Here’s something to keep in mind for this whole episode. When you give, your life gets bigger and time slows down. When you take, your life gets smaller and time speeds up. That sounds like a nice line, but I mean it literally, and it comes from one idea we’re going to build the whole episode on: time comes from s**t happening. If time is made out of things passing from you into the world, then how much time your life seems to hold depends on how much passes through you. Giving keeps things moving through you. Taking holds them in. Start with giving. Giving means letting something leave you. You cause something, it goes out, it lands in someone else, and it comes back to you changed. Every act of giving is an event, and events are what time is made of. So a life full of giving is a life full of things happening, and when you look back over a year like that, it feels long. It’s dense, packed with moments you can remember. And your life gets wider too, because what you gave carries on in other people and in whatever you made. You’re spread out across more of the world than just your own body. Giving slows you down while it’s happening, too. When you cook for someone, or sit with a friend, or make something with your hands, you’re inside what you’re doing. You’re not using it to get to the next thing. That’s the difference between cooking your own food and ordering a takeout. Being present means being inside the whole cycle, and when you’re inside it, time stops rushing. Now taking. Taking means holding on, and when nothing leaves you, nothing happens. Accumulating is the same act repeated over and over: earn, save, earn, save. And days that are all the same leave nothing behind in your memory, so the years collapse into each other. That’s why people whose lives are organised around getting look up one day and say, “Where did the last ten years go?” Taking also squeezes your life down to the size of yourself and your stuff. Everything you take gets pulled inward, so your world shrinks until it’s just you guarding your things. Think of Midas, alone in a palace full of gold. And taking speeds up every moment, because taking always points to the future. Each day is a means to the next one. You save for later. You’ll enjoy it once you’ve earned it. The money is working towards something. Every present moment becomes a stepping stone, and you cross stepping stones quickly, without looking down. That’s compound interest turned into a way of living. Time stops being something you live in and becomes the gap you have to get through before the payoff. Underneath that is a denial of death. The person who takes is accumulating to escape his own limits, and someone running from his own ending is always in a hurry. Get full access to Nonlinearwisdom at nonlinearwisdom.substack.com/subscribe
