How do we spend time, our fundamental resource?
Let me set up the analogy here. We’re humans, yes? Placed on this shitty smelly but sometimes cute earth to do who knows what (as if it mattered anyway). In the kindest of terms, we’re all semi conscious monkeys bumbling around doing things, eating other things, having sex and dying. Oh and we get to do that with a ton of other monkeys.
And what we slowly realize as we grow old and enter our 20s is that the eternal struggle of us diddly creatures is our conservation and scarcity of our most precious gold: time. Time is the fundamental resource, and in that brief moment where the dust of your neutron becomes sentient on this earth, you are tasked with the hopeless duty to provide that sentience with some meaning, some worthwhile living and existing. And that’s fucking hard.
You’ll come to realize that everything is denominated by time. Your dreams, your goals, your experiences and vacations. How your last relationship was, how awkward or amazing high school was. How efficient you are, what you accomplish, what you can do or see or have or feel. How long it’s been since you were sad and how next year will be different than this year I promise! It’s all based on these small units of time.
With enough time you can do anything. You can go to Mars. You can make enough money to live your dream life. You can meet the people that make you whole and you can live out the experiences that make your life notable and worth living. But of course, none of us have an infinite pool of time to draw from unless you are Nancy Pelosi, Edward Cullen, or another member of the Undead. We’ve got just a brief moment, baby. Sucks.
So… what’s this mean? Nothing good, but at least you know your life is about to end and when we lay the ground truths we can start making sense of the rest. For me, it’s lit the path toward a new way of thinking about how I spend each moment of my lives. Life is like this:
In our finite lives, we serve the same role as an art gallery curator. Each piece on the wall of our gallery (life) serves to hold one great experience, one beautiful moment and that’s it. It’s our job to make this gallery great, one worth living.
You’re plopped into this world with only a small set of spaces on your wall. It is then your sole duty as the proprietor and steward of this here life to go out and seek the moments that will fill your gallery with the most beautiful, worth living, rich, and colorful experiences.
It’s not enough to say yes to these experiences (when the group chat say bottomless margs on a Wednesday), but it’s your duty to go seek these gallery moments and to make them happen. Don’t live your life unconsciously. Don’t let life happen to you. Take it by it’s reins and dominate it. It’s yours and yours to live. Act like it.
A few things:
Don’t collect boring people. Live life with people that inspire you, push you, and that generate gallery moments. Most of the battle is saying no to the lukewarm experiences and people. Clear space for the people, projects, experiences that will invigorate your very being, and leave space for nothing else.
Do what makes you uncomfortable. The richness of life expands and shrinks in proportion to your willingness to assume risk, to reach toward your outer edges and play at the boundary. Life is best lived at the edges. Live at the extremes. Do you want to grow up like the rest of your hometown or do you want to redefine yourself each chapter and experience richly the bounds of your potential? Stupid question. When faced with a moment of discomfort and change, that’s usually a good indicator of where to go. And go do the damn thing.
All in all, seek your gallery moments. When you’re faced with a fork, look at yourself from the other end. No, look at yourself from your deathbed. Which side minimizes regret?
If you take one single thing from this ramble is that your life is limited and punctuated by these rare beautiful moments, these limited frames on your wall. Make them the most colorful, fun, story-worthy minutes that your anxious comfort-loving monkey brain can handle. It is your duty as the humble curator of this finite gallery, to fill it with your best works. Go seek the moments that bring you color and make them happen. If you do it right, you’ll look back (at the end of your tenure) upon a gallery worth showing off to the world.
footnotes
Take lots of pictures and videos. Your memory sucks. Trust me, at 21, you’ll want to see that weird face or massive burp your friend belched at a IHOP when you were 14. Photos and videos have an unexpected quality of making your life more interesting and memories more colorful than it would’ve been.
However, the new research on aging, the pace of biotechnological innovation, and synthetic reality is really proving that this dingy, cramped, shitty gallery is not all we have. We could have more gallery to each of us, soon. Woo!