How do you stop living on autopilot?

The short answer: autopilot is not a lack of attention. It is a lack of decisions. A day with no real choice in it will be lived by the part of you that handles repetition, and that part does not make memories. Put one decision back and the day comes back with it.

People try to fix this with mindfulness, and mindfulness is a fine thing, but you cannot pay attention your way out of a day that contains nothing worth attending to.

How you got here

Autopilot is earned. You built it. Every routine was a solution to a problem: the commute you no longer have to think about, the breakfast you do not have to choose, the evening that runs itself. Each one freed up something, and each one removed a point at which you were required to be present.

Stack enough of them and the day runs without you. You arrive at night with no clear memory of having been there, which is the feeling people are describing when they say the weeks are disappearing.

They are not disappearing. They are being handled.

Why it feels like nothing

Memory is made at the points where something could have gone otherwise. A day in which nothing could have gone otherwise leaves no trace, which is why a holiday of one week can feel longer in memory than a working month. The holiday was full of small decisions. The month was handled.

So the sense of life speeding up as you get older is not an illusion and not a tragedy. It is a measurement of how many choices your days contain, and it can be changed.

The one-decision rule

Each day, one thing that only you could have decided, done on purpose. Not a big thing. A different route. A call you would not normally make. A meal that required thought. An hour given to something that is not on any list.

The point is not the thing. The point is that at one moment in the day you were unmistakably there, and the day will be remembered because of it.

Do this for a month and the month will feel like a month.

What autopilot is protecting

Be honest about this part. Sometimes the routine is not laziness; it is anaesthetic. A day with no decisions in it is also a day with no feeling in it, and if there is something you would rather not feel, a handled life is a very good way of not feeling it.

If that is what the autopilot is for, the first decision to put back is the one about whether to look at the thing. Everything else follows from that.

Where this is in the book

Days on the Open Sea is the fourth scene of chapter six. A ship runs for days under clear skies, the wind steady, the land long gone, every hour the same as the last. The sea does not hurry anybody towards anything. The scene is about what happens to the people on board when the days stop being distinguishable, and what arrives when they do.