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- #114: Time and tide
#114: Time and tide
Shem Opolot
March 28, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 You know that vapid advice from rich people about money not buying you happiness? I think it’s the emptiest, most tone-deaf piece of advice out there. It shares the same bed with “When you know, you’ll know” as relationship advice. At least the latter tacitly recognizes how nebulous the process of finding love is.
That being said, I can’t wait to be rich enough to tell you to look for happiness elsewhere.
LIFE.
Time and tide.
By the end of this week, two things will have happened in my life, and disparate though they may seem, they are related. In fact, one causes the other.
By the end of the week, the guilt I feel for being away from my family will have culminated in tears.
Also, by the end of the week—on Sunday, specifically—I’ll go on a long hike several hours away from D.C.
The hike is tied to the tears by a loose, bristled thread, woven and wielded by the fates, who have the power to speed up or slow down time.
You see, I think about the passing of time a lot.
And there’s a link between the passage of time and patterns.
You see, you are a slave to patterns. Your brain, the supercomputer it is, in a bid to simplify your life and make you more productive—or to just conserve energy—searches for patterns everywhere.
Sometimes this is good.
For example, patterns and routines form habits—which is good if they are good habits.
But sometimes patterns can be bad.
For example, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where the increased awareness of something creates the illusion it happens more often. You want to buy a Subaru, so now everywhere you look, you see a Subaru. In reality, there aren’t any more Subarus now than there were before you fell in love with them.
The clustering illusion makes you so desperate for patterns that you make them up. For example, the last 2 times your favorite sports team won the championship, you wore your favorite hat. Now you wear the hat to every game, and your favorite hat is now your lucky hat. Now, having a lucky hat is fine; sh*t, I have one, too. But when you start gambling with your family home as collateral because you have a lucky hat, err, you have a problem.
Get the point? Patterns—sometimes good; sometimes bad.
So what do patterns and routines have to do with the passing of time?
David Eagleman raises a great point I’ve tested and found to be true:
To slow down time, you should break your patterns and routines every now and then. Doing the same thing over and over lulls your pattern-loving brain into autopilot and makes those moments pass by faster.
Conversely, doing new things forces your brain to be more present.
So, I want to slow down time because I feel like I’m missing so much time with my family. I don’t want to be a glaring absentee in my kids’ core memories when they reflect on their childhood. The hike and the like will mix things up a little and [hopefully] make me feel better about the passing of time.
I know. It’s not perfect. It’s a coping mechanism.
But try it.
Work in a different coffee shop, visit a new restaurant, try a new cocktail, get a new hobby, learn a new skill, bike instead of running; grab that relentless ticking clock hand, and pull it back just a little.
THINGS.
A quote.
You cannot bully people into becoming better people, because what they learn from it is that bullying is how things get done.
A picture.
If you still don’t know the kind of person I am, take a look at my AirPods case.
WORK.
Split many at once.
You have data:
You might know that if you wanted to split the full name into the first name and the last name, you could use the SPLIT function like so:
=SPLIT(text, delimiter)
text — the text you want to split
delimiter — what you’d like to use to split the text (in this case, it’s the space [“ “] between the first name and the last name)
However, if you’re in a hurry, you can use the ARRAYFORMULA function to split all the names at once like so:
We wrap the SPLIT function inside the ARRAYFORMULA function
Using the ARRAYFORMULA function allows us to enter a range—which wouldn’t be possible otherwise—inside the SPLIT function.
💡: Think about all the different functions you can place inside the ARRAYFORMULA function to save you time.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ The best feel-good movies for when you’re sad
✅ The best pregnancy test used to be the African clawed frog. Seriously.
✅ Get better at doing good: What is effective altruism?
✅ The best street food in the world
✅ A guide for healthy minds
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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