scrobble.life
Reflections

On My Monthly

Taraz@tarazkp (86)4h

While this makes for a very long day due to travel to the middle of nowhere with relatively poor train connections, I quite like the monthly, long day away. It gives me the opportunity to chill on the train for a couple hours each way, plus a couple hours after sessions while I wait for the train home. The day itself is also nice with one-to-one client conversations with people who are interesting and happy to talk. It will be 16 hours from door to door, but at least it is time with benefits.

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Time with benefits

Some will say that time is our most precious resource, but I disagree. Time is always with us. Well, if it exists at all. From my own philosophical perspective, since existence can only happen in the now, and the now is a moment that is by its very nature has no start or end, it means there is no space between, making it a singular, or an infinite. And well, that also means that in "the now" there is not only no time, there is also no movement, no A to B, so it means that nothing is moving and when nothing moves, there is no life. So, in the now, the only place we can exist, we are all dead.

I digress.

From a living perspective, yes, time is an important resource, but not the most precious. The most valuable resource we have is our attention, which is one of the only things we possess that we have control over. Attention is a precursor to valuable time, because it is our attention that extracts value from experience. We can choose to swap our attention for something that returns value, or what doesn't.

While we can do multiple simple things, mindless things concurrently, when it comes to complex tasks, we cannot effectively split our attention. Complex multitasking is a myth. And the things that are valuable to pay attention to, tend to be complex tasks and situations. This means that if we want to make the most of our time and take benefit, we have to not only pay attention in the moment (the only place we can attend) and choose activities that are going to return value. Value might be in the eye of the beholder and situational, but without paying attention, we are not choosing value, we are working on default - mindlessly.

We can multitask mindlessly.

Think about how you sit on the train as I am now, or in a plane, or in front of the TV. Are you paying attention? Right now as I write this, what is my mind attending to? For me right now, my fingers are working mindlessly, but my attention is on my thoughts, listening in and processing them into a coherent narrative that my fingers can translate into movements on the keyboard to type. If I am listening to music at the same time and analysing the instruments in the background, I am unable to pay attention to the thoughts of the article. If I am sitting here thinking about the woman a couple seats down that looks like the woman that Arnold Schwarzenegger "wore" in Total Recall, I am not paying attention to the thoughts of the article. Though, as you can see, I can move from one thought to another, but it is sequential, not concurrent.

I was talking toa friend the other day and he was saying that he is now struggling to watch a short series without looking at his phone between. This is not uncommon these days of course, but it is splitting attention between two screens, two different pieces of content, when the human mind can only attend to one at a time. So each flick between, means missing out on what is on the other. Not a great loss for the majority of content that people are consuming, but many do the same thing when having a conversation with someone they say they care about and want to listen to. It isn't possible. And when that notification sound beeps in the background, attention is broken.

Time is the space we have to attend to, and what we choose to spend out time on is going to dictate our experiential lives, what we actively learn, or passively absorb. As I was saying to my daughter, we are always learning, no matter if we choose to or not. We can sit and eat a meal and our bodies are learning and reinforcing the way we use a fork, or chopsticks. Learning to familiarise flavours and learning to savour or swallow mindlessly. When we sit in front of the TV, we aren't just learning from what we consume, we are also teaching our posture through the way we sit, or our mind to become familiar with not thinking its own thoughts.

Always learning.

Which means that how we spend our time is very important and if we aren't paying attention, we are going to choose to teach ourselves lessons that we might not want to learn, that are valueless, or often harmful. We end up whittling away the time we have without creating something that we want, something we intend. We are mindlessly travelling across moments of time, taking very little of use or value out of it.

Not much meaningful can happen.

A lot of people I know and have talked with over the years, plus a lot of the common narrative is around having a meaningful life with many searching for something meaningful to do, or spend their time on. Yet, if we are actually going to have meaning in our lives, we have to pay attention to what we do. Not when we find something meaningful, but all the time. Or at least, as much as possible, where each moment we are making the decision to pay attention to what is happening right now and extracting meaning from it. It doesn't matter how mundane the task, how mindless, it is always an opportunity for attentive and meaningful learning. Yet, most of us probably waste most of our attention, because aren't actually using it in the moment and instead behaving on defaults, acting mindlessly in the moment and teaching ourselves, becoming familiar with unmeaningful activity.

What happens when we make unmeaningful activity familiar?

It becomes our norm. It becomes comfortable. It creates the conditions where our mind, body and spirit search for more of the familiar and that is the familiar unmeaningful. And what that mean is that what is meaningful becomes unfamiliar and therefore, uncomfortable. And we are evolved to avoid discomfort, which means avoiding the very thing we say we want to have. But when we aren't paying attention, we do the comfortable default, and wonder why we can't find valuable meaning in our lives.

Attention + Time.

We all have both. Don't waste either.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]

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Comments · 3

  • @toluwanispecial(71)· 3h

    Time is infinite like you said but it is not for us human as individuals. Time is not always on our side as it move faster when you have something meaningful doing but stay with you for long with you are wasting it. Time is relative and what we do with our time is what determines how far we go in life. They say time is money and shouldn’t be used wisely. We all have the same allotted time on earth but we can decide what to do with it and can also allow someone else to use it for us. It is all our choice.

  • @santigs(71)· 4h

    We all have both. Don't waste either.

    I would add, the sentence 'don't waste your time' is completely subjective. Some enjoy and find the energy in spending time apparently doing 'nothing' such as relaxing on a chair or taking a nap. To me, this is absolutely no waist of time, it is the activity they enjoy which pushes them to be way more mindful during the rest of the day, although some may consider it the opposite.

  • @urrirru(65)· 4h

    I can't read something on my laptop and watch a video on the TV at the same time. I always miss some information. And I don't like missing information. I like knowing everything about a topic that interests me.