87 – Architecton

There's a strange asymmetry to how we experience time. A childhood summer can feel longer than an entire adult year, and the reason has nothing to do with the calendar.

Lately I've been challenging myself with being hyper aware of newness within lived experience, and how newness is the key to feeling like life is more enjoyed and, as a result, truly lived. Lived the way you remember it as a child, inside long summers and experiences you never forget.

When we’re young our concept of time is exaggerated, not just because we’re children, but because everything is new. Experiencing newness creates memories that become “pillars,” laying a foundation for a life well lived. Eventually we outgrow this and adopt a secondhand approach to life where we scroll through highlights of people traveling the world, summiting that mountain, creating that art, and buying that home thanks to the digital age. But there’s an escape from this – it's saying yes despite the excuses we reach for first: it's not convenient, it's not in the budget, not right now.

The busier I get with work, projects, and life, the more I realize there's one skill we all have to master. It’s the art of architecting our time.

Experiencing new things constantly as a child, sometimes daily, makes your early life feel much longer and fuller. When we age, everything becomes familiar. And so we operate under the illusion that we're creating a life worth living by reserving it for special occasions. We stop creating lasting memories. We stop creating moments that can be looked back on and make us think, “Wow, that was only a month ago?” We stop creating “pillars.”

When we fill up our days with more memorable things, more experiences, more small moments that compound into a life better lived, we begin to elongate our lives compared to living only within the parameters of the familiar. Because the familiar is where time becomes a formless void. It doesn't compound. And living there long enough is what convinces us that life is short. But I don’t believe life is short. I believe life is more than we often allow it to be due to our shallow lens and lack of novelty.

Novelty compresses subjective time into density. A month packed with new perspectives feels longer lived than a year of repetition, because the fullness is what makes time feel real – and the disruption of a routine rewards those who become architects of their time, and say yes to that project, that experience, and that idea.

In Greek, the word architecton is a compound of arkhi- (ἀρχι-), meaning chief, leader, or master, and tekton (τέκτων), meaning builder, carpenter, or craftsman. An architecton in the ancient world wasn’t just a designer. They built and ran the entire process, top to bottom. Nothing slipped through the cracks because they were masters of the full breadth of the work. And while this might not be the strict etymological use of the word, it resonates with how we have to be with our time, always creating “pillars” for memory.

Newness isn't a luxury or a hobby, it's the fundamental mechanism of a life well lived. And the corollary is simple – if we're not actively creating new moments, we let life compress into nothing.

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86 – Rules & Rituals