What is time well spent?

2024-05-06

In his essay on the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote “Life is not short, but we make it so… The amount of time we really live is small. The rest of our days is spent just existing.”. What is time spent living vs. time spent existing? What is time well spent?

What living isn’t

It might be easiest to start with what is not really living. One rule of thumb for existing is if you’re not venturing out of your comfort zone. Of course, there are exceptions to this. I wouldn’t call being stuck in traffic as being comfortable, but I wouldn’t call it time well spent. Conversely, having a family dinner with you two feels comfortable, but I generally consider this time well-spent.

I got this list of “bullshit” from Paul Graham’s Life is Short essay:

  • Unnecessary meetings
  • Pointless disputes
  • Bureaucracy
  • Posturing
  • Dealing with other people’s mistakes
  • Traffic jams
  • Addictive but unrewarding pastimes

My own list might include:

  • Being a cog. Living on autopilot.
  • Being stuck in ruts.
  • Being in your comfort zone.
  • Not doing things because of Fear or Laziness. (Laziness is a type of fear: It’s your body’s fear that energy is scarce and should be conserved.)

What do these all have in common? For one, they’re all wastes of time and energy. But what constitutes a “waste” here? In these cases, these produce little value. Or the outcome, for example driving from point A to point B, could have been produced more efficiently. Instead of the drive taking 30 minutes, the drive took an hour. The same with scrolling on social media. A person could have acquired the same information more efficiently, and most of the information acquired on social media isn’t that useful or relevant. So the common thread might be that they have a high time/effort to value ratio.

Minimizing mere existence

I’m fairly sure that being stuck in traffic is closer to the “existing” end of the spectrum. So what if you have a regular two hour commute in traffic? When you’re actually stuck in traffic, there’s not a lot you can do, but you can set up your context so that this isn’t the case. For example, you could move closer to work, change jobs, telecommute, find a carpool, or shift your work hours so that you’re not driving during rush hour. There tens of millions of people who don’t have hours of their day sucked away by driving. Why shouldn’t you be one of them?

This applies more broadly to ruts in general. Often, we find ourselves acting at a tactical level. We’re deciding which lane is moving slightly faster, or which route would be less congested on a particular day. But this is our routine, it’s sometimes uncomfortable and even scary to move at the strategic level: Changing jobs, moving, going back to school to change careers, leaving a stagnant relationship. But a relatively small strategic change can often do what a large amount of tactical change doesn’t. For example, I can optimize my commute so that it takes 30 minutes instead of 40 minutes. But working from home changes this commute to almost zero. No amount of traffic magic will reduce my commute to that time. Alternately, I can bike into work (which takes an hour, but is great exercise and I get to ride along the Potomac River and the monuments on the National Mall).

Tactics, vs. having a long-term strategy (and connecting what you’re doing now to it)

What living is

Now we have some idea about what not living is, doing things that have low value. What is value then? We have some ideas about what living isn’t. How can we get at what living is? Any answer to this question needs to be useful when making choices: “Should I work an extra hour on my project, or should I take a short walk in nature?”.

Here are some ideas for what I find are closer to the side of living:

  • Spending time with loved ones Let’s break that down. Just sitting staring at each other might not qualify. Nor would sitting in traffic. So not just time, but useful cycles. Cycles that are free from external constraints.
  • Creating connections and cultivating relationships
  • Creating and Discovering (See my “What Lasts” email.)
  • Running a workshop with 500 Attendees
  • Growing, learning
  • Meditating, Reading, etc.. These are all enriching. In theory, your capabilities (understanding, knowledge, focus) are all greater after doing these.

This being said, my ideas for what mattered have changed over my life. For example, Paul Graham writes “In middle school and high school, what the other kids think of you seems the most important thing in the world. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them.”. This certainly applies to me.

One heuristic for living might be “Do I have butterflies in my stomach?”. One habit I’ve found to address this is to do something every day out of your routine. Even better: Do something outside your comfort zone. Better still: Do something every day that scares you.

Barring extreme situations, no matter what activity is, you can choose to do it with joy. If you end up having a two hour commute, then while you work to change your situation, you can make it so that the commute is at least as enriching as possible. I learned Russian on Pimsleur on my 1.5 hour commute, and plowed through audiobooks and podcasts. (I also taught myself to throat sing.) Or, you may be stuck in a waiting room while waiting for a dentist appointment. You can read, or maybe engage one of the other patients. Who knows what interesting stories they have? You’re both only on this planet for a limited time, and engaging them is probably more living than watching the TV.

One other way to find out what is living vs. existing is to find examples to inspire you. I’d recommend the autobiographies of Richard Branson, for example. He seems to have done significant things and had fun along the way.

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