A quick frame of reference from C.S. Louis’ Screwtape Letters:
(for those unfamiliar with this work, it’s written from the perspective of one demon advising another demon on how to tempt a struggling Christian)
“You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayer or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisement in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked’… Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why… It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one– the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Bottom-line: Your time is valuable. Apathy and lack of discipline in how you spend it will lead to wasting it and ultimately a lack of meaning, no matter how you define it.
Big claim, but hear me out. We live in a world with more opportunity for distraction than ever before. Look to the explosion of content consumption in the last several years. The world watches 1 billion hours of YouTube each day. Netflix manages that same number each week, but gaining quickly. Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV all manage to lodge significant chunks in the life of a huge portion of Americans. Plenty of what I term “Netflix conversations” that go something like:
“Have you seen _______”
“Yeah, I loved it! I watched all ___ seasons in 3 weeks. Then I got sucked into ______”
“Oh I’ve been meaning to watch that but I’m still finishing ______ right now”
“What season are you in?”
“Season ______”
“Oh the finale is soooo good.”
Etc.
Etc.
What’s the cost? Well, apart from studies indicating worsening face-to-face social skills, lower productivity, and a rise in the prevalence of attention disorders. Time. Content consumption has cheapened the life experience of tens of millions of Americans.
Which brings up the question: How can you be intentional with your time? Life is short, how do you fight apathy? The real question to be asking yourself is: What do you do with your free time?
The past four years I was pursuing a degree in engineering at the University of Washington. Lots to do, all the time. It was especially intense at the end of the week, most classes had homework due on Thursday or Friday afternoon. So when Friday evening rolled around, I had definitely “earned” some time to kick back, relax, do whatever I felt like for a good portion of the weekend. There was always a party, birthday, or game to watch. Often a soccer game to go play in, the lulls in my day were easily filled with social media, Netflix, YouTube, and videogames.
It was a constant run of whatever I felt like. I was not getting ahead on the next assignment, or pursuing self-enriching activities in my discretionary hours. I clung to relaxation, telling myself “I need to cut myself some slack, give myself some time to relax”.
Yet looking back at this time, I would echo the line from the Screwtape Letters above “I now see that I spent most of my life doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. I took the road that was soft underfoot. I didn’t lead my life with purpose. I didn’t set goals, in spite of how much great training my parents provided through high school. It seemed like a formality.
At one point early senior year I felt like I didn’t have enough time to do everything I wanted. When I was little, playing every sport, going to Italian lessons, playing an instrument, etc. my mom sat my brother and I down with a list of everything we were involved in. We were told to cross three things off the list because she couldn’t shuttle us around to everything all the time. So I took myself through another version of this. It was titled “168 Hours” and examined my use of time over an “average week”. I started at 168 and subtracted the activities I participated in through the week. Plenty of time for sleep, relaxation. All the essentials like classes, homework, additional studying. The miscellaneous things like sports, meals, walking from one place to the next. Even adding nearly trivial items like laundry and grocery store runs, I was looking at more than 20 hours per week that slipped through the cracks. I had enough time, I didn’t have enough discipline.
That was a lot of time probably spent on my phone, in mindless conversation, fueling procrastination, and consequently the overwork/burnout relaxation cycle I maintained through college. I vowed to change my habits. I failed to make meaningful changes. No action to back the personal pledges, no accountability, no tracking. I’m sure many of you are aware of the layman’s definition of insanity: “doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result.” That was me.
So I fell back into apathy.
Up until a few weeks ago. We so happened to be sharing the country with 2 other World Race Squads, so over Thanksgiving weekend we all met up for a long weekend. Some 9 hours on multiple buses we met, played plenty of cards (Euchre, Black 7), heard some great talks. The first was about ownership, looking to what we are given, what we can control, and what we can do. It brought some of Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership to mind (read it) with the principle that in every failure, there is something you could have done better, period. Learn, take responsibility, move on. The next was along the same lines as this post: reclaiming your time. It was a call to re-examine not only what we can do with this year, but what we could do to reform our life afterwards. “I would rather you have a crappy, broken World Race if it builds into a great 50 years.” This jarred me, as it was (and is) a core principle of why I am on this trip.
So this was my latest jolt out of apathy. What am I going to do with it? I can build the habits to rebuild my life and lay it out in a meaningful, focused manner. I have been writing out a “100 Dreams”–similar to a bucket list, but adding skills, relationships, landmarks on top of the thrills. This gave me a “why”, and with 100 Dreams that I’m chasing it’s pretty easy to conclude that I don’t have 20 hours a week to waste. The next step was writing out my daily schedule. It takes something like 5 minutes and it saves me way more. The next steps will be seeking accountability in my team, consistently checking my progress, and refocusing. It sounds like work, but it’s actually quite freeing. It’s a work-in-progress of my blueprint for success. That success that battles apathy, that reclaims my time, that drives me onward towards growth and knowledge.
Life is short. So define what you want. Writing out “100 Dreams” is actually quite fun and satisfying (I’m currently stuck around 74, working on that too). Set some process goals (aka not end goals, but identify the steps on the way). Find an event to attend, network to learn more about something from a friend over a coffee, enroll in a class or listen to a podcast to whet your appetite to learn more about something.
Don’t be “insane” like I was. Push past it. Maybe cancel your Netflix subscription.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
