Here’s a question I didn’t know how to answer until I built a tool for it: how much of your life do you actually remember?
Not in total, but proportionally. If you’re 45, you’ve lived 540 months. How many of those months left a clear memory? How many blurred into the background — the routine, the commute, the Tuesday evenings that felt identical to every other Tuesday evening?
The neuroscience term for this is time compression. When you do the same things repeatedly, your brain stops encoding new memories for them. Months pass without leaving a trace. In hindsight, that period feels like it lasted a week.
I started calling these “black hole” months — time that passed but left almost no impression.
Clock Time vs. Felt Time
The Life Clock shows two views of the same life.
Clock time is the raw number: how many months have passed since you were born. Objective. Mathematical. Doesn’t care about your experience.
Felt time is different. It’s an estimate of how much of your life you’ve actually experienced as distinct, memorable time — as opposed to the repeated background hum of routine.
The gap between these two numbers is your black hole percentage.
For a lot of people, it’s significant. You might be 40 in clock time but only 28 in felt time — if large portions of your 30s were high-routine, low-novelty, memory-light periods.
The Life Density Score
Based on the input you give — how routine versus novel your periods of life have been — the tool calculates a Life Density score. This is a rough measure of how much subjective experience you’ve packed into the time you’ve been alive.
High density doesn’t necessarily mean high achievement. It means high distinctiveness — periods where your brain had enough new input to keep encoding new memories. Travel, major changes, learning something unfamiliar, new relationships, unexpected events.
Low density doesn’t mean failure either. Stability has value. But it does mean time passes faster in retrospect.
The Parent Overlap
One feature I added late in the build is the parent overlap view. If you enter your parent’s age alongside yours, the tool shows where your lives coincide on the same timeline — the years where you were both alive, both adults, and how much time potentially remains in that overlap.
This one is harder to look at. The overlap window is often shorter than people expect. The tool doesn’t soften it.
Why I Built This
I got the idea from a question someone asked in a forum I read: “Why does life seem to speed up as you get older?” The standard answer is that novelty creates denser memories, so time feels longer in retrospect when more of it was novel.
But the corollary — that you can influence the felt speed of your own life by choosing more novelty — is less often stated. It’s not a revelation, but seeing it as a clock rather than a concept made it feel actionable in a way the concept didn’t.
The black hole percentage is the number I keep checking. I’m trying to get it lower — not by eliminating routine, which is neither realistic nor desirable, but by noticing when I’m running on autopilot for long stretches and deciding whether that’s intentional.
What This Won’t Do
It won’t give you a scientifically validated measurement of your actual memories. It’s a framework, not a diagnostic. The numbers are based on your own estimates of how routine versus novel your life has been.
What it will do is make the question visible. Which is usually the first step.
Run your Life Clock — including black hole percentage, Life Density score, and parent overlap: [Life Clock — Black Holes & Felt Time →](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/life-clock/)
What period of your life feels like it lasted the longest when you look back? What made it dense?
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See what percentage of your statistical life you’ve used — and what percentage of each decade is already gone.
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