What Day is it Again? Losing Time to the Turbulent Flow State

Over the past year or so I’ve found myself frequently lamenting to others that “I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by!” For me, this is different than saying “Oh, the weather sure has been nice this week!” Or “Did you see the big sports ball game last night?” It’s more than casual small talk. And it’s more than just a simple truism handed down from past generations. I’ve even been pairing it with the disclaimer of “I know it makes me sound like an old man” precisely because I want to acknowledge there’s actually more to it. By saying it, I’m raising a concern – somewhat in frustration, somewhat in fear – that something isn’t right.

Recently, the feeling has been even sharper – like its crossed some critical threshold. And while I do feel it when reflecting back over longer periods (as you’d expect to), the feeling of “lost time” is disturbingly most pronounced in the recurring moments that I act out every single day.

• Each night when I lie down in bed and pull the covers to my shoulders.
• When I tell Siri to turn out all the lights.
• When I wake up in the middle of the night and walk treacherously to the bathroom.
• Each morning before work when I drink tea with my wife.

All of these moments, except perhaps waking in the middle of the night, are positive moments. So, I can rule out their underlying connotation as a cause of the negative sensation. Yet in these situations, it’s as if I’ve been hypnotized and the entirety of the day has vanished from memory. I’m only left with these recurring moments that anchor my perception of time to reality – like punctuation without a sentence.

There’s nothing wrong with these moments – its the feeling of missing time that’s the problem. Without the memory of the day to dilute them, the moments become experientially so similar that they border on deja vu. In truth, its worse than deja vu because instead of the simple, trippy, glitch-in-the-matrix tingle, the impression that “I just did this” comes with a visceral mourning of time slipping away under my own wasteful watch. And each time, it stirs up deep insecurities about work, productivity, quality of life – just to name a few.

I know I do a lot. When I force myself to reflect back on the actual day, I can see productivity and progress clearly. But without this forced reflection, the intraday “noise” doesn’t register above the “signal” of the daily punctuations as if they’re in some sort of periodic temporal resonance.

I do not like this feeling.

Not to worry – I’m going to be just fine. But I think it’s a sufficiently interesting observation to write about it. So, what is this feeling and where does it come from? What’s happening during each day that leads to this unpleasantness? There’s a thousand and one possibilities. But is there one that can help me capture the essence of the sensation? One that can help me give it a name so I have power over it?

Maybe I’m Just Getting Older

There is of course the classic notion of how your perception of time supposedly compresses as you get older. You’ve heard this before. This is the idea where each subsequent slice of time becomes a progressively smaller percentage of your overall lifespan than the slice before it. Then as a result, time will feel progressively faster as you age.

I do believe there is some truth to this. I certainly remember how the years seemed to drag on forever in high school and college (I don’t think the years before that contain useful data). Each semester felt like a distinct eternity to be endured. Having said that, I’ve seen too much variance in my perception of time for “getting older” to be the dominant variable here. This means I need to look deeper for answer. Perhaps there’s something to be learned by reflecting on those periods of life and comparing to the present day.

There are No Barriers to Taking on Too Much

Comparing again to my years in school, I think the anticipation of the future could have contributed to a slower ticking clock. For instance, during each of those periods of my life, there was always some major, foundational milestone that I was working towards. For instance:

• Building a house.
• Pairing off for marriage.
• Graduating from college so I could get a “good” job.
• Graduating from high school so I could leave my home town and start my “real” education.
• Waiting and hoping for a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64 for Christmas in 3rd grade.

I felt that my life was incomplete or couldn’t start until I reached each successive milestone as if they were each some critical dependency. This meant that it didn’t make sense for me to take on other unrelated goals or objectives. And because they (particularly education) had deadlines that were consistent for everyone, there was margin built into the schedule. I could frequently clear my To-Do list of everything I thought needed doing within that period to move me maximally towards my goal(s) and still have time left over. The rest of the time could simply be wasted – or better stated, its use was completely orthogonal to the outcome and could be wholly repurposed without the guilt of sacrificing progress for pleasure.

Now, I’ve long since achieved all of those life milestones. **Pats self on the back.** So, a similar anticipation factor is no longer well defined. I wouldn’t conflate this with a lack of a mission, a lack of a purpose, or a lack of things to work on. I have all of those things – I know where I am headed and why. But unlike the foundational life milestones, all of these newly cultivated objectives are distinctly mine and I can create as many as I want with as much variety as I want. I don’t have to wait for my future anymore – it’s mine to create now.

But if I create the objectives and their deadlines (whether at work or at play) they lack the anchoring, social significance of the life milestones and I lose the margin that comes with an objective of the masses. Put another way, I’m free to take on too many things (or the wrong things) and to hold myself to unrealistic deadlines.

Perhaps the shift from an externally governed focus to an internally governed focus is to blame. Not that there is something right about external focus and wrong about internal focus. I mean to say that in my life, externally governed focus led to fewer, high quality objectives and when switching to internal drivers my focus has multiplexed to a great degree. Therefore, we could assume that narrower focus leads to a slower passage of time and the sharded focus leads to a faster passage of time.

Maybe there’s something to this.

There’s No Socially Structured Time Off

Another (related) theory is that I no longer enjoy clear, structured cycles of productivity & recovery – something I used to experience multiple times per year.

Fall Semester –> Winter Break –> Spring Semester –> Summer Break –> Repeat

There is no break now – at least not one that my entire social network participates in. The weekend should be a microcosm of this phenomena. There is nothing special about it other than everyone has agreed its a short break from work. Arguably, even this convention has faded. Even so, I’m talking about the benefit of longer breaks. When we take a vacation, the world keeps moving without us. The work piles up. This is because the world didn’t agree to a vacation – we don’t all holiday at the same time. The structured breaks gave us concrete cycles of work and rest that seasonal activities or even the seasons themselves cannot. The breaks were periods of zero expectations. Time that was truly yours. Time when a person could genuinely unplug if they chose to. These days, there is no option to unplug for me or really any adult.

Hypnotized by Turbulence

Ahhhh, unplugging! Maybe now I’m on to something. It’s certainly true that we are more stimulated (and continuously so) than we’ve ever been before. Perhaps the days pass so quickly because I’m overstimulated when necessarily and unavoidably plugged into society.

But stimulation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, is it?

When I’m ideally stimulated, time passes with a laminar flow – swiftly and smoothly such that I can’t ascertain its speed. This happens when fully engrossed in a task, when reading a captivating book, or when having a good time. You probably know this as the “flow state”. Despite how quickly they seem to pass, these laminar flow periods leave their imprint on my mind. Afterwards, I feel satisfied and accomplished. And typically, this feeling echos forward for hours or days into the future allowing me to relive the positive experience many times over.

However, time can also fly by even when I’m unpleasantly stimulated – when I’m distracted. I’d liken it to a scenario where the TV keeps playing each subsequent episode of a show that I’m not really interested in. I don’t like it but I keep watching it. A tug-of-war between my true reality and the reality that I have chosen to engage with plays out over the landscape of my consciousness. I become hypnotized. I don’t feel satisfied or accomplished. There is flow, but it is turbulent flow. I can tell that time is passing but the turbulence provides no means by which to orient myself. And that is how I lose time.

This is beginning to feel like the description I’m looking for.

Unavoidable Overstimulation

Now, avoiding the TV isn’t hard. I use it only as an example. The real challenge comes from the 9-10 hours a day I am hypnotized by work. While working, especially on the in-the-office days, I am fully engaged with each task. But rather than achieving the satisfying laminar flow state, I much more commonly experience a turbulent one. During this time, the concerns of my own life disappear from my mind and are replaced by those of the company.

To make matters worse, every interstitial moment that might otherwise give me a break from thinking about work is filled not only with face-to-face interruptions but with an endless stream of texts, emails, phone calls, and video conferences. It’s not actually genuine work that requires us to be plugged in as such, it’s our “modern” culture that sets the expectation. And as a result, leaving work at work isn’t really possible anymore. Even if I succeed to not work at home, there is a looming sense that I might have to respond or that others are expecting me to even when I don’t.

This isn’t simply about the volume work – which I’ve done well to keep in check. Its not about liking my job – which I do. It comes down to unavoidable overstimulation without an agreed upon means to unplug. This is evidenced by the experiences of the prior generations. The 40 hour work week is not new, but the ubiquity and expectation of a digital presence is very recent. At least when it comes to my work, there is a limit to how much Digital Minimalism I can successfully adopt. The contemporary covalent bond between work and digital overstimulation has progressively contributed to this unsettling change in my (and others’) perception of time.

To put it bluntly, during the day I’m stuck watching a show that I don’t want to watch. And as a protective mechanism, my mind partitions and time passes quickly, only to be reawakened by those daily, punctuating resonances.

Two Kinds of Flow States

I’m deeply familiar with the idea of a flow state and I crave it as much as the next person. But it wasn’t until I put pen to paper on this thought exercise that I realized there are really two kinds of flow states: laminar flow and turbulent flow. Both types of flow result in the feeling of time passing swiftly. It’s what’s in the wake of the flow that’s different – the presence or absence of a satisfaction.

Laminar flow is the one we crave. It’s the sensation of a deep connection with the way you’re spending the time. Its an acknowledgement that your mind believes the time spent to have been a worthy sacrifice.

Turbulent flow explains the hypnotizing phenomenon that I seem to be experiencing. It’s the sensation of tug-of-war between where your mind wants to be and where it actually is – even if its there for a good reason like fulfilling your responsibilities at work. The direction you want to be going is not in harmony with the activities you spend your time on . There’s friction, turbulence.

The symptoms of each flow state are recognizable. This means we’ve achieved creation of a compact language that we can use to describe something that is otherwise hard to pinpoint. It also means that, for turbulent flow, we should be able to diagnose it and find a treatment. For me, the diagnosable symptom is the experiential resonance that follows in the wake of the turbulent flow.

But once identified, what can we do to minimize it? How can we turn the channel? How can we break the hypnosis? How can we snap out of it?

“Well, doctor, What’s Your Prescription?”

I suspect by now you’re expecting something monumental but I think the answer is simple.

When experiencing a laminar flow state, you’re in harmony with the way that you choose to spend your time. With turbulent flow state you are not. The observation I’ve made is a statement that favors laminar flow states over turbulent flow states as a key performance indicator of a satisfying life – essentially, being present over being distracted.

But what is the essence of “being present”?

The Essence of Being Present

When we’re young, we lack the wisdom to set our own objectives and therefore rely upon an abundance of external systems. Those systems provide enough direction and margin such that we don’t have to be good at choosing how to spend our time in order to avoid turbulent flow states. As we successfully progress through life, the utility of those systems fade, exposing us to the consequences of our own decisions. We then have to rely on the wisdom we’ve (hopefully) cultivated over the years to replace those systems with internal drivers that create harmony between our goals, our actions towards them, and the community that we act in. Success with this leads to being present and enjoying frequent laminar flow states.

This is something that feels true regardless of the point in history that it’s stated. What’s different these days is the scale with which we have to contend. Rather than seeking harmony with a manageable number of variables, the digitization of our society and culture forces us to confront approximate infinities. How do you have harmony with a seemingly infinite global society? How do you choose from a nearly infinite pool of goals and objectives? How do you select from the infinite set of actions at your fingertips?

Well, you don’t.

However, those infinities are non-local. Meaning they are only accessible via digital means. They aren’t really part of your day-to-day life. Therefore, “being present” is a feature of localness. In the present moment, you can only truly experience what is nearby. You can feasibly find harmony at that scale.

So, if we’re experiencing the turbulent flow state so routinely that we have to give it a name, perhaps it’s a sign that we need take account of the world around us and forsake the world beyond us. Otherwise, we’ll lose the tug-of-war between where we want to be and where are attention lies and our lives will no longer be ours to live.

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