Friends,
Tim Urban uses stick figures to shows you several “tail ends“. The visual is a sticky reminder: time is precious. And like land in NYC, you aren’t getting any more of it. So as real estate folk like to say, let’s see if we can build “up” and improve the time we have.
To do that, we must first understand our dual selves and how time passes.
The “experiencing” self vs the “remembering” self
Daniel Kahneman’s research exposed a duality in our perception of the world. How you experience the present versus how you later remember it.
Consider a study in which people recount their experience of a colonoscopy procedure. It turns out that people’s memory of the procedure is uncorrelated with its duration. The best predictors of how they would later report the experience:
- The maximum pain they experienced
- This is now known as the “peak-end rule” in which we judge an experience by its most intense point. In other words, don’t rip a band-aid off quickly.
- How they felt towards the end of the procedure
- You may have heard of a “shit sandwich”. If not let me google that for you.
- And here’s the rock concert version
For more, check out Kahneman’s awesome TED Talk “The Riddle of Experience vs Memory”.
Then consider the question, “would you pay to go on a vacation if there would be no mementos or memories of it?”
Time Dilation
Parents have heard the line, “the days are long but the years are short”. We all know a trip to the dentist or drinks with a friend can both be measured in hours, but a deep cleaning with that metal hook has a funny way of stretching time. An especially perverse distortion is how time seems to pass faster as we get older. Recently, my 6 yr old gets stressed when the schedule is full and “he won’t have enough time to play”. I can’t help but feel some loss of innocence when he acknowledges the scarceness of time. That genie doesn’t go back into a bottle.
Young children actually act like there’s infinite time. Wait for them to put their shoes on at the front door if you don’t believe me. The reason for this is novelty. Everything is new to them. Both engrossing and distracting. Just imagine what the world becomes when you start to read. Suddenly everything from a street sign to a scoreboard is a curious game or challenge often leading to the incessant “why’s”. Adults seem deprived of that level of wonder.
As you get older, you are on autopilot. Here’s a first-world example. Think of how airports curate museum-like exhibits just to keep you amused (SFO has displayed electric guitars and vintage boardgames to my delight). Does a building which triages the miracle of humans crossing skies in reclining chairs with satellite TV need any more bells and whistles? Yesterday’s breakthrough is today’s background noise.
An incurious adult will cruise through life and wonder where the time went.
Implications
We have a “remembering self” which doesn’t faithfully record every moment as if it were a GoPro. Memories, not minutes, are our mind’s basic unit of time. Throw in the fact that clock time is a house of mirrors and we are left with a prescription:
You don’t want to slow all time down. DMV visits are long enough. You just want a timeline with more spikiness. More highlights sewn together is not just life but actual living. Maximizing interesting experiences per year. Everyone’s definition of interesting will differ but a fuller personal reel is the way you actually want to slow down time.
Tips to do this:
- Kill auto-pilot. Small interventions will do the trick. Take a hike or a trip to the library. Mix it up. The more you experience the more frames your memory snaps.
- Be more like a child. Stimulated. Why travel? When you are in a new city or country the foreign flavors, customs, people, and scenery turn you into a kid again.
- Experiences > stuff. Fancy stuff becomes background noise quickly.
- Be mindful that the “remembering self” directs our decisions (“that root canal really sucked, I’ll floss 2x a day now”). That means the way we encode our experiences influences our later actions. By cultivating memorable inputs, you directly guide your future. Your past behavior trains your future behavior. To quote James Watson (of “double helix” fame): “Avoid boring people”. Be careful, his quote intentionally has a double meaning.
My favorite highlights:
- How people think they spend their time vs how they actually spend it
- Are parents spending more or less time with kids now compared to 60 years ago?
- Are you really sleep deprived?
- Why you probably have more leisure time than you think
- What’s the difference in people who don’t feel starved for time?
- How can thinking about yourself as three different people allow for more and better memories?
Climb Higher
In options trading, models assume time passes linearly but we know market volatility is lumpy. It’s concentrated on business days and even within business days, it’s concentrated near the open and the close. Not all hours are created equal. An option barely erodes on a Saturday but decays off a cliff after a stock reports earnings. Option traders adjust for this behavior by specifying a schedule by which “variance” passes as opposed to time.
If you think of an option as insurance, the value of the contract decays at a non-constant rate. By analogy, imagine having a Carribean travel insurance policy that you secure for a year. The value of that policy will remain fixed for the first 9 months of the year then plummet after the hurricane season. Time passed linearly but the risk that is being insured against decays rapidly as we progress through the storm season.
For the markets people, I want to screw with your X-axis. We are used to seeing time series as a function of hours, months, years and so forth. Quant fund manager (and fellow Cornellian or “corndog” as wifey refers to us) Corey Hoffstein considers tracking prices across potentially more relevant domains than time. In his paper, he writes:
Information does not flow into the market at a constant rate. While time may be a convenient measure, it may actually cause us to sample too frequently in some market environments and not frequently enough in others. One answer may be to transform our measurements into a different domain. Rather than sampling price based upon the market close of each day, we might sample price based upon a fixed amount of cumulative volume, trades, or even variance. In doing so, we might find that our measures now represent a more consistent amount of information flow, despite representing a dynamic amount of data in the time domain.
I’d be excited to find such charts on Koyfin but I’m pretty sure I’d die holding my breath.
Last Call
- Burning Man or parenting? This is amazing. #12 and #14 are my winners
- Reddit thread from hell: “What is the scariest story you know that is 100% true?”
- Humblebundle offers discounted bundles of games and digital books, many with the proceeds going to charity. I’ve bought bundles where you name your price. It’s interesting to see the range of prices people pay when they can pay any amount.
- When finance people “market strategies with a backtest”. When you read a testimonial. When you nod to a horoscope. When a rich person tells you their morning routine. Just remember you saw this sham.
- From reader Mike, “Speaking to the expense of youth sports. The NHL has this deal, where for $150, they give you all the equipment (new, good stuff), 7 1-hour lessons, and free tickets to a game for kids 5-9. the prerequisites are some ability to skate and no prior hockey experience. If a kid can skate then obviously the parents and kids are motivated but the rest of the equipment is expensive. Also, they strictly throw kids out with no refund who have obvious prior experience. If those parents already bought the stuff then clearly they can afford it and don’t need the free cheese. This year the attendance went from a few hundred to around 900 and most sold out in 15 minutes and this is in Raleigh”. The NHL has partnered with all of its franchises to promote hockey for kids as well as minority and LGBT communities.
From my actual life
I have a friend who has always been into random acts of kindness. Usually, this means buying a latte for the person behind her in line. Recently, she noticed what looked like a teacher buying supplies at Target. She went over and confirmed the teacher was in fact paying out of her own pocket (this reality is something CA teachers know too well). So she paid the teacher’s Target tab. Almost $200. The teacher protested that not all of it was supplies, some of it was personal. My friend: “Don’t worry about it, I got it”.
I’m close with this friend so I didn’t think anything about her sharing this story. But it got me thinking about donations in general. On the one hand, some people think that anonymous giving is the only true form of altruism. Somehow the virtue-rebate a public giver receives cancels out the good in these people’s mind. This Roarkian mindset is self-defeating. Social proof is used to sell everything from watches to tequila. We can hijack it for good too. I know I have been influenced by other’s giving.
So I wanted to share that story here. She’s not gonna advertise it herself.