Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
Douglas CouplandRead
Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Experiencing a range of emotions can make time feel more expansive, while a lack of new experiences can make it feel fleeting.
In this quote, Douglas Coupland suggests that the richness of emotional experiences contributes to the perception of time. When individuals are engaged with new and varied emotions, their experience of time feels elongated. Conversely, as people age and encounter fewer novel situations, their perception of time accelerates, leading to a sense of life passing by more quickly. Coupland invites reflection on how our engagements shape our sense of time and existence.
Themes
EmotionsPerceptionTimeExperienceNovelty
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared at a birthday celebration to reflect on the passage of time.
More from Douglas Coupland
All quotes →...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
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When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?
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I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'
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If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.
Douglas CouplandRead
When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.
Douglas CouplandRead
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