If you think it's okay to pass the time, then you haven't realized the scarcity of time.
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Editor's note: We only have one life, we only have one day, and the time of the day is spent passing the time, which is passing our life. It's okay to work, play, relax, but don't pass the time. If you think it's okay to pass the time, then you haven't realized the scarcity of time. Original title: Don't Kill Time, by D**id Perell.
Time is scarce, life is short, and time is like a grain of sand in an hourglass, once it passes, it can never be returned. We all know the truth, but in our work and family life, we are so lost in the trance of inattention that killing time has become a chronic disease.
I remember the moment I started thinking about it, it was 2017, I was living in New York, and if I didn't find a roommate to share the rent, I would go bankrupt. I rented an apartment with two rooms, and none of my friends wanted that empty room, so I posted an ad on Craigslist. Two hours later, I received a response from a 31-year-old PhD student named Mark. My roommate and I asked him to tour the apartment and because he seemed to be a nice guy, we invited him to stay with us.
From the moment he walked into our cramped stairwell in Brooklyn, Mark spoke with a feeble grunt. His back is like that of a late-blooming third-grader, dreaming of one day winning the lottery in the draft, but always losing his name. Children like Mark are angry with themselves, not at the world. Outwardly, they are harmless. But on the inside, they are a mixture of bitterness and negative insecurities.
In the afternoon, Mark would walk sullenly from his bedroom to the living room, where he turned on Netflix. When the weight of invisible pain pressed against his eyelids, he would fall asleep. Sometimes, I came home at 6 p.m. and found him sleeping on the couch and couldn't even wake him up. Later, we found out that he was taking emergency room-grade anxiety medication every morning and drowning himself to sleep with Heineken beer at night. Ironically, he's writing about tobacco addiction **Dr.**, which sadly doesn't cure his own addiction. He is sandwiched between a lonely rock and an evaporating bank account. Slowly, his anxiety turned into a gloomy depression, not sadness, but a bland character, and he lost his senses.
He was also in arrears in rent. He never talked about his friends, and at one point, he came home with bruises and a broken arm from a seizure.
However, when his life descends into chaos, he apparently remains calm. It wasn't a Stoic, powerful calm. It was a helpless calm, and there was nothing worth doing because the world was too difficult. Maybe he's allergic to others, he's overwhelmed by life, overwhelmed by his **, and the only thing he wants to do is "do nothing" and kill time.
At some point, I guess all of us are Mark: a distracted person who can't face the challenges of the modern world, who can't resist the modern world. A person who is cynical about everything, because pessimism does not require imagination. A paralyzed person who closes the door, retreats to the couch and watches someone else's life on TV, instead of walking on the road and living their own life. And every time you become this person, the desire to kill time comes with it.
Much of modern leisure is lazy. It's spent in a passive, dejected state of consumption, where we eat processed foods that make us fat, TV shows that numb rather than thought-provoking, and ads that create anxiety that only shopping can relieve. Modern leisure without enthusiasm is **, as if humans are batteries that need to be recharged through mindless entertainment. This desire to kill time stems from a deep-seated nihilism.
As I watched Mark numb himself and suppress his emotions with alcohol, I felt scared and worried that my life would be the same as his. Therefore, I decided to do the opposite of him and do nothing but work. Put all my energy into my work, from checking my email before waking up, to reading articles while waiting for the oatmeal microwave. I see a life of hard work as a virtue. While I was never driven by big sums of money, I surrendered to discipline and poured myself cup after cup of work.
In retrospect, I realize that this was an overcorrection. To avoid a nihilistic waste of time, I confuse the good with the difficult, and the difficult with the valuable.
To be sure, my life has changed for the better because of my obsession with work, even though I have realized that a life of only work is not a good way to live. Without work, you wouldn't be reading this. However, the work-first mindset exposes me to more nail-like pressure. Now, I'm looking for ways to get rid of my obsession with work and enjoy my leisure time without wasting it.
Work is results-oriented. Your work is for an outcome, which is also a measure of the time you take. In contrast, good leisure time should be valuable in itself. Staying active doesn't guarantee leisure, but it should energize us because the mind dies in moments of laziness. If work is guided by utilitarian results, leisure is driven by intuitive awareness. Leisure is not a time to retreat from the world. Rather, it is a time of poetry, prayer, and philosophy: an opportunity to reflect on where we have been, where we are, and where we will go.
Even if leisure doesn't require an end goal, we should expect something good to happen. For example, the Greeks considered leisure to be the time to learn Xi. In fact, the etymology of the word "school" comes from the Greek word for leisure (skole). But in our work-managed, productivity-oriented world, the synonym between school and leisure disappears.
This type of leisure feels like a forgotten art because capitalism has a way of turning all leisure into a sin. Instead of seeing how leisure creates intelligence, we think like an economy: as if only trading can create value. As the great philosopher Gorilla Zoe (singer) once said. "My time is money, and baby's money is time. I have money and I want to make you mine. ”
However, if we look at time and money as two sides of the same coin, then time that doesn't make money is a waste of time. Thus, our obsession with productivity produces the viciousness of demonizing leisure*** but it is only in leisure time that we can hear the chirping of birds, feel the stinging warmth of a goodnight kiss, or listen to the echoes of the universe.
From my point of view, work and leisure follow an exploration-development trade-off. Exploration is guided by intuition. It is driven by joy and adventure, and there is no one desired outcome. It's dedicated to those activities that are fun, but not necessarily productive. Just as focusing on happiness prevents us from attaining happiness, aiming to make leisure time useful sucks away its joy. In contrast, the development phase rushes to the end goal faster than Black Friday shoppers. It is a deliberate, mind-driven action whose performance is measured by results.
Of course, meaningful leisure can look like work. Imagine a father (we'll call him Jimmy) who spends his time building a backyard yard. On Saturday, he drove to Home Depot to buy 2 4 pieces of wood and Sherwin Williams paint. When he gets home, he handles the wood. His family saw sweat and sunburn, while Jimmy felt the satisfaction of manual labor unaffected by the demands of the market. He beat his wood, painted his walls, and when the nails fell in the wrong place, he bled out. Influenced by the dogma of economics, his family encouraged him to hire a contractor to outsource the project. But Jimmy sees things differently. His blood is a river of satisfaction, and he respects his hammer as much as he respects his religion, but smashes it into the wood faster than Muhammad Ali's fist.
Construction keeps him in a state of flow. Hammer, paint, hammer, paint, hammer, paint.
But building a courtyard is not his family's way of leisure. They prefer to order items on Amazon and hire people to assist with manual labor. After all, they don't like the heat of hardwood to burn their faces until sweat soaks their t-shirts. Jimmy's story shows that the value of free time is not determined by the activity you pursue, but by how much satisfaction it brings you.
This difference in enjoyment applies to a wide range of leisure activities. A friend had just completed a 32-mile race in heavy rain that took less than 5 hours. To me, it sounds like torture. For him, that is a kind of happiness, and difficulty is happiness. Similarly, many people hate walking to campsites, sleeping in the cold, and pooping in the woods, but others call this camping.
Mark never engaged in any kind of fulfilling leisure activity because he numbed himself in his free time. But his work doesn't satisfy him either, and he spends a lot of time working to kill it because he doesn't think time is scarce.
As I learned from Mark, a good life requires breaking the shackles of nihilism and embracing work and leisure time. Laziness is **, because time is the essence of life, and it is only after death that the clock stops beating.
No one thinks they're going to get old, but everyone does. Society's obsession with work leads us to evaluate ourselves by our accomplishments rather than by how we spend our time meaningfully. In life, we should oscillate between the discipline of work and the fulfillment of leisure. But in both cases, we should remember the scarcity of time and never kill time.
Translator: Ti Kewei.
Translation, if any**, please indicate the source.