This post takes a more serious, rhetorical tone.
As someone in his 30’s, I’m going to repeat a cliché that I say a lot: time flies. It’s amazing how fast the years go by. You can choose to be a grown up and do grown up things (family, career, etc.), or you can choose to have less responsibilities (more freedom?); but time flies regardless.
One topic that has been weighing heavily on me is my time with family. The family that I’ve taken for granted. You may know what I’m talking about: parents, sibling(s) – the people that you saw all the time when you were a kid. The people that you spent all your time with doing mundane things like watching TV or eating a meal.
As a person living in a different region from my immediate childhood family, it feels really weird for me to see so little of them. The worst part is that even if I do see them, there is no real way to “make the time count”. How do you make your time count anyways? Time flies by and that day or week with them is in the distant past.
I’ve read an interesting piece, The Tail End by Tim Urban, that shares some of my sentiments. By not living near my parents or childhood friends, I’ve got very little % of the time left with them. I’ve already spent most of the time I’ll ever have with them (in the context of humans on Earth).
Urban brings up great takeaways:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
The more I think about this topic, the more paralyzed I feel. Not in a literal sense, but more in a existential sense. How do I make the most of my time here?
To use a shoddy example: when I travel to a new place, I want to experience “all the things” and feel like I’ve done it all. Which is obviously impossible for any place that’s not super, super tiny. What I end up doing is walking around streets arbitrarily, take a bunch of bad pictures. This is a brute force / high level strategy to see a little of everything, but without any depth. I feel like I am not experiencing everything to its potential, and this feels like FOMO (fear of missing out).
I don’t have any satisfying answers to making the best use of our precious time. There is always a sense of FOMO in a world with endless choices. All I can do is prioritize between what I need to do and what I want to do. Everything else will be left behind, but that’s alright because ain’t nobody got time for that.