A friend pointed me in the direction of Waking Up which is an infamous platform run by Sam Harris.
I did the 7-day free trial of this but I’m not really in the space or the place for another infamous app or another subscription for that matter because at the moment I think I’m guided quite well in the things that I’m doing.
What was fascinating though was that there was a series by Oliver Burkeman of Four Thousand Weeks fame.
This series was about time management for idiots but of course, relating to Oliver Burkeman, it’s not quite what it seems.
One of the main themes running through the short series is the concept of finitude.
I’ve explored finitude for a long time in different names and guises but basically, to me, it’s most easily explained as knowing that you’re going to die sometime soon and making the most of the time that you have.
One of the greatest issues we seem to see is that everybody pretty much wants to do everything all of the time and then gets stressed and sad that they don’t have the time to do the things they want to do.
I’ve refenced this here before but there is a beautiful peace in the Ladybird book of The Mid-Life Crisis where a guy Is walking round B&Q and sees a tin of boat varnish only to realise that he will never own a boat despite the fact that he never wanted to own a boat until he saw boat varnish at B&Q.
On reflection, I would like to own a boat and now I’m disappointed that I won’t have the time or the finance or the inclination or the relationship or the circumstance to be able to own a boat and you see how this plays out.
And so, if I think about it carefully and clearly and all I would like to do is own a boat, then I probably would be able to do that but of course, that would be at the experience of all the rest of the things that are going on at the moment that I’ve already decided are more important than owning a boat.
It seems to me in the current middle-class bubble that many of the readers of this blog live in, along with me, is that success looks like time to chill out and watch streaming television whilst eating food that’s delivered and cooked by someone else so that we don’t have to do the dishes.
The problem with that is that we block out the opportunity to think about our finitude.
If the series that we binge on Netflix is 6 or 10 or 15 hours that we’re not getting back, not anytime soon, not ever.
The ability to face forwards and look the immortality right in the face is empowering, not paralysing and perhaps the thing that many people that we all look at as successful have actually had the ability to do.
So, every time my wife goes to the horse with the girls or on her own and spends hours there, I could run round to the shop and get a big bag of crisps and 200g of dairy milk (and I have done that many times).
I could come back and watch a film on Amazon Prime or Netflix or Disney Plus or Apple TV or Sky or any other steaming service that apparently, I’m paying for at the moment (subscription rationality required) or I could spend the time on something deeper and better and more nourishing (crisps and dairy milk are not actually nourishing).
I’m in a rush because I have so much to do before I’m done.
I love watching movies and I love sharing experiences like that with my children, but I never watch a series where it automatically clicks onto the next episode or YouTube which does the same because that means someone on the other side of the screen is stealing the precious time that I have and that is finite.
Blog Post Number - 3169