So, what is life? Well, people are going to give you some fancy and philosophical answer, but I give you a simple one. It’s time. It’s an amount of time that you have. Time is all you have. This is the only thing that is most obvious and yet gets ignored a lot.
Behind all the fantasy and facade, time is the only thing that life is. And we don’t use it that well to be honest. I mean it gives me chills when I see people setting and watching reels for hours. They don’t even enjoy it. They do it just to feel distracted from boredom.
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People get bored so easy these days. They need constant stimulation. From one thing to another. What does it even mean to be bored? So, you want to pass the time. That is hilarious. You don’t pass the time; time is passing you. And soon it will pass all of you. All you have is time and you have no choice but to lose it slowly but surely.
Time you overlook
But social media is not the only thing that is eating up your precious time. There are many things that eats it up in large chunks. Like for example, sleeping. You sleep for at least thirty years of your life. Now, depending on how your life is going, it can be a good or bad thing. Regardless, you can’t do anything about that. You have to sleep.
And then, there are things you do while you are awake, like your job. Your job takes all of your healthiest years from you. And God forbid if you don’t like your job.
However, it may be the case that you love your job but most of the time people don’t, no matter what they tell you. Let’s say you are not going to get paid for your job, will you still do it? I mean, you should, if you love it so much.
You should take out time for your job even when you are doing something else for making money. This is what we do, we make time for things that we love doing even when we are not getting paid for them.
But I highly doubt most people will make time for the work they are doing in their jobs when they are not getting paid for it. One thing I have learned is never take people for what they say, we lie to others and even more than that we lie to ourselves.
So, most people spend a majority of their time of life doing something they don’t even like. But like sleeping, what can they do, they have to. Just think about it, you spend most of your days at your job and then you come home, stay awake for a while and then go to sleep. We do this for years with a little variation here and there. This is how we spend our time.
We don’t even have much time in our hands. You may think sixty, seventy, or eighty years are a lot. But what are sixty years in the grand scheme of everything. Forget about grand scheme, after twenty-five, your years will pass by like they are months, and months, like they are weeks. A day will be nothing.
What to spare time for?
However, I don’t think that’s even the main problem. Not the time but what are you doing with it is something of an importance. I am not going to tell you to find something you love, as a job, so you can enjoy doing it throughout your lifetime. Doing something when you have to, when you have to show for it, when it is a necessity, can turn even the most passionate thing into a chore.
People trade their time for money, what they don’t see is they are trading life for the means of life. But one can try to find something that consumes least amount of time, for work. Even if that work doesn’t pay as much as you may want, because once you see the true value of your time you will be trading money for time.
Even if you don’t have a choice, and you can’t save time at your job, you will not waste the rest of it at mindlessness. You would want to take out the most out of it. However, the question is, what is this most? What would you gain form saving or gaining time.
What do I even mean by saving time. Save it for what? It takes you to a fundamental question. What is the meaning of life. What does it mean to live. We need to understand something. Most people don’t live, they are just alive. Life drags them through time and time drags them through life. You can have all the time in the world, and you can be most miserable of them all.
Actually, it is most likely that you will be miserable proportional to the time you have to spare. It will turn into boredom and meaninglessness.
This is one reason people keep themselves busy with something. Social media serves the same purpose. Your jobs distract you and keeps you occupied. So, you don’t have to face the utter absurdity of your existence. The thing with existence is, you won’t find meaning in it other than what is.
Not to achieve something.
I don’t care about meaning, but I do care about joy. Or in other words you don’t need any meaning when you are joyous. All the questions for meaning arises from the misery of life. Joy is the only thing that brings you closer to a meaningful life. Not for anyone else but for yourself.
When you have time, you have an opportunity to get closer to joy. How? Do things that brings you joy. Not only your passions but learning new things. Exploring new ideas brings joy to your life when you don’t have anything to achieve through it. When you are learning something in mathematics, not because you have a test tomorrow but just because for the sake of learning.
It brings joy to you when you experience new things and learn new topics just for the sake of doing it. Learn photography, drawing, dance, whatever you like. It doesn’t even matter if it’s your passion or not.
That’s the thing, you don’t even need to be passionate about anything, everything will become your passion when you do it just to learn and explore. It will bring joy in your life. That is what you need time for. You need time to have a joyous life. To have a joyful journey. To experience joy.
Write, learn philosophy, do philosophy, learn singing and sing, learn coding and code, do sports, do these things just to do them. When you have time, you can do all that and more. This is joy. To do things just for doing. Not for some set goal. Because once you set a goal or once you have to do it for something to get out of it, it becomes work, even worse, a job.
Achievement does give you a sense of accomplishment. it feels good to learn something new, to have progress, the problem arises when you want something else out of that progress than what it is.
So, if someone wants to live, they need time. But time itself is not the point. You need to fill it with joy. Only then you are living. Or else your life is just a distraction, distraction by this and distraction by that but distraction none the less, and then you die before you even know it.
