I acutely remember the moment my anxiety began. It was around age 10 and while I’d been primed many times before with incidents that could make a person anxious, this was when the existential dread set in for me. It was the precise moment I realized that life could feel… long. That a person had to come up with their own reason for living and in addition to that, figure out ways to fill their time. That all sounded like a bit too much, it still does.
While I think finding a reason for living takes a while and maybe doesn’t even make sense until the end for a lot of us, the big question of how to fill your time activates pretty much as soon as you realize that you have some degree of free will.
The first years of our life, if we are lucky, are blissfully spent being courted around from appointments to schools to activities that someone else decides for us. Many of us probably do not encounter free time until well into our adolescence. And is there ever any “free time” anymore? Most of it has probably been replaced by time spent in absorption of an internet connected device. I’m not sure I would have just lied on the grass and daydreamed in a spare moment of my youth, but I did read a lot and played a lot of a game called horses.
Confession: I am a horse girl. I would run around like a horse for hours at a time, creating jumps out of brooms and buckets, impersonating the different horses I knew from the barn, emulating specific tics and movements that only made sense to me and my best friend Lauren. Movements so specific that we would critique each other’s accuracy down to the way one of us girls moved our head like Bubba the horse when he was annoyed.
As strange as it is, I’m glad I spent my childhood doing this instead of moving shapes around on an iPad. Yes, we also played The Sims and the only horse computer game called Riding Star but only real horse girls know about Riding Star. Nothing like the rush of inserting the CD-rom into the computer and the subsequent whirring of it booting up, unsure if the whole computer would crash or if you could get 30 minutes in before it went down from too much Sim activity and not enough RAM. Lol Idk if it’s even RAM that powers a computer. My digital literacy has plateaued. I was born at just the right time to know not enough about any technology. In my computer class we learned how to type on a keyboard (incorrectly I might add), not how to code. And in the class called “Technology” we played RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and built fake amusement parks. Very useful skills.
So how should a person be and how should they spend their time? The question becomes even heavier if you try and add some kind of search for meaning or purpose as the self help gurus suggest we need to do in order to feel FULFILLED. But even just figuring out how to spend all of the moments that make up your silly little life in between the weddings, funerals, births, parties, and work… is a big task that nobody prepares you for because it isn’t something we talk about. It seems like we’re just supposed to know how to do it. And these small moments are what make up the bulk of our lives. We’re taught to cherish every breath and be grateful when we have time to rest. But dear reader I don’t know how to rest unless I am downright sick and even then I try to find an obscure cleaning project like a drawer I’ve been meaning to organize for years after the DayQuil has kicked in. Or I go full dissociation and watch horrible television like The Kardashians.
By adulthood the appointments and activities of our youth turn into work and that takes up a good chunk of time. Then some people have kids which seems like that means you’ve got a full schedule for the next 20 years. Then people plan to retire and maybe travel, pick up some hobbies they didn’t have time to do before and they just pass the time until… the end? How are they passing the time?
While we are acutely aware that we have a limited time on this earth to get through everything we want to get through, there can also exist a feeling of there just being a lot of time to figure out how to pass. Like I said last week I hate idleness. I’ve never been more depressed than when I’ve been unemployed and not just because of the financial hardship but also the lack of structure to my days. If time seems like an abyss before you with nothing to mark it or fill it, it can be daunting. It feels like you’re not making the most of the time you’re given here on earth and I find that uniquely distressing.
The idea of making everything count and optimizing and using your time wisely can also be a different kind of exhausting. To weigh all of the ways you can spend your time and make decisions about what is the best use of it is taxing. I think I may have this problem more than most people because I experience a lot of choice paralysis around even minute decisions. And I read a lot about productivity because I am always searching for salves to cure my procrastination problem. Currently reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (which is the number of weeks you have if you make it to 80).
Maybe I watched too many movies and read too many books, (ahem Mary Oliver) about how precious our time here is and I came out of the womb wanting to live a full life. At the root of it all is a fear that I won’t spend my time wisely and that I will waste my life. I think the most powerful antidote to this fear is to just continue living and try to worry less. And probably meditating more to become comfortable with the emptiness of time. Like my mom always says, “try to wear life like a loose garment.”
Thank you