When I was seven, I went on holiday to Monaco with my parents. And, serendipitously, while walking around the town, I wandered onto a film set.
They were shooting Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. I don’t remember much about the rest of the holiday, but I remember that. It was one of those, what you might call, key (or even fixed) memories that we fondly remember. I can still see the cables, the lights, the location, the crew standing around doing nothing in a very purposeful way, the car and the stars of the production. Not to mention somebody letting a small boy get closer than he probably should have got, because back then nobody minded much. I work in film now, so I can tell.
I think it would be accurate to use the word awe here for what I felt in that moment, and I fell in love with movie making. But I never really took it seriously for about forty years.
That’s not quite true, actually, and the untruth is the interesting part. Looking back, I did keep returning to it, constantly, in every way except with 100% commitment, and it took me the better part of five decades to understand why.
Your Memory is not a Recording
Before we get to any of that, we need to look at how memory works.
Frederic Bartlett demonstrated this problem in Cambridge in 1932, and it remains one of the more awkward findings in psychology because most of us behave as if the opposite is true. He read English students a Native American folk tale called The War of the Ghosts, a story full of details that made no sense to them, and then asked them to retell it a few days later, then weeks later, and then months later.
The story changed every time, and it changed consistently in one direction. The strange bits fell away, the gaps closed up, and the tale drifted steadily towards something an English undergraduate in 1932 would find reasonable, until what came back to Bartlett was a story about that Native American world through the eyes of those undergraduates. And every one of them was certain they were reciting it accurately.
If you’ve ever played Chinese Whispers, you’ll half-recognise this, except Bartlett’s version is stranger, because there was no line of people passing it along. Each teller was passing the story back to themselves.
Which means the version of my childhood I was carrying at thirty-five wasn’t the one experienced in 1976 at all. It was assembled by a thirty-five-year-old, out of the beliefs a thirty-five-year-old held, in the service of the peace a thirty-five-year-old needed to get through the week. It wasn’t a record of what happened. It was a record of every time I’d told it to myself since. Every detail was processed and reprocessed through the emotions and environment of those moments.
Chronesthesia
Psychologist Endel Tulving gave the process a name around 2002: Chronesthesia, the ability to place your awareness elsewhere on your own timeline. In my case, to go back and stand on that road in Monaco. Or even to go forward and stand in the life you haven’t lived yet, and have a look around.
It’s an essential part of who we are, and we use it every day, albeit unconsciously. It contributes to your continuous character rather than turning into a series of unrelated personalities.
Three in the Morning
You know the hour.
You’re awake, and you didn’t ask to be, and you’re back in that conversation from your past. Not just thinking about it. Right in the middle of it. You can hear the tone of voice, the feel of the room and the smells that were there. You’re standing in the kitchen with the light on, but you’re saying the thing you should have said, properly this time, and it lands. They have no answer, and you win. Then you run it again with a better line. Over and over and over of “if onlys.” Then you lie there and watch the life that would have followed the best version of your response unspool in the dark until about four am when you drift off into the reality of your current life, resigned to the anxiety and labelling the experience with some derogatory phrase about yourself.
That’s actually chronesthesia operating unencumbered, and you’ve spent years filing it under insomnia.
Look at what you’re actually doing in those hours. You go back. You stand in the memory. You alter it. You play the altered version forward and watch the consequences. Then you return. That is the entire technique in this piece, but it’s running unsupervised, every night, for free, for years. The only difference is that at three in the morning nobody is driving. It goes where it wants, it never gets anywhere, and you wake up tired.
Nobody ever taught you that this was a skill. So you use it the way you’d use a self-driving car, which is to say you sit in it and let it take you round the same route for two hours.
And when you look at the neuroscience, running on autopilot at 3 am is allowing your conclusions unbridled access to your subconscious because you are closer to an alpha state and much more suggestible. So you can begin to see how these late-night musings can quickly create negative self-beliefs which are hard to undo.
But chronesthesia works both ways: consciously and unconsciously. Conscious use is a skill you can leverage, and I’ll teach you what you need to know.
The Film that Always Gets You
Here’s another example of chronesthesia. This one’s interesting because it comes at you from outside.
There’ll be a scene, or not even a scene, a theme, that gets you every single time. Not just the first time. Every single time. You might know it’s coming, you may have seen it eleven times, you could be watching it with other people and actively trying not to react, and it lands anyway.
And it’s oddly specific. Mine is tribe. Family, belonging, where you fit and who with. Show me a group of misfits finding each other and deciding they’re each other’s now, and I’m gone, and it doesn’t matter whether the film is any good. Yours will be something else, and it’ll be just as narrow. It could be somebody being seen for the first time, or a cause that you strongly believe in, but there will be something, a pattern.
The film isn’t making you feel that. The film is reaching past your conscious gatekeeper and pressing on something that was already buried inside, something that’s been sitting there so long you’ve stopped recognising or allowing it. And what comes up isn’t about the characters. It’s about you, and it’s chronesthesia again, triggered from outside, while nobody is watching.
It might not even be in film. My friend described exactly this stimulus and response when she watched football, in how the referee exhibited bias towards one team or player while overlooking the same infraction with others.
Most people pass this off as being moved and change the subject. But it’s worth a great deal more than that, because whatever the theme turns out to be that keeps repeating on every watch (especially in the not-so-well-made films), that’s not a preference. That’s a signal you need to take note of.
Something in you is unfinished, and it’s been sending you the same message for years.
Opening the File Changes the File
In 2000, Karim Nader and Joseph LeDoux published work that dove deeper into Bartlett’s work and upset what was commonly accepted as how memory worked. They verified that when you recall something, it isn’t simply read off a shelf and put back unchanged. It becomes briefly unstable before it is written back. They called this process reconsolidation. It creates a window of opportunity while the file is open, and while it’s open, the memory can change.
Daniela Schiller and Elizabeth Phelps showed the same thing in 2010 in relation to fear. Fear responses that were reactivated and then met with new information and a felt sense of safety during that window changed. The experiencers stopped having the trigger-response or had it significantly reduced, and it remained that way a year later. However, fear responses that were revisited and simply relived without support or objectivity never changed.
But the principle is enough, and the principle is this: your past isn’t fixed. It’s only stable for as long as you leave it alone. You’ve been opening these memory files for decades and editing them every time, unconsciously, usually in your own defence, according to whatever you needed to believe in that moment. And remember all those negative self-beliefs you supported at 3 am? Well, they get stronger the more you replay them unchallenged, deepening the grooves as I’ve discussed many times before.
Think of it like this. Every time you pull a memory out, you rebuild it, and you rebuild it out of whatever you happen to have lying around today: your emotions, your environment, your needs, and your ego. It’s like taking a book out of a library, only the book is loose-leaf, and you drop a few pages before returning it, or maybe add a couple of your own. Memory recall isn’t simply reading a digital file that stays put until next time.
The only thing actually up for debate is whether you’d like to start doing it deliberately. And I’ll get to that next, but first I need to quickly talk about the ego.
The Editor has an Agenda
There’s one more thing you need to know about this editing process: it isn’t neutral when left to its own devices.
When your mind reconstructs a memory, it doesn’t reconstruct it towards objective truth. It (aided and abetted heavily by the ego here) rebuilds it towards safety. And its idea of safety is very simple and very old: whatever you did last time, you survived it, so whatever you decided or did last time gets the benefit of the doubt, even if it’s not objectively the best option. The known kept you alive. The unknown might not. The part of you running the edit would rather keep you certain and small than risk you large and exposed, every time, without question.
So it curates. The memory of the time you spoke up and it went badly gets sanded a little sharper each visit, until “I tried that once” gets extended with “and it didn’t work, so I won’t try again” instead of remaining a curiosity or open door to future possibilities if you tried a different way. The memory of the time you gave in and kept the peace gets a warm light of validation attributed to it, until being the reasonable one, the easy one, the one who doesn’t make a fuss, becomes simply who you are. You know where that road leads. Boundaries you can’t find. A niceness that costs you everything that you justify as kindness. A life arranged entirely around not rocking a boat you were never even sure you were meant to be in.
That’s the editor, the ego, protecting you. It maintains the beliefs that keep you safe and rejects the ones that pose risks. Safe means known, and known means staying exactly where you are.
This is why the memories that hurt most are the ones that never seem to shift. It isn’t that they’re too painful to touch. It’s that something in you is deciding, on purpose yet without your permission, to keep them precisely where they are for what it thinks is your protection.
But doing it deliberately means you control the edit. Let’s get into it.
The Process
Do it by Hand
Type it if you’d prefer. Typing lets the situations stream out, and there’s a lot to be said for that, because when they start running, they run faster than any hand can go, and you may want to let them run so as not to miss a beat.
But typing can feel like reporting. You end up at a slight remove from your own life, like taking a statement from a witness who just happens to be you.
Writing it by hand feels lived. At school, we learned to write by hand first, or at least I did, depending on which future you’re reading this from. And when you write by hand, what you write feels lived. You’re engaging physically and allowing time for the words to form, which allows time for the emotions to resurface. You’re not simply describing the road in Monaco so much as returning to stand there again in the heat of the midday sun and the excitement in your veins as if you’d just discovered Shangri-La.
Which is what we want to do: relive the event as much as possible. So use the best tool that takes you back there. Note that if you’re typing it out, when you come to the “The Rewrite” part later, you’ll also get to revisit the emotions. Use whichever works for you, or try both and don’t let your defaults drive your decisions.
The Recall
Pick a period or a topic. It could be your twenties, a job, school, or romance. We’re not looking to create an autobiography in one sitting; just look at a contained period or theme in your life.
Write out what happened. Not how you feel about it, not what you’ve concluded about it since. What happened. Start with headings, the major events of that stretch, and fill in the details underneath as they come back to you. They will come back in fragments and out of order, and some of them might arrive three days after you thought you’d finished, usually in the shower. Let them and add to the document.
This process works for one reason, which is that reading your own life as an observer gives you an objectivity you simply can’t get just by sitting in a chair thinking about it. Only thinking about your past might invite your subconscious into the meeting, but your ego will come along too, and as we’ve discussed, it isn’t there to help you grow. It’s there to keep you alive, and it will hand you the version of events that costs you least to hold, the ones it feels safe with (even if they are painful) because it doesn’t like change. The written page doesn’t do that. The page just reports what you wrote on it.
The Scorecard
Now go back through and score each event in two categories.
Inherited, meaning the decision came from outside you. Parents, school, employer, friends, culture, the whole operating system you were handed before you were old enough to read the terms and conditions.
Authored, meaning the choice came from you.
One important rule here: you’re scoring decisions, not overall events. A single episode in your life can contain two or three separate decisions pulling in opposite directions, and if you score the episode, you’ll flatten it into a verdict and learn nothing. Score each decision on its own. Some of my example entries below carry multiple scores, and I’ve explained why in each case.
Here’s mine, from school to my thirties, in a very brief format. My own writing on each event went deeper, but I have abbreviated it here for the process.
I dropped Geography to study Maths, Chemistry and Physics. I liked Geography and was good at it. But the sciences were “better options” according to my parents, leading to a “better” career.
Inherited 1.
I gave up on film. After Monaco, I kept circling it. I did a bit at university and never took it seriously; then, when I started looking for work, I made a few enquiries into the business, but didn’t understand how any of it worked and couldn’t find anyone to explain it, so quietly let it go around the same time I was being encouraged to get a “proper job.” It never felt like a decision. It felt like a thing that hadn’t worked out.
Inherited 1.
I’ve told you I was seven in Monaco, and while writing this, I worked out I was actually ten. For forty years I’ve carried that, and the one detail in it that could actually be checked was wrong. That’s the funny thing with memory. Everything else about that day is crystal clear, but the year quietly rewrote itself while I wasn’t looking.
I stayed in student accommodation but came home at weekends. The rationale was simple: University wasn’t far away, and my parents could make sure I was looked after, do my washing, etc. University was my chance to break from all of it and step into being an adult, though my fear of change meant I took the advice on offer. I had a few weekends at university, and they were great. Otherwise, it was much like living at home, and I didn’t grow as much as I could or should have.
Inherited 1.
I gave up Astrophysics. I’d discovered astrophysics while I was studying physics, and it reminded me of my love of stars from the astronomy club at school, the one I went to because I wanted to. My parents thought astrophysics was too rarified, with no job at the end of it, and why would I want to sit alone on a mountaintop in an observatory anyway? It took relatively few conversations to persuade me out of the idea.
Inherited 1.
Three job offers, took the one closest to home. Software development at Abbey National in Milton Keynes, marketing analysis at a boutique firm in central London, and quality assurance at GEC. The marketing job was the one I really wanted, but it paid the same as the local job, and I’d have had to fund the commute, so I was persuaded that GEC made more sense. Sense was the problem: logic vs heart.
Inherited 1.
Stayed home until twenty-eight, then moved away. Two decisions under one heading here, pulling in opposite directions. I had stayed eight years in a field working for a company I’d only entered because it was convenient and sensible. Finally leaving home to do it somewhere else was my choice, and it is the first thing on this list that was.
Inherited 1, Authored 1.
Started a LARP club. Live-action roleplaying. While I was still at GEC and living at home. I wrote over five hundred individual adventures, most of them woven into the world our club built together. I also did special effects for Curious Pastimes and edited a national LARP magazine for the Southeast. Nobody asked me to do any of it, and I absolutely loved it even if my neighbours thought I was weird when Middle Earth gathered outside my house at 8 am on a Sunday.
Authored 1.
Immersive Theatre and Themed Events. Murder mysteries, one-offs, artistic direction for Hallowe’en Horrors at Fort Amherst, educational work (edutainment) for the council, and a ten-month immersive murder mystery running across multiple locations in Kent. We had the opportunity to take the troupe to America and Japan, but the crew chose settled lives instead, so it went into hiatus, and I told myself I needed a new challenge and took that “regular” job in Surrey. It was the push to move out, but not quite the aspiration that started it.
Authored 1.
Back into the Machine. Three decisions here. I was headhunted out of my City job into management consulting: a natural career progression but inherited (following the “traditional” path). Ironically, I ended up consulting to Abbey National in Milton Keynes on a configuration management rollout. Good job, boring as hell, because it wasn’t what I’d actually been headhunted for, so totally inherited. However, starting to move jobs on my own terms and finally becoming independent was mine, and I then stepped into working at a web design firm.
Inherited 2, Authored 1.
Launched my own Web Design business. The internet company restructured and dropped all the creative work, so I left. Well, I didn’t really have a choice in the decision. I’d just bought a house and had a little cash aside, but decided to launch my own business. I enjoyed building websites, and it was still a new world to explore back then. It was scary, and I got by, but it was like having a day job with more admin. I made it work, and it was another thing I’d built on purpose.
Authored 1.
Inherited 8, Authored 5.
The Rewrite
Now ignore the total. The total is worthless, and if you catch yourself feeling relieved that Authored is only three behind, that’s your survival programming (aka ego) kicking in again and telling you what you want to hear, reducing the point of the exercise down to something it was never intended to be.
The decisions are the point. Each one is an inflexion, a moment when the needle moved, and what you’re hunting for isn’t the decision or the score. It’s the reasoning underneath it. This is where we apply the higher skill of metacognition to each inflexion, the point where we sit with each specific decision point and fully, consciously apply chronesthesia.
Ask yourself: Why did I say yes to that? What was I protecting? And then the question that actually counts: Is that reasoning still running my life today?
Mine was. Four restaurants and an entire career later, I was still the twenty-year-old who took the job closest to home.
The Subtext
Here’s the thing I didn’t see until I had it all written out.
Both of my dreams leaked into my future after I thought I had left them behind.
I’d given up on film at twenty, and then spent the next twenty years writing five hundred LARP adventures, developing four role-playing systems from scratch, running immersive murder mysteries for ten months across an entire county, and doing special effects and script work and cameos and improv and artistic direction. I called it a hobby. Hobby is the word you use for the passion you don’t monetise (not that you should monetise everything, but sometimes we need to take an objective look at what we’re doing).
I’d also given up astrophysics at twenty, yet in 2015, between restaurant shifts, I was posting things like this on Tumblr:
Memory is the disintegration of probability that forms the perception of reality. The memories represent the sum of the collapsed quantum waves to create the now.
And:
All of you is memory. And only memory. Every thing you think as real exists only as a memory in the mind. Nothing is real. Real is illusion. Even ‘now’ is a memory of a fraction of a second ago. Remember me?
I posted them under the handle The Cosmologist. And that’s a tell in itself.
These aren’t examples to massage my ego or appease my pride. They’re examples of how my younger dreams, however much I said I had given up, were still hanging around under a different disguise. A man who was convinced that there was no job for him in the cosmos was still out there at fifty, calling himself a cosmologist. Neither dream went anywhere. They just went sideways, and I never looked at why, because looking would have raised a question I wasn’t ready to answer.
It took me years to understand the irony. What I was writing about, under that pseudonym, was memory; that memory makes the world, and that the past isn’t sitting idly where you left it. I’d written the argument of this entire piece down in 2015 and filed it under the philosophical musings of a pseudonym.
A similar thing happened in 2019 when I first started actively applying chronesthesia. I wrote a version of the timeline above and, when I got to astrophysics, I added an aside. It said that every time I see Jodie Foster in Contact, I think, “that could have been me.” I’d been watching that film for twenty years by then. Every time it came on, I’d feel something I couldn’t name, chalk it up as one of my favourite films and go back to work on Monday. That’s chronesthesia, firing on its own, dragging me back to my thing: finding my tribe. Even in my applied chronesthesia in 2019, it was simply a footnote.
The breadcrumbs of my life were never hidden. They were always there, in my own handwriting.
There’s a reason it never fit. When I understood my own blueprint through Shuyi and a few other systems, the corporate 9-to-5 wasn’t anywhere in it. That life was the inherited choice, the one my parents and teachers knew to recommend. It was never mine, and the map I was born with said it clearly. I just didn’t see it until recently.
What Happens When You Do Apply Chronesthesia?
Most likely, you’ll find you’ve been performing a story that was never yours.
The story about my parents and astrophysics wasn’t forced on me in that kitchen. I justified it, slowly, over three decades, every time I reached for it to explain why my life looked the way it looked. And because I never once took it out and read it in the light of day, it never occurred to me that I could have been the author. I had simply made an agreement to live a certain way.
So, I started acting after my stroke in 2020. I was in my fifties, and it turned out that the thing I’d wanted at seven (OK, ten) was still there, exactly where I’d left it, waiting to see whether I’d ever come back for it. Nobody had taken it away from me. I’d filed it under done and left it running in the background for forty-odd years. As was my love of organising events, of speaking, of entertaining, of not fitting into any typical mould. The love of organising events, of speaking, of entertaining, of not fitting any standard mould was on my blueprint the whole time. I’m just living it now instead of overriding it.
The files are open. They are always open. The question is, who is writing them?
Go and read what you’ve been writing.
Then ask yourself the harder version: If your past has only been holding its shape because you keep agreeing to it, what else in your life is doing the same?
Cracking Your Code
That last question is the bigger one, and it’s hard to answer alone at the kitchen table, because the same editor that curated your past is standing guard over your present.
So I run this live, together, online. We take the technique you’ve just read about and aim it, in real time, at one thing you’ve been treating as fixed. Not your whole life. One inflexion point, worked properly, with someone driving. Most people leave having watched a memory they were certain about come loose in front of them, and that changes what you think is possible from there.
It’s called Cracking Your Code. I run it in small groups because the format only works at that size, so seats are limited. Put your name on the waitlist below, and you’ll be first through the door when the next round opens.
Come and take your wheel.
