Thoroughly Thursday - The Birthday Paradox Edition
This week, I consider the passing of time. Also, Ryan Holiday encourages you to read the Stoics, how the Louvre thieves pulled off their heights, and animated Halloween flick "Wendell & Wild."
“The awful thing about getting old is that you have breakfast every half hour.”
- Noël Coward (per Dame Maggie Smith)
Welcome back to Thoroughly Thursday, the Birthday Paradox Edition. Most years, I find myself waiting expectantly for October to arrive: the summer heat abates, occasional early-morning rainstorms roll through, and the knowledge that Halloween is just around the corner. But, this year, I had this odd, sneaky feeling that autumn tiptoed in unnoticed.
I have been noticing this feeling more recently. It’s like time has started to speed up. Each day seems to slide by without me noticing. I have breakfast at 7:30am, but the next time I check my watch, it’s 11:30am. I grab a snack at 2pm, and before I know it, I’m home and it is 9:45pm. What was once Tuesday is suddenly Friday afternoon. If life is a journey, I’ve begun to feel like I’m sliding down a mountainside. Weeks slip into months, and 2025, which feels like it just began, is suddenly coming to a close.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and there are a few potential reasons why life seems to speed up while we age. The first idea is known as the Proportional Theory,1 or the Birthday Paradox. When we are younger, each year is a huge portion of our lived experience. To a 10-year-old, a single year is 10% of their life, while for me, each passing year is less than 2% of my total. The scale of time shrinks as the context expands (in my case, an additional five decades of memories).
Combined with this is the idea of Novelty Compression, and how the brain captures new experiences. I still have a vivid memory of my 5th birthday party with my school friends in Lancaster, CA. I can remember the sun in the playground and the small boxes of colored pencils that were used as party favors. It was the first big party that I ever had, and all the little details, including the shape of the cake, made an impression. Every year since, I’ve celebrated my birthday with family and friends, but I’m not sure I could tell you more than a handful of details about any of them. When we’re young, nearly every experience is new, and our brains put down loads of neural pathways to record them. However, as we age, familiar actions and situations require less unique encoding and begin to blend together. So, it’s not that I’m sleepwalking through the world, but that my brain is saving time and energy by providing only rough sketches of my daily routine.
The final possibility is Attention Saturation, the idea that our brains are so stimulated we can't notice time passing. Personally, my world is filled with nearly endless online meetings, emails, meditation and language learning apps, text messages, chat requests, song playlists, YouTube videos, streaming services, and Kindle books, which are shoved between IRL conversations, phone calls, workouts, and social events. I love my life, but opportunities for boredom are rare. And this persistent lack of empty spaces, the moments when my brain gets pulled back into the here and now, are a necessary part of the world slowing down.
So, for all my love of our interconnected world, filled with countless curious details, I’m trying to spend a bit more time journaling, thinking, and enjoying the sunlight passing through the leaves. I might be sliding down a mountain, but at least I can take a moment to enjoy the horizon. I hope you can, too.
Take care, my friends, and see you in a few hours when Thursday rolls around again. 😏
A few cool things I have seen/read or have been sent from readers this week, in no particular order:
ARTICLE: In what feels like a scene from the latest Ocean 11 movie, last week thieves pulled off a daring, mid-morning robbery from the Louvre. As the museum opened at 9:30 am, they stole a collection of priceless jewels in less than 10 minutes before disappearing on scooters down the Paris streets. The BBC has an excellent multimedia article that shows both the timeline of the theft and where it exactly happened.
BOOK: While I have been a fan of Ryan Holiday for a while, I had never read his original book on stoicism, The Obstacle is the Way. The holiday is largely to thank (or blame) for the modern Stoic revival and the sudden fad among tech bros of quoting Marcus Aurelius in PowerPoint presentations. The book blends ancient philosophy with self-help energy, urging readers to see obstacles not as barriers but as the path itself. Drawing from figures like Seneca, Epictetus, and Ulysses S. Grant, Holiday’s optimism is relentless. At times, this may feel like a TED Talk in a toga, but the central idea of resilience through perspective remains timeless.
FILM: This week, as part of my 2025 Halloween Movie Series, I watched Wendell & Wild (2022), a stop-motion animated film directed by Henry Selick and produced by Jordan Peele. Selick, the director of the brilliant Coraline (2009), takes the darkness up a notch here—with a hefty dose of punk chaos for good measure. Where Coraline brooded on childhood loneliness, neglect, and creepy spider-moms, Wendell & Wild bounces in PG-13 territory with themes of grief, activism, personal identity, and why you should definitely rethink using teddy bears to raise demons from the Underworld. It’s messier, weirder, and undeniably its own kind of fun.
What I'm Thinking About -
“I do have regrets, to be certain. But all of my regrets [are because] I didn’t demonstrate with my actions or my words or my person, the proper amount of empathy, kindness, or respect within a specific relationship.”
- Adam Savage
All the best, and remember, tomorrow is Friday. 🙂
Scott
P.S. If you like this email, send it to a friend. They can sign up here.
P.P.S. Check out these amazing microscopic videos from the Nikon Small World in Motion competition. Each video was filmed through a microscope to provide exquisite detail. From tiny flower petals opening to algae dancing in a drop of water, they are truly remarkable.
P.P.P.S. Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber.
First proposed by psychologist William James.