Answer without looking away from this text: What’s the time right now? What day is it today? How long do you have to read this post?
Now check if you had those answers right. It doesn’t matter whether you knew what the exact time was, but how do you feel about it? Does it cause you any anxiety when you’re uncertain?
My experience with time has been all sorts of bumpy, and I’m aware that it’s largely because I have some sort of intangible goal utility or productivity in mind. I have no way of measuring if hit those goals anyway, so I’m doomed to feeling forever that I’m wasting my life. I’d like to do some work on a better way of experiencing life, and learn to just exist? Expecting that journey to be long and difficult — it’s not going to be easy to undo the productivity-value coding we’ve been indoctrinated with.
Generally, thinking about time makes me anxious and angry. Can it just stop existing, ugh! Must it be so suffocatingly linear? And go by so goddam fast?
One of the many things I’ve done to deal with these feelings - track how I spent my time. I’d log every minute of my life by assigning it to some activity or the other. If I just couldn’t place something, it would go under “spacing out” and I thought it was pretty neat to be able to space out and have a record of it.
This was oddly satisfying. Looking back, it was lovely to be able to analyse my activities, and there’s so much information even in which activities are coded as “wasted” time, for example.
As much as I liked doing this, it was combination of tool limitations (not being able to track multiple activities in parallel) and life getting more complex and active that eventually wore me off this habit.
Would I start doing this again? No. Retrospective tracking is no longer helpful. I can’t do much about the past, and the data was only useful to learn about myself. In this season of my life, I’m prioritizing planning, looking forward, managing forward. Maybe its a reflection of how much agency I’m able to exercise right now compared to the common helplessness we all went through during the pandemic of 2020.
I still cannot relax about time and live like a carefree bird (btw birds have amazing internal clocks) so I will continue to obsess over time as a necessary part of trying to live well.
 | A guest post by
|