Reflections on Time
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Reflections on time!
It's good to be back after a few weeks away—from home and this newsletter. Disrupting your normal life rhythms is clearly valuable. I got to swim in new waters, meet new people, and also read and digest more new and different thoughts in the past few weeks than I do typically. Some of you suggested I should extend my break and take an even longer pause. I will take that feedback into advisement, for sure. Pausing is good. We all need to sharpen our saws from time to time.
This brings me to perhaps a rather obvious reflection this week. I am returning to our complicated relationship with TIME. I have discussed this on several occasions before, perhaps most intricately here. There are lots of things to say about time, of course. First, few choices we make matter more than how we spend the time we’ve got. You could actually say that nothing compares to it. I also find it rather comforting that it is also is the most democratically allocated of all our resources. We all get 24 hours per day. No one gets less. No one gets more.
But it's the finitude of life that I really want to talk about. The fact that our lives have an expiration date. And that our time here on Earth isn't eternal or, really, in a more universal context, even that long. I believe part of the anxiety and stress we are witnessing around us, to a degree, can be traced back to our rather unhealthy relationship with the time that we do have.
Hear me out. It's simple, and like most important things, also complicated. Exactly the kind of stuff I love!
Many people act and live as if they have endless time. In fact, most people spend a majority of their lives trying not to think about the amount of sand left in their hourglass. Despite this, we all work hard at being more 'efficient' in managing our time. Bookstores are filled with hacks and ideas for how to more effectively and efficiently manage your time. And, of course, much of that advice and tools can be helpful. Technology is also doing its part by reminding us what we spend time on, what we should spend more time on, and offers all kinds of sounds and notifications when we are off our schedule or when there might be something more important begging for attention. But does all this efficiency and time-saving translate into spending our free time more meaningfully and intentionally?
Obviously, none of us have endless time. I'd leave for another day whether that is good or bad. I am sure people will continue to live longer which, of course, is good, and perhaps even much longer, but I don't believe we will ever escape the certainty of finitude.
But here is the thing. The available choices for how we could spend our time have also grown exponentially in the last number of decades. And so have our sentiments of anxiety, FOMO (fear of missing out), and this somewhat exhausting sense of never really feeling that you are "caught up".
Embracing brutal facts is often the starting point of an entirely new mindset. While staring your own mortality in your face can be stressful to some, I find it to be helpful. Since I know I can't escape it, I'd rather make sure I don't regret my choices when the time comes. I often refer to this life philosophy as “living in reverse”.
Tim Urban produces this weekly chart below. This is the chart of my life. The red dots are the weeks behind me. The grey ones are ahead of me. Yes, there is SOME chance I could get more, but there is also an even bigger chance I'd get fewer. (I will post a link to this chart below so you can look at yours).
The more I think about time the more I want to make fewer and better choices. At a minimum, I want to be more considered in the choices I do make. The benefit of accepting the fact that we can't possibly engage with even a fraction of the many choices we have, we might slowly learn actually to enjoy missing out. As recognition of a smart choice, we made.
Every time we say no to something, we also say yes to something else. It carves out a new opportunity. “Missing out” is therefore a completely inaccurate portrayal of our emotional landscape. Missing out on what exactly? Your life?
How we invest our time is paramount to the life we live. It's therefore perhaps our most important responsibility. If we are not the timekeepers of our life, who is? Or as Joan Didion so accurately reminded us: Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
This idea that taking control of your time will improve your self-respect is worth reminding ourselves of.
As many of you know, I need a lot of help here. So please help me. I truly only want to spend time with people that matter and on things that matter. That's it. And less time on everything else.
There are of course a myriad of resources on this topic. But I want to stay on the theme and NOT bombard you with choices. Here is the link to Tim Urban's chart on weeks, and thanks to Sam Harris, you can also enjoy Oliver Burkeman's free lessons on Time that have been released as part of the Waking UP app. You can access them here. If you want more you will have to subscribe to the Waking Up here (which is totally worth it). Finally, I am also linking to a thought-provoking article by Oxford Philosophy professor William MacAskill around the case for longtermism which puts our time on earth in a very different context.
Have a great week!
