Travel expands your lifespan — not in years, but in how long life feels.

The older we get, the faster we see our lives go by. But why?

I have two theories:

1. The older we get, the smaller each day becomes as a fraction of our lives. If you're one day old, that's 100% of your life. Two days, 50%. So each day gets experienced as shorter and shorter relative to our whole life.
2. As we age, the number of new experiences we have shrinks. We fall into jobs and routines that stay largely the same from day to day. As we do this repeatedly, our brains chunk those routines into mostly singular memories. When we look back, it’s just a blur of routine — where did all the time go?

So how do we break free from this compression of time?

That's where travel comes in. It's an antidote to this life-shrinking phenomenon.

Travel jolts the mind awake. The routines we usually run on autopilot—where to eat, what to do, how to get around—suddenly need recalculating.

New places, sights, smells, people — travel floods us with novelty.

And each time we travel, our mind registers this as a discrete experience.

Have you ever had the experience of traveling and feeling like the days are so long? Not by measure of exhaustion — I mean they feel longer than a day. You did so much in a day that it feels like a whole week.

That feeling comes from your mind logging dozens of distinct moments. Our brains don’t organize life by calendar days—they remember emotion, sensation, novelty. It’s not the date that sticks, it’s the vividness of experience.

Travel drops us into unfamiliar terrain—mentally and physically. It fills our minds with moments we’ll actually remember. It's a way of literally expanding how long our life feels.

And it doesn't matter where you live. Even in the most vibrant cities—New York, London, wherever—routine still creeps in. And routine isn’t travel. It's the very act of being outside your comfort zone that engages your mind to process a whole new set of stimuli.

So here's my invitation: as you reflect on your life and think about how to improve your lifespan, think not only of what you can do to extend your physical life. Think about how you can extend your experienced life.

Where will you go to stretch the edges of your memory? To make this year feel twice as long? To live more days inside each day?