235. Clock Time Event Time

Explicit content warning

07/09/20 • 12 min

Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several “mini lives” in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters.

There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark.

Getting used to a slower pace of life

The pace of life in Medellín is different from the pace of life in Chicago. It’s slower. People talk slower, people walk slower. That thing where you stand on the right side of the escalator so people can pass on the left -- yeah, people don’t really do that here. They stand wherever they like. It’s usually not a problem. It’s rare that anyone climbs up the escalator while it’s moving, anyway.

Whenever I came on a trip to Medellín, the same thing happened: The first week, the slower pace of life was refreshing. The second week, as I was trying to get into a routine, it started to get annoying. The third week, some incident would occur, and I would -- I’m not proud to say -- lose my shit.

A comedy of errors

The last time I went through this transition, it was a concert malfunction. I showed up to the theater to see a concert, and the gates were locked. A chulito wrapper rolled by in the wind, like a tumbleweed. Nobody was around, except a stray cat.

Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody?

As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater.

This was especially aggravating because of everything I had gone through to get these tickets. My foreign credit card didn’t work on the ticket website, so I had to go to a physical ticket kiosk. But then the girl working the kiosk said the system was down. So I came back the next day, and the system was also down. No, it wasn’t “still” down -- it was just down “again.” So I waited in a nearby chair in the mall for forty-five minutes. Then I finally got my tickets.

And now the concert is cancelled. I go to the ticket booth at the theater to get my money back. But they tell me I can’t do that here -- I have to go to a special kiosk, across town. Oh, and I can’t do it today -- they won’t be ready to process my refund until tomorrow.

I take the afternoon off to go get my refund. After standing in line for half an hour, they tell me they can’t process my refund on my foreign credit card. I have to fill out a form, which they’ll mail to the home office in Bogotá. I should get my refund within ten days.

I’m always wary that I’m an immigrant living in another country -- that sometimes the way they do things in that country makes no sense to me. I never want to come off as the “impatient gringo.” But at this point, I become the impatient gringo. I demand my money back, and recount the whole experience to the clerk. In my perturbed state, my Spanish is even more embarrassingly broken.

I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I’ve been through this enough times to know what’s coming.

Out on the sidewalk, in an instant, as if a switch were flipped in my brain, I go from steaming with anger, to calm as a clam. Months worth of pent-up tension melts away from the muscles in my neck and back. I feel relaxed -- almost high.

Flipping the “temporal switch”

I call this moment the “temporal switch.” I’ve talked to other expats about this phenomenon, and they report something similar. That when you first come to Medellín, it takes awhile to get into the rhythm of life here. But once you’re in that rhythm, you’re more relaxed, more laid back. You’re even happier.

You might wonder what my concert catastrophe has to do with the rhythm of life in Colombia. I might be wrong, but somehow it seems that malfunctions are incredibly common here. It certainly seems so to myself and other expats that live here, and even Colombians agree. (If the concert incident is any support for this theory, I’ll add that I never did get a refund -- I ended up calling AMEX to do a chargeback.)

These malfunctions have a symbiotic relationship with the rhythm of life. The internal chatter I experience whenever I make the temporal switch might provide some insight. I’m telling myself, “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them. You might as well relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment.”

So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them.” That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, even if things don’t work out on the first try, don’t worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say,

Before I moved to Colombia, I lived several “mini lives” in Medellín. I came and lived here for a few months. I escaped the very worst portion of the Chicago winters.

There was a phenomenon I experienced every time I came here, which taught me a lot about how I think about time. It always happened right around the three week mark.

Getting used to a slower pace of life

A comedy of errors

Is it the wrong day? I confirmed on the website: The concert is today, at this time, at this place. So where is everybody?

As I walked around the building, looking for another entrance, I saw a security guard. He told me the concert was cancelled. Something broken on the ceiling of the theater.

I give in, fill out the form, and leave the ticket kiosk -- without my money. And I’ve been through this enough times to know what’s coming.

Flipping the “temporal switch”

So perhaps everyone is telling themselves that. “Things aren’t going to work out the first time you try them.” That could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, even if things don’t work out on the first try, don’t worry. It will work out eventually. As the Colombians say,

Previous Episode

234. How to Have a Thought

Maya Angelou was right, “People will forget what you said...but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Because I don’t remember what this woman said to me, but I do remember how I felt: Attacked.

My heart was racing. I had two options: Lash out and defend my position, or excuse myself from the conversation.

My brain hastily searched for the best way out: Slip into the kitchen to get another drink? Go to the bathroom? Awkwardly appeal to my need to mingle?

But then I realized something: I felt attacked, but she wasn’t attacking me. She wasn’t even disagreeing with me. She had merely asked a question.

Don’t be other people. Be a thinking person.

Only now, years later, do I understand why I felt so threatened. I had met a thinking person.

Oscar Wilde said it well,

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. -Oscar Wilde

Forgive the quotation, but it accurately describes who I was. I was someone else. Whatever I had said to that woman at that cocktail party, it wasn’t a thought. It was someone else’s opinion.

And I was encountering someone who was not someone else. She was herself. She was someone who didn’t speak in pre-programmed sound bites. Someone who didn’t merely parrot the latest news headline or social media meme. Someone who listened to what you said, asked questions about it, and expected a response. Someone who, in good faith, assumed I, too, was a thinking person.

Since that day, I have endeavored to become a thinking person. I’ll never truly master thinking. If I thought I could master thinking, that wouldn’t be very thinking-person-like of me.

But once in awhile, I do have a genuine thought. Some people agree with me. Because I’ve tried to become a thinking person, I was proud when an Amazon reviewer of my latest book called me “a very original thinker,” and when best-selling author Jeff Goins called me “an underrated thinker.” (Though it would be nice to be an appropriately-rated thinker.)

So, I humbly submit to you the way I think about thinking. How to have a thought.

There are four keys to having an original thought:

Read widely (not the same shit as everyone else)
Stop having opinions (stop defending your “beliefs”)
Stop wanting to be liked (start being intellectually honest)
Write regularly (explore what you really think)

In sum, assume nothing, question everything.

https://twitter.com/kadavy/status/1217900835503558656

Now, a little more about each of these points.

1. Read widely (not the same shit as everyone else)

Haruki Marakami said,

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. -Haruki Marakami

The same way you are what you eat, you also are what you read. This is a little counterintuitive, because, in trying to become a thinking person, we’re trying not to have all of our thoughts be mere re-hashings of something we’ve read.

Don’t think of reading as a way to put thoughts into your brain. Think of reading as a way of trying on someone else’s brain for a little while.

This is why a book is such a bargain: Someone spends their whole life thinking. They write all of that down. Now for ten bucks you get a lifetime worth of thinking, sewn into a costume you can try on for a few hours.

Charles Scribner, Jr. said, “Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.” With a book, you can try on someone else’s thoughts, and see how they feel. You can question those thoughts, and compare them to your own thoughts.

Sometimes a book completely reorganizes the way you process the world. Other times, you just get one or two good ideas.

But to have original thoughts, you can’t be reading the same thing everyone else is reading. This is tough, because we’re all fishing from the same stream. The stream of information that rushes by each day in the news and in our social media feeds.

Every week, thousands of new books are published. A few dozen will be hot. Most of those books won’t have a lasting impact on culture.

And they shouldn’t. Most of the books mainstream publishers are publishing are crap. They’re blog posts with 250 pages of filler. They don’t have new ideas in them. Even when the book is written by someone who has done original research, you’re better off reading one or two of their twenty-page academic papers than you are reading their 250-page book.

If you want to have a thought, you can’t read the same shit as everyone else. I love the story of Tyler Cowen, who I interviewed on episode 155. He talks about how he drove all...

Next Episode

236. Time Worship

When I was working with Timeful -- the productivity app co-founded by behavioral scientist and Love Your Work guest, Dan Ariely -- we had a great feature. You could put todo items on your calendar.

You could estimate how long a todo item was going to take, and then you could drag that todo item onto your calendar. It would be right there on the timeline, along with any other events you had planned for the day.

This todo-items-on-calendar thing was a handy feature. It makes sense, really. Too many of us have a todo list a mile long. We know what we intend to do, but we have no idea when we’ll actually do those things.

When Timeful built this feature, and I finally got to use it regularly, I made a discovery. We’re really bad at estimating time. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Our vision is distorted by our “time worship.”

Our perception of time is warped

My own faulty time estimates went both ways. I might think it would take me less than fifteen minutes to respond to an email. I’d be shocked to discover that it took half an hour. I might think it would take an hour to draft a blog post, and I’d be pleasantly surprised to see I could do it in only ten minutes.

Instinctively, we know that our perception of time is warped. We know the saying that “time flies when we’re having fun.” Our perception of time changes. It changes according to our mood, our personality, or the number of events that happen within a certain amount of time.

But if our perception of time is so warped, why is time so important to us? Why do we treat time as if it’s the only thing that matters? Why do we practice “time worship?”

The way we measure time is arbitrary

It turns out, the way we measure time is pretty arbitrary. There’s nothing in the natural world that says that we should divide our days up by twenty-four hours, with sixty minutes in each of those hours, with sixty seconds in each of those minutes.

Our heart may beat about sixty times a minute, but if we’re exercising, it could be 160 times a minute. We breathe about fourteen times a minute, but if we’re running, it might be forty times a minute.

Aside from the rotation of the earth and the earth’s revolutions around the sun, there’s nothing about the natural world that says we need to measure the time the way we do.

Dividing the day up into twenty-four hours, sixty minutes an hour, sixty seconds a minute -- that’s leftover from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian numbering system.

And hours weren’t even originally a fixed length of time! Back in the days of sundials, hours were relative to the amount of daylight in the day. Hours in one season were shorter than hours in another season.

It wasn’t even until the late 16^th^ century that there was a mechanical clock that kept track of sixty minutes in an hour. To measure seconds, we had to wait until a century later -- the 17^th^ century.

Even the earth’s rotations are unreliable

Yet even with this mechanical precision, the way we measure time doesn’t totally match up with the natural world. In an atomic clock, 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation in the caesium-133 atom represents one second. The atomic clock uses this atom’s radiation to keep time, because it’s one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature. Certainly more reliable than grains of sand falling through an hourglass, or even the vibrations of a quartz crystal.

But still, even with the help of one of the most reproducible and stable things in all of nature, the atomic clock is not perfect. We still have to add an extra second -- a “leap second” -- to our measurement of time. We add a leap second eight times a decade.

It’s hard to match mechanical or even atomic precision to time, in part, because even the thing that time is based upon isn’t perfect. There are tiny, portions of a millisecond, differences in the length of a day -- that is, the amount of time it takes for the earth to rotate. These differences fluctuate over the course of multiple years and throughout the year, as well as every several days.

So why does time rule our lives?

So if our perception of time is warped, if our measurement of time is arbitrary, if even the things upon which we measure time are unreliable, why are we so reliant on time?

Most of us wake up to an alarm clock. We break for lunch at a certain time. We meet for coffee at a certain time, through synchronized clocks on our phones. We go to bed at a certain time. You probably looked at how long this podcast episode was before you decided to listen to it.

One reason we’re so reliant on time is because keeping track of time is useful. It allows us to do more things in less time. It allows us to coordin...