THE LONG RIDE ESSENTIALS
A 4-minute distillation of a Long Ride essay helping new subscribers discover earlier posts. The full version, with the research, the data, the depth, and the full series, is available on Substack.
The Long Ride with Greg Pallone
There is a moment — most people can pinpoint the approximate year when mortality ceases to be an abstraction.
It is not the first funeral you have attended. It is not the first diagnosis, yours or someone close to you. It is something quieter and more specific than that. A conversation at a dinner table where the room’s median age has shifted. A birthday when you notice, for the first time, that the number feels different from the inside than it looked from the outside.
The clock, which has been running since your birth, becomes audible. And it seems to be getting louder.
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I will be 70 in a few months. I have survived stage 3 cancer, buried both parents, and watched peers I expected to have with me for another two decades disappear from my life faster than I was prepared for. I know what the clock sounds like. I have been hearing it long enough to develop an unexpected relationship with it.
The relationship is not based on fear. It’s a more thoughtful relationship.
I want to be careful here because I don’t mean to suggest that confronting mortality is easy or that the fear isn’t real. It is, at times, very real.
But sustained awareness of it, the daily background knowledge that time is finite and specifically so, has produced something I couldn’t have predicted: clarity.
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The psychologist Laura Carstensen has spent decades studying how human motivation and emotional priorities change with age. Her research found something counterintuitive: older adults consistently report higher emotional well-being than younger adults, despite objective losses in health, relationships, and capacity.
The mechanism she identified is what she calls socioemotional selectivity.
As the perceived time horizon shrinks, people shift their attention from future-oriented goals — building, accumulating, positioning — to present-oriented meaning. The quality of the moment matters more. The number of moments matters less.
The clock, in other words, is not a statement but a filter.
What the clock filters out, in my experience, is the noise.
The things that produced anxiety in my forties and fifties — status, approval, the opinions of people I didn’t particularly know, and the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be — have lost their grip in a way that feels less like wisdom and more like the natural consequence of having a more accurate sense of what matters.
What remains after filtering is not a diminished life. In some ways, that surprises me. It is more vivid. The people I love or have loved are more vivid.
The work I care about feels more vivid. The ordinary moments — a ride early in the morning before most people wake, a meal with my sons, the quality of a September afternoon walk — carry a weight and a presence they didn’t have when I assumed there would be unlimited more of them.
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I am not going to tell you that hearing the clock is a gift. That framing is too easy and too tidy. There are moments when awareness is simply grief for the time already gone, for the people who will not be there for what remains, and for the version of yourself you were going to become, which you may not have time to become fully.
But I will tell you that it is survivable. And that the alternative, living as though the clock is not running, as though there is unlimited time to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, and become the person you have long meant to be, is a more dangerous illusion than the one you replace it with. Hearing the clock.
The clock you can’t unhear is the one that tells you the truth. The truth is clarifying. Clarity, eventually, is a kind of freedom.
This is The Long Ride Essentials version of ‘The Clock You Can’t Unhear.’ Originally published as Part Five of The Long Losses series. The full essay — with the research, the recommendations, and the complete series — is still available on Substack for free subscribers.
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I loved this! It is never too late to learn about our bodies. I have gotten to my 8th decade and want to remain as mobile as possible for many more years. I am working on my glutes to help improve my knees and your article verifies the value in doing this. I teach tai chi and do use some of your movements. I totally get the importance of moving and being upright. I very much appreciate your sharing this.