The Ticking of Time’s Hands
Making the most of our limited lives
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
Intro to Monthly Theme
"To philosophize is to learn how to die.”
Michel de Montaigne
The Essays
Perhaps the most confounding aspect in all of one’s life is the knowledge of one’s own existence.
This existential reality hangs over each of us, though we seldom acknowledge its existence.
Much of life is built around forgetting that everything we know eventually ends.
This dilemma has plagued thinkers since the beginning of consciousness. Unlike other creatures, we know that we are faced with this insurmountable dilemma.
It is within this knowledge that we struggle to find meaning in life, and it is within this dilemma that we all must come to accept the finite nature of existence.
Whereas Montaigne reminded us that philosophy was created to help us to come to terms with death, it also has, by natural inverse, helped to teach us how to live with that ever looming knowledge.
For the month of October, we’re exploring the existential questions of life and death.
In the world today, with the advancements made in technology, science, and medicine, the average person is set to live to around 4,000 weeks, or roughly 80 years old. What we do during this time is up to us.
Partially.
The majority of us will spend the first 22 years or so of our lives trying to understand how to live according to society—that’s roughly 1148 weeks. This will include what it means to be human, learning to walk, talk, eat, build relationships, and begin learning about this thing called life.
As we age, we then begin to enter society in the form of schooling, and we spend the majority of our childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood being taught about how the world works, what we need to have in preparation for when we’re out on our own.
But then, when we graduate college and are on our own, we’re met with the question of life: what am I going to do with the rest of my life?
This is a universal question and isn’t limited just to Hollywood movies. I remember driving to my college graduation, a mere 3 mile drive, and it feeling like it took me 3 hours. What was I going to do with my life now?
The short answer is we fill it with work to be able to afford a roof over our head, food to eat, and money to hopefully one day retire with.
But for a good majority of us, we’re just shipped off to the workforce and told this is life: you work, you pay taxes, maybe have a few kids, and eventually you die.
And this works for a good majority of us. It takes a lot of pressure off the idea of life needing to be filled, instead, we just follow the routine that’s been set out for us and we follow it…
…right to the grave.
But then there’s others of us who reject this notion and who think deeper about the experience of life. About how to fill the time. What to do with weeks 1149 through 3999.
In the productivity driven culture of the day, it’s easy to turn to the notion of maximizing productivity within that time, making sure you’re sucking every last drop of juice out of your existence.
But this can quickly lead you into the productivity trap, where your time becomes more about being productive than it does about living.
The fact of the matter is, we live a finite existence that requires we prune our activities in order to create the life experience we desire.
In a world of endless possibilities of what to do with one’s life—and this only grows larger by the year—one must find the power of focus to decide what is worth filling those weeks with.
“The harder you struggle to fit everything in,” writes Oliver Burkeman, “the more of your time you'll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things.”
This is similar to the notion of not being able to focus clearly on the objectives at hand in business. As Jony Ive once said:
“What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.”
The same goes for us. If we cannot focus on what we want to fill our time with, other people will, or nothing will.
This means finding our interests and seeing what we want to do with them.
Some things are unavoidable like having a jobs to ensure you can survive, but other things, such as how you spend the remaining 14 hours post-job, those are your hours to fill how you choose.
You will always be limited by time, by the ever tick-tick-tick of the second hands of the clock of your life, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit there listening to it.
“No one will bring back the years,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca once wrote to his father-in-law Paulinus, “no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course.”
That bears repeating as we often forget this when thinking about our existence.
“Life will follow the path it began to take, and will neither reverse nor check its course.”
The responsibility of how we spend our time is up to us. If we do not put focus on what we’re doing with such responsibility, it will be gone before we know it.
And then, so will we.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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