Arjun Khemani

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it

Seneca

Time is something that I think many people can agree on being one of the most important elements of life. We say from time to time, “I don’t have any time for that.”, “I’m busy.”, “I have another meeting in 2 minutes.” or “I never have enough time.” It feels as though our entire lives are a schedule, a time-table if you like, with activities pinned down to the minute, every minute of our existence. But it’s certainly not always been like that. Actually, it’s really been like this quite recently if viewed from the global existence spectrum. Go back a few centuries and people guessed what time it was. Our accuracy in sending messages, viewing maps, and knowing the exact time is something that even the most intelligent philosophers in the past couldn’t dream of. We have cut so much time taken by small activities today through a few years of evolution, but still we somehow never have enough time. Of course, we’re even getting more done than those before the precisions were invented, but what is it that we are getting done with?

We get so engrossed in being “productive” and doing something all the time that we tend to never think about what we are actually doing and what is it’s significance. This obviously goes for scrolling through Instagram for like 90 minutes a day but also for stuff that we call “work” and “important”. We need to realize the real importance and relevance of the activities we spend our time in.
A person spending his time doing something relevant to him will never repent of never having enough time. Rather be grateful for spending his time on things of relevance to him.

When we find things of relevance to us, we won’t care if we spend even our lives doing that. But doing the opposite never works.