Alive Time vs Dead Time

Sweet Bites for February 28, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Time.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

The author Robert Greene had many jobs early in his career including at one point working as a skip tracer for a detective agency.

All day Greene would try and track down people who had skipped out on a bill. He’d have to call around to friends and relatives, spinning up stories to try and find the individual.

“It was depressing, the feeling it gave me morally, [just] dirty inside, like I was capturing these innocent people,” he would say.

But even though he hated the job and desperately wanted to leave, he realized the gift he was being given. Greene would see he was learning a lot about deception and how people are so easily fooled.

“This is the most incredible lesson in human nature,” he thought to himself.

Greene wouldn’t get his first book, 48 Laws of Power, published for some time but the experiences he had in his 20s and 30s—dealing with people looking for power, people deceiving others, the games people play—this all laid the groundwork for him to be able to write the book.

It wasn’t just his experiences though. Greene has the ability to immerse himself into the moment and really absorb it. This, he would say, is Alive Time.

“There are two types of time in this life, there is alive time and dead time. One is when you sit around, one is when you wait until things happen to you, one is where you’re wasteful, you’re passive, you’re accepting. The other is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing.”

We all encounter situations we don’t want to be in. We have bosses we can’t stand, we’re stuck in traffic, we miss a taxi and have to walk.

Alive time is when we seize the day, when we bring power back to us by ensuring we meet the challenge head on and turn it to our advantage.

The bad boss teaches us what we’ll not tolerate, the traffic gives us time to reflect or listen to a podcast, the missed taxi gives us an opportunity for exercise.

Alive time is about reinforcing our will on the situation, by turning a negative to a positive, by seeing the situation as an opportunity to practice growth rather than hinder ourselves to weakness.

Every day we encounter situations like this. But our time is limited. So we must always keep asking ourselves, in these moments, am I approaching this with a mindset of alive time? Or am I allowing myself to slip into dead time?

“Everything is an example for learning, even flipping burgers at McDonald's. You're learning about human nature, you're learning about yourself, that is how to translate so it becomes your time. You own it.”

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

There has never been a time when this article didn’t exist by David Chai

“In the nameless harmony that is cosmological oneness, time persists, but at a level too subtle for humans to recognise. The reason for this is that we’re inherently limited in what we can know (physically, mentally, spiritually). By retraining ourselves to reside in the in-betweenness of things, we can release ourselves from the notion that time is being-centric, and consider the alternative: time is the resting nothingness of the Dao.”

📚 Wisdom

“Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?”

Marcus Aurelius

Source: Meditations 2.14

🔴 How We Spend Our Time

🎥 Video Worth a Watch

I greatly enjoyed this video by

Big Think

on the physics of time and how it works.

Think someone you know would enjoy these? Hit below to forward and spread the love.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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