Somewhere along the line, humans decided that a day consisted of 24 hours.
I don’t know why I am the way I am but I don’t like feeling like I am wasting time. I try to squeeze as many things as I can throughout the day. I often feel like I am racing time and don’t want it to slip away. Every day is a reset and I want to make sure I did as much as I could to make sure I didn’t waste my day.
Is this healthy? I have no idea.
But feeling like I wasted the day is one of the worst feelings. This is the main reason I hate hangovers. I get so upset thinking I wasted the day.
Naturally, I researched this phenomenon. Steve Taylor (Psychology Today) explains two different attitudes to time, both of them positive in their different ways. These could be called the ‘positive pressure perspective’ and the ‘transcendent perspective’.
Personally, I relate 100% to The ‘Positive Pressure Perspective’. This statement sums up how I feel about time:
“Time is slipping away from us every moment, so it’s incumbent on us to use it productively, to fulfill our potential, to achieve as much as we can, to do what we were meant to do. Life is temporary, so we should make the most of it.”
Unfortunately, “this view of time can be problematic, though. It creates pressure, and can lead to an obsessive concern with not ‘wasting’ time. Every minute that is not deemed ‘productive’ is seen as worthless. It may mean that we’re unwilling to relax, even when we’re mentally and physically exhausted, and when we would actually become more productive if we allowed ourselves to take it easy. And more fundamentally, this attitude pre-supposes a duality between us and time. It views time as an external force which we have to continually struggle against – and which will ultimately be victorious against us.”
Shit.
I can’t even relate to the other perspective of time; the ‘Transcendent Perspective’. Here is what Steve Taylor has to say:
“The second perspective has a less combative attitude towards time – in fact, it doesn’t even accept its existence, at least in the normal sense. It sees linear time as a construct, a creation of the human mind (and of human culture). After all, the future is not a real phenomenon. It does not exist, except in our thoughts, in our anticipations and our plans. Similarly, the past is not a real phenomenon. All past events have faded away into non-existence. They only exist in our memory, and in the recordings we may make of them. We live our lives wholly and continually in the present. And in the present, there is no time. As a culture, we have decided to divide time into seconds, minutes, hours and days, but this has no basis in experiential terms. In the present, there is just a continual flow of experience. There are no isolated moments, or instants, there is just a flow. And we are part of the flow.”
Conclusion:
I am going to keep up my hectic schedule. I like feeling like I am getting things done! BUT, I will try to remember this mumbo jumbo about the future not being real.
