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REGARDLESS OF WHETHER it is counted by watching the sun pass across the sky or by an atomic clock, time is something we tend to want to extract the most value from before we die. That might be because of our unique awareness that we will inevitably die, which gives us a nagging sense that we are wasting what little time we have.

Subconscious fears about death drive much of human thought and behaviour, according to psychology’s terror management theory. “The idea is that we would be overwhelmed with existential terror if we didn’t have some way to manage it,” says , a psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. And we manage it, the idea goes, by doing things that give us a sense of meaning and value, from believing in the afterlife to creating art.

For Solomon, this leads to a startling conclusion: that we are all just “anxious meat puppets tranquillised by culturally constructed trivialities”. But while Solomon and his colleagues have shown that subtle reminders of death make people more likely to cling to their own world view and discriminate against outsiders, there is also a bright side to this awareness of the inevitability of death.

For starters, when a commodity is perceived as scarce, it becomes more valuable – and there is no reason to think time is any different. More specifically, that when people consciously reflect on death, they can , become and more open to novel experiences.

New experiences, in turn, could help us savour our time, according to at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. When Wittmann and Sandra Lenhoff, both then at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, surveyed 499 people aged between 14 and 94, that the past 10 years had passed faster than younger participants did. The reason can be found in the way our memory works (see “What affects our perception of time?”). “The more memorable events you have stored in memory, the longer your subjective time,” says Wittmann. So if you want to at least feel like you are making the most of your time, seek out novelty. “To slow down time, you must always have something new, new, new,” says Wittmann.

But he also offers another strategy: recognising the need to switch your focus between past, present and future – the three “time dimensions”. Take a teenager who doesn’t want to study for a big exam: they are stuck in the present at the expense of the future. “The focus of their lives is on a single time dimension,” says Wittmann. What we should instead be aiming for is a healthy balance between all three. “Studies show those who have a more balanced time perspective are more successful in their professional life,” says Wittmann, “but they’re also in general happier.”