11. Expanding Time

I get asked a lot, “Why are you moving to Portugal?” The truth is, we’re doing it for a lot of reasons. Here’s one more for you…

As we get older, something strange happens to time.

The days feel shorter. Weeks blur together. Months disappear. You look up and another year is gone, and you’re not entirely sure where it went.

There’s a reason for that.

A Stanford professor explains it this way: time doesn’t actually move faster as we age — our perception of it does. And the biggest culprit is that we stop creating new memories.

As adults, we slowly start sleepwalking through life.

• Same route.

• Same office.

• Same conversations.

• Same routines.

When your days look nearly identical, your brain compresses them. Weeks, months, and even years get filed away as one long copy-and-paste. The more predictable life becomes, the faster time seems to vanish.

So what slows it down?

It doesn’t have to be grand adventures, nor bucket-list trips.
Just novelty.

The professor teaches one simple technique to stretch time:
Do one unfamiliar thing every single day.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to be something your brain can’t run on autopilot.

• A different route home.

• A new gym.

• A new skill.

• A new environment.

That small disruption forces your brain to wake up and lay down fresh memory tracks. And those memory tracks are what expand time. Novelty stretches your days because your mind finally turns the lights back on.

When life becomes predictable, time evaporates.
When you introduce friction, curiosity, and challenge — time expands.

That’s one of the reasons we’re moving to Portugal.

• New places.

• New people.

• A new language.

• New daily challenges that require attention instead of habit.

It’s good for the brain. But more than that, it makes the time I have left feel richer and longer.

I met my wife in mid-life. And sometimes it feels like I missed out on so much time with her simply because our paths crossed later than I wish they had. So, I want to capture as much time in life as I can and grow with her as much as I can. Moving to Portugal isn’t about escape or reinvention. It’s about presence.

About slowing the blur.
About making the days distinct again.
About squeezing every possible moment out of the time we still have.

If novelty expands time, then this move isn’t just a relocation.

It’s a way of giving ourselves more life inside the life we already have.

And that, to me, that feels worth everything.