Is Time a Lie?
And how to market your stuff without being a douche.
Welcome, once again, to Dispatches from the Deep End.
In this issue:
I’ve been thinking about clocks lately.
The ones on walls, the ones in phones, the ones ticking inside our skulls that nobody calibrated and nobody can read. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the fact that none of them agree with each other, and the one between your ears is the biggest liar of the bunch.
A few weeks ago I was sitting on my patio at two in the afternoon and I could have sworn it was already evening. Not because it was dark. Because the day felt used up. Spent. Like the hours had been running at double speed and I’d missed the middle of the afternoon entirely.
And I remembered, in that moment, a very different experience of time. A mortar impact in a ditch overseas where three seconds lasted long enough to compose a grocery list and contemplate the fundamental architecture of the universe.
Same brain. Same skull. Two completely different clocks running inside it, years apart, and both of them lying.
This issue is about time and how it tells you lies.
Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!
ⴵ The Hours That Lie
The mortar round hit about forty meters out and I watched the dust column rise in what felt like geological time, each particle of debris individually lit and suspended, and I remember thinking very clearly that I needed to move but also that I had plenty of time to think about moving, maybe make a sandwich first, maybe reorganize my entire understanding of Newtonian physics, because the world had gone syrup-thick and I was swimming in it with my boots on and my weapon up and my brain firing on some frequency I didn’t have a name for yet.
Three seconds. The whole thing lasted three seconds.
A neuroscientist named Endel Tulving spent his career trying to name the thing I experienced in that ditch. He called it chronesthesia, which is a five-dollar word for the brain’s ability to unstick itself from the present moment and slide along the timeline like a bead on a wire. Forward, backward, sideways into some temporal pocket that doesn’t appear on any clock. Tulving published the concept in 2002, working out of the University of Toronto, and the basic finding was this: your left lateral parietal cortex lights up differently when you imagine yesterday versus today versus tomorrow.
The brain has dedicated hardware for time travel. Mental time travel. The kind where your body stays put but your consciousness goes wandering through hours that haven’t happened yet or already did.
The military doesn’t call it chronesthesia.
They call it tachypsychia, from the Greek. Fast mind.
Every combat veteran I know has a story about it. Time slowing to a crawl during a firefight, every round visible, every decision stretched into a luxurious eternity that didn’t actually exist.
Or the opposite. Entire engagements compressed into what felt like a held breath. Two minutes that swallowed six hours. The debrief afterward, where nobody agrees on how long anything took, because nobody experienced the same event at the same speed.
The chemistry is straightforward.
Dopamine and norepinephrine flood the system during extreme stress, and the brain starts encoding memories at a higher density. More frames per second. When you play the memory back later, the extra data makes the event feel like it lasted longer than the clock says it did.
A 2007 experiment by David Eagleman tried to test whether time genuinely slows down during freefall by having subjects read a rapidly flashing display while dropping from a 150-foot tower. The subjects couldn’t read the display any faster than normal. Time hadn’t actually slowed. Their brains were just writing the experience in higher resolution, and the dense recording created the illusion of expanded duration when remembered.
Except.
Newer research complicates that.
Studies on action preparation under stress suggest that information processing does increase during high-arousal states. The brain isn’t just remembering more densely. It might actually be computing faster, pulling more data from the environment per unit of clock time. Which means the experience of slowed time might not be purely retrospective. It might be something the brain is doing in real time, stretching the perceptual window to cram in more survival-relevant information.
The implications land hard if you sit with them.
Your entire experience of duration, every hour that drags at a desk, every weekend that evaporates, every decade that felt like it went by in a season, all of it is manufactured.
Your brain is a clock that lies to you constantly, adjusting the speed of subjective experience based on arousal, novelty, attention, and chemical state. There is no objective “how long” inside your skull. The machinery is rigged.
The Aymara people of the Andes point forward when they talk about the past and backward when they talk about the future.
The past is what you can see, so it’s in front of you. The future is unknown, behind you, approaching from where you can’t look.
Māori speakers in New Zealand describe walking backward into the future, guided by what’s already visible.
These spatial metaphors for time vary across cultures because time doesn’t have an inherent direction inside the mind. We built the arrow. We drew the line from left to right because we read from left to right, and we called it natural, and it isn’t.
I think about this when I meditate.
Chaos magic practice involves a lot of sitting with altered states, and one of the things you notice after enough hours on the cushion is that the present moment has no width. It’s a razor edge between two hallucinations.
The past is a reconstruction your hippocampus assembled from fragments.
The future is a simulation your prefrontal cortex is running based on pattern recognition and wishful thinking.
And the present, the now that every mindfulness teacher tells you to inhabit, is so thin that by the time you notice it, it’s already memory.
Tulving’s fMRI studies showed something wild.
When subjects imagined doing the same activity yesterday, today, or tomorrow, the brain regions that lit up for past and future were nearly identical, and both were different from the regions active during imagined present-tense action. Your brain processes “yesterday” and “tomorrow” using the same neural real estate.
Memory and prediction are the same operation running in different directions. The past and the future are neurologically indistinguishable.
The Buddhist concept of impermanence starts to feel less like philosophy and more like neuroscience when you read enough of this research.
The self that remembers last Tuesday is a different neural configuration than the self sitting here now, and the self that will exist next Thursday is a prediction generated by a brain that treats prophecy and recollection as identical tasks.
You are, at best, a probability cloud shaped like a person and smeared across a timeline that only exists inside your own skull.
I did Ayahuasca in the middle of the Arizona desert once where the entity I encountered, and I’ll call it an entity because I don’t have a better word and “hallucination” implies a certainty about the nature of consciousness that I don’t possess, the entity communicated something without language.
It wasn’t words. It was a feeling of temporal structure, the sense that time was an artifact of limited processing power. That a sufficiently expanded consciousness wouldn’t experience sequence at all. Everything simultaneous. Past, present, future collapsed into a single point of awareness.
Which is either the most profound thing I’ve ever encountered or the result of my tryptamine receptors throwing a party without adult supervision.
Both could be true.
Here’s what I carry from all of it.
Time is a sense organ, not a feature of reality. Like vision and hearing and taste, it can be distorted, expanded, compressed, and broken.
The clock on your wall measures something, but it doesn’t measure what you experience. The gap between clock time and lived time is where all the interesting questions live, and most people never visit because the culture runs on schedules and the schedules run on the assumption that an hour is an hour is an hour.
It never was. Your brain knew that before you did.
It just didn’t bother telling you because you were busy watching the dust column rise, very slowly, in a ditch somewhere.
🗣 How to Tell People You Made a Thing Without Becoming a Human Pop-Up Ad
I watched a guy I respect turn into a carnival barker over the course of about six months. Good writer. Interesting perspective. Made a product worth buying.
Then he discovered marketing advice on the internet and within half a year every post was a funnel, every email was a pitch, every conversation was a conversion opportunity, and the thing that made him worth following in the first place had been hollowed out and replaced with a blinking neon sign that said BUY MY STUFF in a font that screamed of quiet desperation.
He’s not alone.
The entire creator economy runs on advice that treats your audience like a resource to be extracted.
→ Optimize your CTAs.
→ A/B test your landing pages.
→ Build urgency.
→ Manufacture scarcity.
Every interaction is a touchpoint in the customer journey, and the customer journey ends at a checkout page, and if you’re not moving people toward that checkout page at all times, you’re leaving money on the table.
The table. Always the table. Money lying on it, uncollected, because you had the audacity to just be a person who made something and talked about it honestly.
I sell things.
I have a Gumroad store with dozens of products priced between two and fifteen dollars.
I promote them.
I want people to buy them.
I am not above wanting to make money from the things I make, and anyone who says they are is either lying or has a trust fund. So this isn’t an anti-selling screed. Selling is fine. Selling is necessary. The question is whether you can sell without making everyone around you want to mute you.
You can. Here’s what I’ve figured out.
The first thing is that the work does most of the selling if the work is any good.
Every issue of this newsletter is free. You’re reading it because you wanted to, presumably because at some point a previous issue earned your attention.
Somewhere in the catalog at store.nicheof.one there are guides that go deeper on topics I’ve covered here. If you want them, you’ll find them. If you don’t, that’s fine.
The newsletter exists whether or not it generates a single sale, because the newsletter is the thing I actually care about making, and the products are concentrated versions of the same energy.
That relationship between free work and paid work does the heavy lifting. The free stuff proves the voice. The paid stuff offers more of it. The reader decides when and whether to cross from one to the other.
No countdown timers. No tripwire offers. No “only three left” when the product is a PDF that exists in infinite copies.
The second thing is frequency and ratio.
I mention products sometimes. A link at the bottom. A natural reference when the topic connects. Maybe one issue in five has a direct mention. The rest stand alone.
If seventy percent of what you put into the world is genuinely useful whether anyone buys anything or not, the thirty percent that mentions what you sell doesn’t feel like an intrusion. It feels like a natural extension of the conversation.
The problem is when people flip that ratio. Seventy percent pitch, thirty percent substance. Your audience can do that math faster than you think, and the unsubscribe button is always one click away.
The third thing is honesty about what you made and who it’s for.
I don’t write copy that promises transformation. I write copy that describes what’s in the thing and lets you decide if it’s worth three bucks.
“This is a 40-page guide about X. It covers Y and Z. It’s based on my experience doing W. If that’s useful to you, here it is.”
No manufactured urgency. No implied inadequacy. No “you need this” when you might not. The best sales copy I’ve ever written reads like a table of contents with personality.
The fourth thing, and this is the one nobody talks about much, is that your promotion should be indistinguishable from your regular content in quality and voice.
If someone can tell immediately that a post is an ad, you’ve failed. The post should be interesting on its own. The product mention should be woven in so naturally that removing it wouldn’t change whether the piece was worth reading.
If the only reason a piece of content exists is to sell something, the audience knows. They always know. The body rejects a transplanted organ; the reader rejects a transplanted sales pitch.
The fifth thing is patience.
The compound math of a catalog means that products sell on their own timeline. Someone reads this newsletter today, browses the store in two weeks, buys something in a month. The connection between any specific piece of promotion and any specific sale is almost impossible to trace, and trying to trace it makes you insane.
Trust the system. Write honestly, mention products when it’s natural, and let the catalog do its slow accumulating work.
What I refuse to do:
Webinars that are actually 90-minute sales pitches.
Email sequences designed to create psychological pressure.
Countdown timers on products that will be available tomorrow at the same price.
Testimonials I had to solicit.
Affiliate arrangements where the incentive structure corrupts the recommendation.
What I’m willing to do:
Tell you I made a thing.
Describe what’s in it.
Link to it.
Then move on and write something interesting.
The creator economy’s marketing advice is designed for people who don’t have anything worth buying.
When the product is thin, the marketing has to be loud. When the work is good, the marketing can be quiet. A sentence at the bottom of an essay. A link in a bio. A store that sits there like a bookshelf, waiting for someone to browse.
You don’t have to be loud. You don’t have to be obnoxious. You don’t have to perform enthusiasm you don’t feel about a thing you already made.
Just make the thing, tell people it exists, and then go back to making the next thing.
The telling is necessary though.
Silence doesn’t sell anything. You do have to open your mouth. But there’s a canyon of difference between saying “I made this, here it is” and constructing an elaborate psychological apparatus designed to make someone feel incomplete without your product.
One of those is communication. The other is manipulation.
I keep thinking about that guy who turned into a billboard. He had something real. People liked his work. He could have just kept making the work and occasionally mentioning that he also sold things.
Instead, he took advice from people whose entire business model is selling advice about selling, and now his feed reads like a QVC segment written by a therapist who wants you to feel bad about yourself.
He lost the thread. The thread was always the work. The selling is just telling people the work exists.
Everything between those two points is noise, and most of it makes you worse at both.
☍ LINKS:
If you made it here, that means you should…
That’s it for this week. If you can do it, you probably should. If you can’t, you never could. Until next time…
~ J.D.
P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…
Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.
made me think about how much I hate those fake "only 3 left" timers on websites. It is so much better when someone just tells you what they made and lets you decide for yourself.