How to Trick Your Brain into Making Life Feel Longer and Richer

I used to associate old age with ominous human decline. Then I started hanging out with an octogenarian super athlete named Dag Aabye. Dag lives in a school bus on the side of a mountain in British Columbia. When he’s not stoking the fire in his bus or writing in his journals inside that bus, he can be found cutting wood or running day and night through blizzards and heat waves. He runs for several hours straight up and down that mountainside on hand-cut trails that he maintains himself with a chainsaw.

While on one of those trails not long ago, he shared with me seven words of wisdom that I jotted into my notebook and have reflected on several times since.

“Time is a river,” he said, “never to return.”

It was a simple yet thoughtful observation, one of many he’d passed down to me like a messenger from one generation to another. I’d visited him countless times on that mountainside, documenting his story along with his philosophies on life, death, and the limits we place on ourselves as we age. I’d written a book—Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past—about my journeys with Dag and had done my best to detail how and why he managed to live the way he lived and do the things he did into his eighties. And though I hadn’t seen him much since that book had come out, I had returned to visit once more because I knew there were still things I could learn from him.

Dag is, without a doubt, the fittest human being I have encountered. I say that having spent several years as a sports writer, interviewing and writing about some of the bigger names in professional sports. Years ago, I had the privilege of following Serena Williams for two weeks when she was thirty-three and still at the top of her game. Like Dag, she, too, seemed to be pushing our collective understanding of what could be accomplished with the human body despite being widely considered “an older athlete.” Watching her repeatedly trounce professional tennis players a fraction of her age gave me the same feeling that I got from watching Dag compete in a 125-kilometre ultramarathon at the age of seventy-five. In both instances, I felt I was watching someone levitate beyond the realm of what the rest of us perceive as possible.   I tried to summarize this sentiment in a profile I wrote about Serena at the time. “It is the unavoidable human tragedy of every star in every sport that they reach a point where they can no longer compete against those with youthful knees, ankles, wrists and elbows, who slowly supplant them both in the game and in our consciousness. It’s why so many greats spend the latter stages of their careers humbled by their inability to repeat the glories of their pasts. It’s why our final glimpse of Air Jordan was as a grounded man with ice packs strapped to his knees and why Muhammad Ali ended up bruised, battered and unable to defend himself in the days leading up to his 40th birthday.” 

It’s why Serena was so special. And it’s why Dag was special too. And yet neither of them was entirely unique. They shared commonalities with each other and with others who refuse to be limited by their age.

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Have you ever met someone whose chronological age doesn’t align with your own perception of how old they should be? Dag is one of those people. It’s not that he looks younger than he is. In many ways, he looks like you would imagine someone would if they spent their days running through a forest for decades. And yet beneath that wild-man exterior is someone who appears to be ageless.    I followed Dag for eight years while reporting Outsider, and what I concluded was that his apparent agelessness was not rooted in what he managed to accomplish physically day to day. It was rooted in his philosophy on age, on life, on legacy and on longevity. I also came to understand that many of the basic tenets of his philosophy could be traced to cultural traditions that have long existed in other places on earth. His way of life and of seeing the world seems alien only because we have been conditioned to view him and people like him as alien. He exists outside of our fast-paced, digitized, endorphin-driven modern Western society. He stands out among us. And because of that, I am convinced there are things we can learn from him and from others like him.

I am not an advocate for alternative medicine. When I feel unwell, I go to a trained medical professional. But as a consumer who exists within Canadian society, I’m exposed every single day to a massive wellness industry offering countless therapies and diagnoses. We are all exposed to this. We have grown accustomed to being sold de-aging products by an ever-growing industry now valued at more than $6 trillion (US). The biggest market for these products is North America, where our life expectancies have been fluctuating in recent years.

And while much of the wellness industry plays on our fears of aging and decline, it rarely confronts the harder truth: that no product can insulate us from mortality. There are innumerable factors that are going to lead each of us to our deaths. Among the obvious, like cancer, car crashes, suicides, accidental overdoses, heart attacks, and strokes, is something statisticians refer to as “lifestyle factors.” This is where our sedentary lifestyles—poor diets, alcohol consumption, etc.—all get linked to poorer health outcomes and shorter lifespans.

This is where, I believe, we each have something to learn from someone like Dag, who is living rough but is keeping himself mobile in order to survive in the environment in which he chooses to live.   Some of you may be familiar with the concept of blue zones—five geographic regions that are said to have had high concentrations of people who lived to 100 or older. Perhaps you’ve seen the Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. If so, then you know that these places are each unique and yet somehow similar to one another. They are located thousands of kilometres apart: there’s a small blue zone in Japan; another in Greece; one in Sardinia, Italy; another in Costa Rica; and the last one is in California.

You may be aware that these apparent blue zones are shrinking. The factors believed to have contributed to their populations’ longevity are being eroded, replaced by urbanization and globalization, which are changing the local diets, introducing new stresses, and resulting in more sedentary behaviours.

You may find the findings of the Netflix series interesting and compelling. I’ll admit I did. As a result, I now eat raw honey, one of the apparent secrets to longevity on the Greek island of Ikaria. I also now try to walk up and down a hill near my house every day, just like the 100-year-olds in Sardinia, and I’ve tried to de-automate my life and lean back in to doing physical chores every day, like the 100-year-olds in Okinawa, Japan.

Earlier this year, my family and I spent two and a half months living in a blue zone. We chose the Nicoyan Peninsula in Costa Rica. While there, we tried to consume a traditional Nicoyan diet and adopted the Costa Rican Pura Vida, or “simple life,” philosophy. We adjusted our workdays to better match the Costa Rican work schedule. We didn’t detach ourselves from our phones, but we detached our phones from the rest of the world. And we tried, every day, to focus on simple, daily pleasures—like watching the sunrise or the sunset.

Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that any of this lengthened my life, but I will tell you that it made those two and a half months feel like the longest winter of my life—in a good way. Time moves faster when we are locked into daily routines that deprive us of new experiences. This is one of the reasons why time feels like it speeds up as we age. The clock, of course, ticks on with the steady pace of a metronome, but our perception of time changes.

Similarly, as we age, the years become a smaller fraction of our entire lives, making them feel as if they pass by faster. For my three-year-old, a year represents a third of his life. At the same time, he and other children are more likely to experience novel events—which makes time feel more stretched in their minds.

As a journalist, I’ve spent the past nineteen years looking for people with interesting stories to tell. I increasingly believe that the memorable interactions and encounters that have punctuated points in my career have helped shape my perception of my time as a reporter. I worked in a newsroom in Rwanda. I spent my twenty-seventh birthday shadowing Nepalese peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Weeks before my wedding, I covered a plane crash in Russia. I trained with bullfighters in Mexico and boxers in Toronto in pursuit of other stories. At one point, I followed a climber to the southern base camp of Mount Everest to explore the allure that mountains had on him and others.

I find myself reflecting at times on some of the lasting takeaways from the people I have met in this job, especially from some of the older athletes whom I interviewed long after they disappeared from public view. I remember how Ron Turcotte, jockey of the racehorse Secretariat, told me that no one is ever truly forgotten, even if fewer and fewer people remember the things they once did. I remember Elmer Lach, Rocket Richard’s former linemate, telling me at ninety-seven that he no longer remembered scoring the goal that won the 1953 Stanley Cup. It was just one of 215 goals he scored over the course of 664 games. But he could remember his first skates, which he borrowed from a neighbour. And he could remember his mother, who told him, “Don’t get hurt” as he stepped onto the ice for the first time.

Back in 2023, one of my favourite podcasts, Radiolab, devoted an entire episode to “The Secret to a Long Life.” In the show, one of the reporters challenged herself to try to make a week of her life feel like two weeks by packing every waking moment with completely novel experiences. In doing so, she managed to trick her brain into making more “control saves” during her days, making that week feel longer than it was. I was doing one of the most routine and forgettable things imaginable when I listened to that episode. I was driving down Highway 401.

But I was inspired to try to follow that reporter’s lead and pack as many novel experiences not just into a week but into an entire year. Perhaps it was the fact that I had recently turned forty when I heard that episode. Or that Outsider had just come out, and I was feeling a bit lost as to how I might continue to explore different ways to extend time and life in general. 

When I became a father, it was explained to me by other parents that the days we spend with our children are long but the years are short. Filling your days with surprises is a different approach to longevity but shares parallels with some of Dag’s philosophies on never sitting still long enough for time to catch up with you or, worse, pass you by. 

I will leave you with a question, and perhaps a challenge. If you have reached a stage in your life where time seems to be flying by, what might you do in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead to slow your perception of time? What novelty might you inject into the remaining hours before you go to bed?

You don’t have to move into an abandoned bus on the side of a mountain and start running endlessly in order to slow time or lengthen your life. Novelty doesn’t have to be exceptional in order to be memorable. Maybe it’s as simple as taking a different route home or preparing something you’ve never eaten for supper.

I won’t bore you with the laundry list of activities on my agenda for 2025. Lately, my personal effort to inject more novelty into my days has drawn less inspiration from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an age-old story about a timid man daydreaming far-flung capers, than it has from my own children, who happen upon something new every day.

I will simply share that, back in early April, I was at home with two young kids and a couple of overflowing jugs of maple sap. That week’s novelty trick was to try our hand at making maple syrup. And while time does seem to slow when you’re watching maple sap evaporate, it’s the challenge of converting water drawn from a tree into syrup, then pouring it over our yogurt, that I hope will help my children and me make a lasting “control save” together. 

Soon after sugaring season was complete, I boarded a sailboat as part of a three-member crew for a journey from Bermuda to the Azores. Though that transatlantic crossing was indeed unique, memorable, and very slow, I am not convinced it did more to stretch my sense of time than all the summer days I have since spent chasing life’s little adventures with my kids. Be it the simple exploration of a new park, eating a picnic lunch in a canoe, watching a movie on the grass, pumping a handcar down an abandoned railway line, or setting out on a quest to collect green pine cones from a forest floor. 

Like that ninety-seven-year-old hockey player who remembered his first skates better than his Stanley Cup–winning goal, maybe these simple little moments won’t just make the spring and summer feel longer. Maybe they will stick with me to the end of my days here. 

Adapted from the author’s lecture when accepting the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, awarded by Wilfrid Laurier University. It is reprinted here with permission.