{ "item_title" : "Long Days, Short Years", "item_author" : [" Adam Vesey "], "item_description" : "Ask someone how the last five years went and they will say gone. Askhow today is going and they will say normal. Both answers are correct, and almost nobody notices that they contradicteach other. If time were speeding up, this afternoon would be racing. Itis not. It is an ordinary Wednesday going at the speed Wednesdays go. Nothing has happened to your time. Something has happened to the record. You have two clocks. One measures the hour you are in and it runs onattention. The other measures the year behind you and it runs on memory, and it does not count hours at all. It counts differences. A week youcannot tell apart from forty other weeks takes up almost no space in it, so when you look back, the week is not there. It did not go quickly. Itnever got written down. Which leads somewhere uncomfortable. The things that erase your years are not distraction, or your phone, ora failure to be present. They are competence. Routine. A house you knowin the dark. Work you can do without fear. A relationship where you nolonger have to work out what the other person means. Everything youspent your thirties building, on purpose, at cost, for good reasons. A settled life is one in which fewer things require you to be there forthem. That is what settled means, and it is why the years began going atthe point they did. LONG DAYS, SHORT YEARS explains what happened to the decade you cannotfind, using what is actually known about memory and duration rather thanwhat is usually repeated. Why a summer at eight lasted forever. Why thedrive home is shorter than the drive out. Why almost nobody can date2020 and 2021. Why the most retrievable year of most lives is also theworst one, and what that tells you about the years you cannot find. And then what to do, on the assumption that you have a job, obligations, no spare money and no free evenings, and no intention of dismantling alife that works. The answer is smaller than the usual advice and it doesnot involve travelling more or saying yes to things. This is not a book about managing your time. It argues against thatentire shelf, since efficiency is compression and every routine youoptimise is a week you will not be able to find. It will not give the years back. Nothing will. But there are more ofthem coming, and how findable they turn out to be is not fixed byanything except what you do next.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/173/9798191731872_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "13.99", "online_price" : "13.99", "our_price" : "13.99", "club_price" : "13.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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