into the mix with spatial computing. They are not promising AR or VR, just a new way to immerse in to the apps and content of which you are already addicted. The $3,500 price point makes sense because Apple products have always been a status symbol. They aren’t targeting kids, or gamers, or even serious business people or the creative types that have always gravitated towards their products. They are targeting tech-progressive societal influencers who will flex the gear on a plane, or in a coffee shop. Normal people won’t dare sport them in public. So you won’t see a lot of them out there, because the initial production run will be small, and they will sell out fast, so they will be somewhat mysterious to the general public, the same way knowing what it’s like to drive a Ferrari is. This is good, because the experience and use cases of spatial computing probably won’t be compelling enough on their own to sell hundreds millions of units to the average consumer. The low supply plus status-y price point artificially creates demand and provides them the much needed time for developers to adopt the Vision Pro as a meaningful platform while the marketing gears turn. If the developers come, then VP2 or 3 might catch a little more mainstream interest. Now back to the article..
A key concept of Information Theory is entropy. High entropy means high unpredictability and high uncertainty. We all know zoom calls have a high degree of uncertainty, with massive amounts of body language and other nuanced forms of communication lost. If it turns out in 50 years that a bunch of VR metaverse gamer communities are living past 100, we might be able to quantify that communal aspect of the Blue Zone longevity. But until then, and for normal people, in-person community seems to be a main driver of biological longevity.
In David Sinclair’s book Lifespan, he talks about the tradeoff between cellular reproduction and repair. With a finite amount of energy, cells must decide which task to perform. Early on in life they reproduce, until repair becomes the more prudent thing to do. Eventually cells become so damaged that they die, and this is what causes aging. All of Sinclair’s research goes into increasing the efficacy of cellular longevity, and thus stopping aging in its tracks. I read this a couple of years ago and immediately extrapolated that into the tradeoffs of daily life. We are in a closed system with finite energy, but maybe it is possible to spin the dial in our favor and create a flywheel that allocates energy into the correct task to increase prosperity.
Working that into the larger heuristic of time that I am building here, we can see that tradeoffs are not just a big factor, but the factor. We can freeze time and experience nothing, essentially living forever. Or, we can experience everything, and have it all end in an instant. To think about this in three dimensional terms, we have breadth and depth. Think about breadth as a widening expanse of experience, and depth as our progression through time. The more breadth we have, the less depth we can walk through, and vice versa. The current fad of longevity is akin to the diamond analogy from before. People are injecting energy into the system (via nootropics, intermittent fasting, cold plunges, etc.) to decrease their cellular entropy.
I know I’ve taken you all for a loop blending the perceptual reality of time with physics and biology, but let’s get back the the heuristic I promised. How do we optimize in our current life?
Let’s quickly summarize the assumptions to get back on the same page:
Perception is reality. If we think time goes by quicker, it does.
We can change our perception, and thus our time.
We can inject energy, Deus Ex Machina style, into the system to slow down time.
Clearly we need to use energy to change our perception to shape our reality. The difficult thing here is that so often we are subjected to so much stimulus that it drains our energy. Dopamine addicted youths constantly checking their phones are increasing their frame rate and with it the speed at which their life is racing by. TikTok is the ultimate microcosm of this whole time conundrum. The viewer is awarded a new “experience” every few seconds in an unending loop. User reaction after 15 minutes or an hour is quite uniform, they feel as though that time was completely lost. The Buddhists may have had it right. Use your energy to meditate on the present moment. Extrapolating beyond that, using your energy to create order in your daily life will reduce entropy. Energy is the ingredient that powers the flywheel to perpetuate beyond the breadth and depth trade off of experience and longevity. Focus is the tool you must use to apply that energy. Order, stillness, calmness, tranquilo, are the areas in which to apply it. The end goal is that we have our cake and eat it too. We live a life of many experiences, but with enough focus and attention on the moments in between them so that we aren’t rushing through. Time is what you make it.