Useless Considerations You Should Make When Wasting Your Time

Don’t mistreat your time.

It is the only free resource you have, and it is not replaceable.

There are no replacement parts for it, and it shows an expiration date.

Always think about this thing: your time has an expiration date.

Haven’t you always read in physics and philosophy books that time is infinite?

Yes, just like that, without a beginning or end. But we’re talking about that time. Not your time.

Your time has a beginning and an end, just like your body and your thoughts. Every day you lose is a day you won’t get back.

But I’m not celebrating productivity.

You can also spend your days doing nothing, eyes closed under a tree or locked in your room.

If this is what you want, then you are making the best use of your time.

When you reopen your eyes, however, you will not have to humiliate the time you have left, with regrets for your past inactivity.

Lament mortifies time twice: before and after.

It is true, however, that the inactivity that you may appreciate today, you may hate tomorrow, when it will be too late to recover what you could have done when you enjoyed lying in the shade.

Remember the deadline talk? Here, it’s an alternative way of telling you how time should always be used to its best advantage.

When you are immersed in amniotic fluid, it becomes very difficult to imagine yourself soon being outside, alone, and in the cold.

Continuing to mistreat time is not a solution to anything. Nobody throws away the things they own, especially when they are unique specimens.

Saving the time you have left is not something I, or anyone else, can suggest to you.

Each of us knows very well what he must do and how to do it. But some things hinder the passage of time and the proper use of time.

I’m talking about fear, habit, inertia, the black hole called procrastination.

Let’s do a little experiment, then, to understand why throwing hours out the window is never a good choice.

Listen to yourself for a moment, and feel the anguish growing as you do this thing I propose to you.

The time card technique

Take a calendar and compare how many months have passed since you were born, with how many months you probably have left, according to national statistics, by gender and age.

If you are still young, you will not notice the number of blank sheets of paper still left to leaf through. And perhaps you aren’t even reading these words.

But if you are over 35, and the more you get on with your life things, the greater the weight of the pages that remain and which progressively reduce in number will become.

It’s strange, right? They decrease and instead of getting lighter, they get heavier. The opposite should be correct.

When we talk about time, we always find ourselves dealing with paradoxes of this type.

Here you are. Here are the thin stack of remaining white sheets of paper, which were only white at the beginning, but they become yellower as time passes, even before they were written.

Because there is also this consideration to make. You won’t always be at 100% of your strength.

Physiologically, your body progresses and loses consistency and strength. It will not allow you to do to the end what you can now do lightly.

However, if your physiology does not support you, or an accident occurs unexpectedly, your actions will be significantly slowed down. If you are lucky, you will only be able to look at yellowed sheets of paper from afar, without being able to write on them or even leaf through them blankly.

And yet, if things backfire on you, you may abruptly interrupt the physiological progression, and the remaining chapters go black instantly.

What I wrote to you is dramatic, brutal, and even rude to present to a community of readers and writers, half of whom just want to be entertained by beautiful writing.

But if you have decided to continue living, because all of us at a certain point in our lives thought that there was no point in continuing to do so, if I said, it is your intention to continue in this matter that is life, it is good that you continue in the best way you are capable of.

And it is good that you do it both in your own interest and in the interests of the people who are close to you and who you care about.

Mistreating one day is bad, wasting two is a crime.

There is only one, absolute, certainty

Advice on how to best use your time makes no sense. I cannot offer them to you, just as no one else can. The internet is full of tips on how to optimize your life, but there isn’t one that tells you how to optimize your life.

You are constantly looking for certainties. You look for them at work, in friendship, in love, in science and in faith.

You find satisfaction in creating simulacra of certainties based on irrelevant facts that could be modified again without warning. But you make do with them, certainties that are as comical as they are useless because you don’t know how to continue surviving without them.

You make vital decisions, based on beliefs built on the progress of past events, deluding yourself that they will be repeated in the future, a photocopy of what has already happened.

But just as every roll of the dice is a fresh roll, every future is also a new future. You can direct it in your favor only with a very large expenditure of resources, in a very small part, and with an enormous factor of uncertainty.

In this tumult of frustrating insecurity, in the perpetual search for something stable, you neglect the only and absolute certainty that you have possessed since birth: the passage of time and its end which will coincide with your disappearance.

This is the only guarantee you have in life: something that will concern you, that will happen without a doubt, and in the only plausible conclusion.

To a minimal extent and within a wide range of variability, you can procrastinate the moment, adopting more or less healthy measures and lifestyles. Alternatively, you can dramatically accelerate the process and reach the physiological end early, with limited margins of uncertainty regarding the success of the operation.

But the product of the factors does not change. The conclusion will always remain the same.

Everything else is supposition, statistical calculation, illusion, self-deception.

Everything else is a lie.

From this inevitable condition, however, you have an enormous advantage.

I want to talk to you about it in this last part of the article.

Just a little more effort, and then you will be free forever from the temptation to waste your time.

Understanding that time is limited gives you a competitive edge

Maybe it seems absurd to think that you have an advantage from knowing that you will have an end.

In fact, it is really a significant advantage to have at least one certainty in life. The only one.

Your time has an expiration. Everything you do and would like to do must necessarily be achieved within this peremptory deadline.

There is a high degree of uncertainty about the actual possibilities of completing any plan undertaken. As your age increases, your life expectancy decreases, during which very long-term projects may no longer make sense to undertake. Furthermore, sudden events could unpleasantly come between you and your goals at any time.

But even under these inevitable conditions, the certainty of the event of the conclusion of your time puts you face to face with an even greater absurdity. I’m talking to you about the one you implement every time you procrastinate your actions.

Your time will end. There is a quantitative limitation to your time. Wasting it on useless activities, due to inertia, or due to an incurable tendency to deferral, forces you to be a spectator of a structural inconsistency.

Do you prefer to define your planning on the basis of a 100% certain event? Or do you prefer to continue wasting your time in lifelong activities set up on the fragile ground of uncertain and fleeting events?

You are faced with one of the basic principles of persuasion. The scarcity of supply, which amplifies the desire for the thing sought.

Here too you find yourself faced with another paradox. There is little time to do everything you want to do, but you don’t defend it or try to use it as best you can.

It’s as if they presented you with the choice between a small amount of time to use well, and the same amount of time to use badly. And you chose the second option.

We’re really weird. It is not true?

I want to end the discussion, without wasting any more of your time

I’m not here to give you advice. I don’t know you, and I would never allow myself to do so, even if you were my relative.

With this article, I have only told you how I see the question of the time we have left to live.

The certainty of our end is a destiny that unites all of us, without exception. But the shared effort also united us in making the best use of our time, the remorse for not using it for our own good, and the regret for having remained to watch the days slip through our senseless fingers.

We have no choice but to be aware of this deadline, which is our only and unquestionable motivation not to waste the time we have left.

Missing time is suicide. It is equivalent to dying a little at a time every day.

If you waste your time, death will not find you alive.

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If you liked this article, you will also like my The Quite Page. I write every day about writing, about how writing can change your life for the better, and I also write a little about life.