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Some people learn things faster than others. It’s usually because of the fact they’ve been genetically predisposed to retain information more easily. These people can get by in school easily, if they wanted to, whether they wish to play the game and maintain high grades or to ignore the content and ace the tests, they are able to retain information without hammering it into their minds. Not everyone is born like this. Some have to put a lot of time in for the most basic of things, spending hours upon hours learning the most rudimentary aspects of something before it ticks and then they can move onto the next thing. There is a range of gray area within this, how much time it will take for someone to learn or understand something goes beyond the intelligence they were born with. In many cases, it depends on the content they’re attempting to learn, what they are trying to recreate, or how the content is presented.

I have found that I am geared towards learning and understanding some things better than others, and that seems to be just about the same way for everyone else. There are the oddballs who are genuinely capable across the board, sucking in every piece of information, retaining it all, and having a seemingly infinite storage within their mind. Likewise, as you can see where I’m going, on the other side of the bell curve there are those who struggle to bring in any amount of information, and to retain anything of the slightest complexity is a struggle. And, like myself, and most others, we sit in the middle, able to take in information for some particular things at a higher complexity, while struggling with many others.

While not clearly defining the extent of the complexity, I think most can think of things that they consider to be complex. If you were to ask 100 different people a question like “What’s something you consider complex and why?” you will receive a variety of answers. Yes, things like demographics matter, what education the person has had, their background, but the more we scale up the question, the more things will average out. If I were to answer that question, I’d tell you that, what I consider to be complex would-be things that take years to understand at a professional level. My basis being systems that exist in society that already decide how long someone needs to be educated before they can be considered in the workforce. This tends to be four years, but it can go beyond that. This clearly defines how long it would take, four-years, but even using this as my basis would not clearly define the intelligence required. Some might find the content with the classes through those four years to be very difficult and time consuming, they might have to spend all their time studying and rehearsing all the content before taking a test or quiz. On the other side, there will be others who don’t have to try at all, and suck up the information like sponges, and don’t know what it’s like to study.

Not everyone going through a degree or course will have to put in the same amount of time in order to achieve the same goal. Due to whatever genetics they’ve been predisposed to, the amount of time required to achieve that goal will be varied. However, I don’t always think it’s this simple. Yes, I believe that to be true, but I also think that how people learn will be another factor in the speed and retention of new information. This isn’t a new idea, it’s usually been broken down into those who are visual learners, auditory learners, and textual learners. Some might have to visually see the thing to maximize their retention, some might have to hear it, and others might have to read it. In the person being able to know and realize the best way for them to learn, they can learn at a faster rate. I think those who are a bit smarter already are aware of the ways they learn best, and tap into that, while those who are a little more unaware, struggle with this.

Even in the case of realizing or having someone else make you aware of the ways you best learn, there are also the factors like your own personal interest and ability. Yes, if you actively chose to partake in a four-year degree, you probably care about the thing you’re learning, and you’re probably targeting the thing you’re best at or you believe you are best at. I heard this idea that people shouldn’t focus on the things they want to do, but they should focus on the things they’re good at, and then work from there. I like this idea, to an extent, because it means that you can do something you’re good at, and enjoy the thing, to some level, because you’re good at the thing you’re doing. Of course, there’s variability in this, and it depends on how willing you are to push certain things. For example, I was not naturally able to write, to any extent, good or bad, but there are those who have. By pushing, despite not being predisposed to be someone who writes, I can get myself to being a writer, but the time that will take will have a huge discrepancy in comparison to those who had it come easily.

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami, he mentions at one point some of his past, and how started out writing, and then talked a little about other writers. Like I’ve said already, some just have a natural talent, and that carries them through their whole career, and that’s enough. There are also those who have a good amount of natural talent, but it only helps them in the beginning. And there are those, who don’t really have any talent. Unless you’re the prodigy writer, you will have to learn how to work especially hard in order to produce the same result of someone who had natural talent. You’ll have to mentally dig to get the words on the page, and to make those words worth reading, will require another layer of hard work and dedication. For those who have some talent and that carries them through their early career, they will burn out, the talent they had been predisposed to will run dry, and they’ll have to figure out how to get back to that place, if they want to continue, in this case, writing. For those who lack the talent, they had to start working hard from the beginning. Sure, their writing might not be great, but they’ve had no choice but to work hard, so they already know what it’s like to dig for water, as in, words and stories, within their mind.

Obviously, this goes beyond writing. It goes beyond the arts, even. If you wanted to be a professional sports player, in whatever sport it was, you could genetically be predisposed to a stronger and faster body, but you’ll still have to work hard, maybe not as hard as others, but you’ll have to push yourself the same. Some might not have that, but they can get up there, to some extent, just by working hard, but the time required in order to get to that same level will not be the same, but at one point or another, even the one with the natural talent, will have to keep putting in more and more time to maintain what came easy to them.

Time will always have to be put in in order to achieve any difficult goal, even if it was easy or something the person was predisposed to. Another example I can think of is a channel I’ve listened to in the past. It was mostly commentary over Minecraft Alpha footage, and in one of these videos, he states he is majoring in mathematics. Even though math is the thing he’s good at, the thing he cares about, and that’s why he’s going to school for it, it’s still incredibly hard. This generally tends to be the case across the board whenever I hear of someone talking about mathematics. There is just a breaking off point for how much a person can take. For me, I suck at mathematics, I could learn it, but the time required to reach the level of complexity that others achieve in a margin of the time it would take me is far too unreasonable. Not only that, I don’t really, well, care for it. Yes, I care to some extent, but it’s not like I stay awake at night thinking about the math I could be doing instead of everything I’m already doing.

What I wanted to get to was the fact that even if we put in large quantities of time for specific things, there will be a point in which it no longer makes sense, at least for the individual putting in the time; for us to continue putting in that time. There is a limit to how much each person can learn as well, their own personal capacity. I’ve been avoiding mentioning things like IQ, but I think it’s okay to use some of the values as a reference point to the capacity of a person. Someone who is 80 IQ won’t be able to achieve the same things as one who is 110 IQ, but this comes to be expected. However, many of the things that the things the 110 IQ person can do the 80 IQ person can also do. It is just when we introduce many layers of complexity, the gap in intelligence becomes hard to avoid.

I’d consider it dangerous to hold these values too closely because we might use them as indicators to a person’s capability across the board, when that isn’t the case. Even those who might be considered dumb possibly have capabilities they’ve been unable to tap into, whether they’ve been unable to receive the proper education or they never had a strong interest in anything, they probably have things within them that are considered their strengths. If we wanted to compare the 80 IQ and the 110 IQ person again, I’d tell you, at least probably, the 80 IQ person will be able to maintain a greater capability to do a variety of repetitive tasks than the 110 IQ person. The more intelligent person will become bored and tired, if not annoyed, at the task, while the dumber person wouldn’t care, wouldn’t mind at all. Is this not a strength? If the person lacking intelligence can’t understand highly complex topics, even if they had an entire lifetime to spend on them, why should they bother? They probably shouldn’t, and that’s okay. We should acknowledge, at the very least, that this person has a capability for learning, it just would take them a lot more time to conceptualize the information, but they still will have that capability. The ceiling for them will be lower, but they will be able grasp many things if given the proper time and treatment.

The smarter person might have no problem with the fundamentals, and even might not have trouble with increased complexity, in whatever the thing is. However, they’ll reach a point, like the dumber person, where they could put indefinite amounts of time in something without much of a return. At what point this is, depends on the person, and their willingness to find out their true limits. It’s also a matter of worth, how valuable they consider the thing they want to do or learn and their willingness to put in time to obtain that.

Have you ever heard the idea, “Starting is the hardest part?” It usually refers to, just about anything, starting anything, whether it’s going to the gym or playing a video game, actually starting, committing the first initial action, is harder than all that follows. Some things will be easier to start relative to other things, it might be easier to start playing the game than going to the gym, but the value produced, even if just to ourselves, will be vastly different. I want to maintain the context but increase the scale. Instead of starting something that will last a day, imagine starting something that will last a month, or a year, and you have to maintain that starting, every single day, and it’s something that takes a lot of time and energy and the results aren’t immediate. Wow, that sounds tiring, and time consuming, and it makes someone wonder why they would bother with something like that, how could anyone get something out of that?

I’m not predisposed to music, at all. I didn’t really even listen to music as a kid, and never played any instruments, but where I’m going with this, is that, due to a pact, I started playing an instrument. In this pact, I had to practice every day, for 2 to 3 hours, depending on the day, and I had to do this for a month. I had no prior experience nor a natural talent towards it. As a result of putting in all this time, I actually learned basic music theory, in reference to guitar, and was able to do some basic things on guitar. It also promoted me to continue playing even after the pact was over. If I had not put in all this initial time, I would have not seen that I have a capability to play an instrument at all, even poorly, and even after putting a lot of time in.

This makes us wonder how long it might take, from person to person, to get started in something that has a higher difficulty ceiling in the beginning. Another example I would give, which is only loosely comparable to what I’ve given already, would be a video game, Team Fortress 2. I would say this game requires a substantial amount of time in the beginning before you have any idea of what’s going on. It’s not very intuitive, and the tutorials lack a lot of important information, although at this point, there’s a lot of information for you to learn the basics online, but the quality of that information will vary, just like guitar. You probably will have no choice but to put in a huge amount of time before even getting a hang of the basics, and even when you get a hang of the basics, you still will struggle, because once you are aware of just a small sliver of what can be done, you will end up intimidated, and the amount of time required to get there, and to maintain that level of playing, you likely would perceive as absurd.

The difference between these two things, in my eyes anyway, is the fact that one is going to be considered “fun” to a lot more people than the other. I would say more people would find TF2 fun, even in the early stages, than one would consider guitar “fun.” Sure, both might be fun, but I don’t think many would consider the beginning of guitar fun, but I’m certain that many consider, and still do consider, the beginning of playing TF2, or any difficult video game for that matter, fun. It was designed with that in mind, to be fun, for all types of players, but guitar was not.

This wraps back to time in reference to intelligence. The more intelligent person will be able to learn both guitar and TF2 faster than the person will less intelligence. Be that as it may, there are noticeably a variety of people in both of these unrelated groups. Many intelligent and unintelligent people play TF2, and many intelligent and unintelligent people play guitar. They might play at completely different levels, they may understand differing depths of the thing, but no matter what, if put in the time, they can get pretty close to each other, at least in most cases.

I actually don’t know how to quantify the speed in which certain individuals reach particular goals. Dumb or smart, I don’t know, and the best thing I know of is a test, which is variable, because if you suck at test-taking, it’s not going to measure you all that well. Even then, the test doesn’t always yield the same result, and the test I’m obviously talking about is an IQ test. If you work your brain all the time, it’ll get better at noticing patterns and logicisms, if you work those particular things. However, this is about the amount of time it would take to reach those points, where you would see that increase, or where you would begin to notice a difference between the abilities of different people. The best I have to give is some of my experience, and in it, things still aren’t entirely clear.

In high school, English class had a few different forms of writing improvement and critique. We had assignments where we had to learn how to proofread, assignments where the teacher would assess our work, tell us to make changes, and we would execute those changes, and many similar tasks. One in particular gave me many opportunities over the years to notice and compare changes in writing quality of whoever I was assessing. There are going to be a few problems with this, like being unable to follow one particular person and compare them to others over a period of time. The most time I’d have with most of these students would be, probably a year, sometimes two. Even in a year, there was also a limited number of times where we would have an assignment like this, maybe once or twice within a year, and whoever I’m paired up with will probably change. So really, what’s going on here is a comparison between myself, another student, or other students.

In my assessment now, I know that it would be totally flawed. How? Well, I’m looking back, with my memory, and I don’t distinctly remember the students perfectly, nor their work, nor mine. There’s no way for me to make a perfect comparison in the present, and even then, I couldn’t. There are other variables at play. Like, I have no idea how much time the student put into the writing assignment in comparison to myself, or anyone else, other than directly asking. The only person that I know how much time they’ve spent on the assignment is myself, but even then, I’m not even keeping track at that point. So, what then? What can I look back on?

Well, I can look back upon myself in a different fashion. I can vaguely see where there is improvement in the thing I’m doing. At one point, I thought I had recognized a pattern in myself, and that it made me different than others. It was that, I would be slow on the uptake, but once grasping the thing, I would speed up, and be able to do the thing quickly or reach a particular goal faster than others. Obviously, that was silly. I’m not faster than anyone else, but I was getting a little closer to something else. Now, I think that like myself, and everyone else, we’re slow in the beginning, but as we progress, we speed up, and after we speed up, we must slow down again, and we repeat this process.

For example, if I’m learning a new thing, it’ll be mostly foreign to me. Where I am in life, I can connect and associate many things together which enables me to progress through the thing more quickly than when I was a child, and this works the same way for other people too, I think. After enough time spent with the thing, my comfort level increases. What was once difficult is now easy, and I can work through it pretty fast. This is true, and this is reflective of reality, but what I failed to acknowledge in the past was that I would speed up in reference to a particular subsection of the thing, and when I moved onto the next, I would slow down. After speeding up, I had no choice but to slow down if I wanted to progress further, go another layer deeper, and then I would speed up again, to slow down again, and so forth. There are both people who are faster and slower on the uptake than I am, and those who are faster and slower during the part I’d consider speedy.

This pattern is recognizable and repeatable in the case of learning or doing a thing. There is point in this pattern where it changes for me. What would normally be considered a fast part is no longer fast, but very slow, and the slow part has become incredibly slow. This point is usually where I lack the experience of other associations, so I can’t tie things together as quickly, I have to learn and understand the things that need to be tied together; it’s a new thing to me. It’s like being a child, a first experience to a thing, but with a higher-complexity, because childhood is over. Believe it or not, children soak up information easily. They learn really fast, I mean, think about how fast a kid learns how to speak and listen using language, that’s really impressive for someone with no life experience. Unfortunately, we don’t really maintain those levels of absorption. We drift off, and new things to be absorbed arise, and we have to learn layers upon layers in specific things, and we have to worry about things, and we are tasked with doing things that take up our mental inventory. So, because I don’t have those levels of absorption, and I’m doing things that are, or feel, completely new and different, the time required in order to learn that thing or the specifics of that thing are going to require a lot of time.

With this information in mind, I can analyze myself and see where I struggle and where I do well, where I’m lacking and where I’m adequate, and yes, these things are only relative to each other. This means I know, to a limited extent, how long it takes, vaguely speaking, to reach a point or learn a thing. I don’t know the numbers, but I can feel when something is going to take a long time, or I can feel when something is going by quickly.

I wanted to obtain Cisco’s CCNA certification some period of time ago, I don’t even remember the date, and it really isn’t that important. I just wanted to get myself into IT, I mean with a career, and I thought this would help. It hasn’t, it basically doesn’t matter to anyone, but what I will say is that it taught me new information. I went through some online course, I used flashcards, and at first it was pretty easy. As it progressed, it became more difficult, the information was seemingly esoteric, yes it was building upon what was already known, but I wasn’t quite clearly building the associations at a fast enough rate for it to be as easy as it once was. I already had knowledge in technology, but I knew had basically nothing to do with networking, and even now, I’ve forgotten a large majority of what I learned in that course. The point is, new information was being presented, and because it was unconnected to what I’ve had settled in my brain for years, it required more focus and time in order to obtain a feeling of solidity with the information.

There’s another important aspect to this, and that was I wanted to complete the course and obtain the certification within a relatively short amount of time. If I had spent, let’s say, double the amount of time on learning the information, I wouldn’t have experienced nearly as much stress nor would have required the same level of focus. It would have felt very easy, because instead of pounding the new things into my head, they would gently float right on in, yes, I would have to try, but the extent of that trying would be less on a day-to-day basis. Time felt like it was passing quickly, but it felt like my retention of the information was holding together loosely, and by the fact that I don’t remember much of it, it goes to show how well that has worked out. However, I did pass the test, and I did alright on it, and that was that.

Instead of learning something, we can think about the time required to do something. Assuming I have the skills, I can do the thing I want to do, but how long it takes can vary. I have a severe case of “lack of experience” with most things but there are some things that I’ve spent enough time on that I can see the difference in the baseline and the ceiling, within myself over an extended period of time. The example I’m going to use is Team Fortress 2, over two accounts I have something over 3,000 hours, which is a lot of time to spend on something for me, probably a lot of time for anyone. What’s important to note is that not all of those hours were used equally. There were hours where I was practicing in MGE, hours where I was playing Casual, hours where I was playing dodgeball. The hours in which I was being pushed were the one’s that raised the baseline bar, and we need to look closer in on how long it would take for me to be pushed to reach my current baseline.

Once again, I don’t know the specific numbers, but the hours spent being pushed were the most important hours. Those hours we could consider the ones where I was moving slowly. They were the most difficult, the most grueling, because in them, I would have to learn and become someone who could play the game better than my previous self. Hours spent on jump maps, hours spent on MGE, hours spent on sniper vs. sniper maps, these events by themselves are not indicative of a push upwards. It is only with intense focus and intent that I actively improved during those periods of time. After the intense focus, the new information and physical ability would assimilate into my ability to play. If I tried that hard again, I could play like that again. If I continued doing that, the path in my brain would be used at a continually increasing rate, and so my brain would note that path as being important, and then it would be easier for that path to execute its commands. This obviously goes for all types of learning and training, but the results of it are pretty easy to see in a game like Team Fortress 2. After enough of that pushing, the paths were solidified to the point where I could mindlessly play the game in public matches and do relatively fine.

As time passes, those links only weaken, and so my ability to play only deteriorates, but this is fine with me. My baseline is still fine, and I can still boot-up the game and jump into a match and do well enough that it doesn’t require intense focus or intent to do well. I mentioned the speeding-up and slowing-down of learning new things. In how long it takes for someone to learn something, there reaches a point for many people, depending on the thing, where they become content and complacent to where they are. For me, I don’t have a need to play TF2 any better, I don’t care, and because of this, I’m not pushing, and so I lack that speeding up or slowing down feeling. If we step out of feeling and rationalize this, we can notice an important pattern, which is that people slow down on things they grow more experienced with. I could spend the next 1,000 hours in TF2, hopefully I don’t play that much but you get the idea, playing at the same level, and I would be in a state of neutrality. I don’t have the need for more, therefore, more is not provided. That’s time. That’s a period of slowness.

Along with it being a period of slowness, I also can and will learn new things along the road. I can learn about things, bits and pieces, which over the course of many hours, add up to being a significant amount of information. This can be contrasted with me focusing on and trying to obtain that same information, rather than just letting it float on in. This is an important factor in determining how quickly, or, how much time it will take for you to get somewhere. It’s the urgency to reach that destination you’ve set in your head, along with your natural aptitude, and your general interest to learn, understand, and execute the new information. Urgency requires an emotional response, intent and focus are intertwined with emotion, no one acts machine-like, and in the moments where it seems that way, they’ve either suppressed their emotions or used their emotions to set themselves off into a state of machine-action.

That emotionality will be another variable in deciding the rate in which you do or learn something. If you are neutral, then you’ll grow as long as you let new things in, but the rate at which you’ll grow will probably be slow. If you are eager, you’ll let a lot of the new information in, taking in all the new that you can, and looking for more new. If you are dissatisfied or in a state of rejection, you’ll probably hold onto very little new information, if any. In high school, there were a few different styles of student when it came to learning. Some really cared, and studied with all their effort, to achieve a specific letter grade. Some didn’t try at all and did poorly, while some tried and did well, and others did just fine. Between two people of the same intellectual aptitude, will the one who wants more be able learn and use information more quickly than the one who doesn’t care at all? Yes, of course!

Now we can see a few things about how long it takes for one person to reach a destination relative to others. They obviously have their nurture-type intellectualism, their ability to stay within or out of a comfort zone, and their own personal urgency to obtain more. There is one more part to this, and it plays into emotions once again. Urgency is a result of emotion, and that emotion is subjugated and related to only urgency. That emotion doesn’t inherently drift off into the thing that we’re learning, it is only used as fuel to learn the thing. We can have a want or need to learn something, but when actually going through the process of learning it, it might really suck, it might not feel all that great, but we can use our feelings of want to continue pushing through despite the negative or neutral response.

In people who are really good at things, they probably are generally intelligent, have a natural aptitude for the thing they want to learn, and have continued asking more out of that thing. The aspect of natural aptitude is the quality to note here. We could have two seemingly equal individuals, intellectually and emotionally, but one has a natural aptitude, while the other does not. The one who does will reach the same barrier as the one without that aptitude, but the rate in which they get there will be different. We might not know what natural aptitude is, we can attempt to think of it as some extra layer of nurture, but something to be noted is the emotional response the people with natural aptitude, or if you want to call it, talent, have in response to doing or learning the thing that seemingly comes easy.

They feel good! It feels good to feel like you’re good at something. It feels good to feel like you’re progressing. This alone acts as a force that moves that person forward. They don’t have to spend hours trying to remember specific things, they just do, it just happens, they let themselves naturally gravitate towards the new information, and they continued honing in on their ability to soak up information and feel good as a result of it. The person without talent has had no choice but to work the hard way, doing all that they can to get that information in, and they may have reasonably the same ability, but emotionally lacking the small wins the other person receives. Alongside this, those with natural talent also have an urgency to use information and apply it, thus retaining it, and then with the emotional response, it enhances their ability to remember and use the information. They needed the information for a reason, applied the information, and moved onto the next thing.

We all have our own natural talents, we probably gravitate towards them, we just do them because they’re the easiest path to take, and unless we deliberately try to get off that track, we won’t. Some people exist to build railway stations, some to demolish buildings, others to eat large quantities of food and post it online. These are all real talents, real ways we are above the average and receive something, emotionally, that tells us that we should keep at it. Talent is usually described in reference to the arts, but it obviously goes beyond those limits, and at one point or another, you’ll recognize all things are an art, which means all things have the potential for you to be naturally talented in doing them. Once we recognize this, we can take that emotional feeling we have in reference to the thing that comes easily, and place that into the thing we want to do. Enjoy the thing you want to learn, remember to enjoy it, if you aren’t enjoying it, there’s no point. The point where you set a goal for yourself, you set an expectation for yourself, and if you don’t reach that expectation, you’ll be upset, rather than enjoying the goodness present in the journey of doing the thing. It should feel good, and if you can’t make yourself feel good doing the thing, then that’s okay, because if you really want it, you’ll get there, but you might have to question if you should be doing something else instead.

The time required in order to obtain a certain level of understanding or ability to act ends up being some simple things. The mind and body you were born with, your emotional response to difficulty, your urgency to put in hard-work, your ability to stay out of a limbo state, and your talent or natural aptitude towards something. I used to really care about my ability to reach a certain state compared to my past self or different people, but now I don’t hold onto it so strongly. When I get there, I’ll get there, and I’m going to try my hardest, but I’m not going to set expectations that are baseless. I’m not going to leave my mind dry, begging for water, and not give it water. I’ll let it drink up, and I’ll enjoy it, and I’ll keep trying, and I’ll enjoy trying, rather than trying to enjoy the boundary outside of enjoyment.

Time can be used. Well, I mean what we do within time can be adjusted, altered, and configured in ways that enable us, the human, to do as much as we can within those limits. Maximizing time use can enable us to do as much as we can given within whatever timeframe we want to create, whether it be a day, week, or hour, we are able to choose and analyze what we will and can do. Of course, this is something to be careful with, because we could end up assigning ourselves a task that reasonably should take a week but we force ourselves to complete the task with a few days. We are consciously aware of the amount of time it will take, at least for most people, and we’re probably most people, so we should probably follow that amount. Things don’t always work out this way, but despite this, we can readjust and adapt ourselves with new knowledge, which can allow us to maximize time usage in a way that makes sense to ourselves, in our own individualistic ways.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to maximize or want to maximize time usage, but acknowledging your limits is necessary in doing this. For myself, in recognizing these limits, I get upset, because within a given time-frame I can only absorb or understand some amount of information, whatever that quantity is. Time is going to pass no matter how much information I absorb. Time is going to pass no matter how much I write. Time is going to pass no matter what action I commit to. I’ve come to realize that I have to grow content with my limits because there are limits that cannot surpassed. I want to find ways to surpass what I can surpass, but I also have to be willing to accept that my brain, the physical-meat-machine, can be pushed. It’s not like I knew my limits until I started pushing them, it took until they were being pushed until I felt the stress of my limitations.

Stress sucks. It’s like a burning heat on your back but you cannot physically or mentally escape it. Just kidding, you can mentally escape it… sometimes. Stress, despite being painful, and possibly impairing, also acts as a force to move you forward, or at least it does for me. The stress from whatever I’m doing, or thinking, assuming the thing I’m doing is to do with understanding in some fashion, makes me want to understand more of the thing. This is great, but there’s a catch. I have limits! We all have limits! If my brain is telling me, “Please no more master!” and I keep going, what do you think is going to happen? It’s going to be upset, and it’ll be upset after I’m done with whatever the task is, until it finally cools off. A machine can work hard, a machine can do a lot, and if you lube up the machine, it works even better, but if your machine has a max, you have to acknowledge that maximum.

Fortunately, I can avoid this, or minimize it. I don’t have to push myself to those points, no one does. For me, I don’t absorb more information while in those states, it brings no conceivable benefit other than feeling like I’m working really hard, but really, it’s just stubborn persistence. By getting caught up in these feelings, the stress, the need to get more inside of me, information that is, I forget why I was doing it in the first place. The reason being, I wanted to make the most of my time. Time is passing, and I’m not making the most out of it unless I’m trying my literal hardest. This isn’t untrue, but in what ways I’m trying my hardest will decide whether or not it was used well. Stressing myself and unreasonably pushing myself in one particular direction won’t give me the desired result, which will make me feel like I’m less, and those feelings will inhibit my ability to do the thing I want to do.

If I were a little nicer to myself, I could do whatever it is, within whatever timeframe, that actually makes sense for my capabilities, and then do other things that work on other parts of me. If I really want to maximize, I can do that, but maximize in ways that are intelligent. I appreciate hard work, I love people who work hard, and I want to work hard, but what’s the point of hard work if it isn’t done intelligently? I could work hard, really hard, mentally and physically, smashing some rocks together. That could be some really hard work, but what’s going to come of my rock smashing? The same as me introducing an unreasonable number of new words to my short-term memory. Literally nothing. Yeah, it’s hard work, and it hurts, but it doesn’t bring any result, and in the midst of working, I think it does, but it doesn’t.

This awareness that it doesn’t bring a result should be enough for most people to stop and then readjust, but for me, it has not been. Stubbornness, like already mentioned, has enabled me to be upset with myself for smashing the rocks together and not giving me the wanted result. It was not the expected result, the result I wanted. After enough time has passed, I finally realized enough was enough. I had to accept it would take time to internalize information at the rate that I do. It has and does feel upsetting, that I can’t be anymore than I am, at the speed of which I want to absorb information, that is. The only way I can be more than me is to no longer be me, which comes as a result of time passing, and as long as I continue what I’m doing, with as much effort as I can put into the things I’m doing, then I’m doing and maximizing my time as much as I literally can.

Emotionally speaking, I had to realize that I can only be so much. I can only be so intelligent. I can only understand so much within a timeframe. I can only remember so much within a timeframe. It hurts to feel like you couldn’t be what you wanted to be, or attain what you wanted however quickly, but by losing sight of this, I forgot the enjoyment that comes with doing the thing. For a lack of a better term, I had become greedy. Greedy not for money, but for information, for whatever reasons, and my own ability to reproduce that information. You might have heard that greed is the root of all evil, and usually its within the context of money, but being greedy in this circumstance was no better. I wanted more and more, but more wasn’t actually giving me what I needed. Instead, it was the fact that I was being distracted at all, that was giving me something. I can still be distracted, and enjoy the learning, and enjoy the understanding, but without the greed to get more out of what it is. If I can only remember things at a particular limit, I should always push to that limit, and overextending can be okay, but in that overextension, I should be aware that I’m not going to receive results for what I did for all that came after the passing of that line.

Recognizing your own abilities can enable you to use them to their maximum and not push past certain points of reasonability. We all have our own limits, and you should recognize what that limit is, and unfortunately, the only way to find that limit is to go past it. No one else knows you, only you do, only you know yourself. Be able to recognize when you do pass that limit, and be okay with slowing down, until you reset again, and can go back to getting right up against that limit, and be okay with that limit, whatever it is. There are people who can learn a lot faster and slower than me. I’m not the faster people, nor am I the slower people. I am me, and growing content with this, with what you are, with what you can do, is the only way to maximize your time. Discontent inhibits focus, a lack of focus disables your ability to act, and if you can’t act, it seemingly becomes pointless to do what you want.

Aside from all the emotionality revolved around maximizing time, there is also systematically creating a system in which things are done. What I have heard, and what I use, are sets of time-blocks. I assign myself a thing to do within a specific time-block, and then I do it within that block. Once that block has finished, I either move onto the next block or rest, with breaks in-between for literally resting and eating. In my world, this works for the most part. I’d say many people could do something similar, and it’ll work just fine, but I also allow for fluidity when it makes sense to do so.

As said already, emotions impact my ability to do things. I think it goes that way for everyone, but some actions require less emotions or no emotion, and thus, emotion can be muted or altered in order to do whatever that thing is. While not my focus, where I’m going with this, is that I’ve had my emotions on for a while now, consistently, and I’ve found that I can’t always systematically do the thing within the time-block. Maybe a machine could, and sometimes I am a machine, but not always, and if I want to maximize my time, being frustrated over this will stop me from maximizing it; it’ll minimize it. I think most people have emotions, and because we have emotions, we have fluidity in which we do things. I might have a four-hour time-block to write, but I end up feeling like I can’t write after two hours. Do I sit there trying to write, without words coming out, or do I move onto something else I can do? This depends on what you want to do, what you can do, and how you think.

For me, I have times where I both will sit there trying to write and times where I will acknowledge my inability to write and I’ll shift my focus onto something I can handle. It helps to sit there, and just try, try with everything I can, because after an hour of sitting there, feeling like I can’t get a single word out, many thousands of words might rush out, and it took time in order to find the words. If I hadn’t sat there, trying to find words, any words, I wouldn’t have written anything more than what had already been written. Wait, how would I have known to sit there and wait for the words to come? It’s impossible, I think. If the words want to come, they will, if not, they won’t, and there comes acceptance with this. Even if no words come, it can be an opportunity to think about things I hadn’t thought about, refreshing my mind on what I want to do, where I want to go, and why. I can think about the ideas that I’ve pushed off, and if there are no ideas, I can think about what it would take to produce ideas which would enable me to write. I can maintain that time-block and still do things related to and within the confines of whatever the thing is.

Just as that can be the case, I could also move onto something else. If I can’t write, and I really want to write, but nothing comes out, I can do things I know which will enable my ability to write. In this case, I could read. For me, reading is a sort of fuel which enables me to digest and spit out more words. It enables me to understand and learn new ideas, alter my own ideas, disagree with ideas, and many more things. It’s a good fuel, and it works, and I know it works, and its results are reproducible. I could sit around trying to write or I could feed myself with some literature which would, at some point or another, be enough to set me off again on my word splattering.

Both of these methods work just fine for me. They might for you too, but within whatever thing it is. If you want to do something, and you can’t do it, but you can do something else related, that can help invigorate and enable you to do the thing you want to do. There will always times where you can’t do the thing you want to. Whether it be because of the condition you’re in, the people you’re with, or your mind’s own dryness, there will be something for you to do, within that silly noggin, that can get you closer to whatever the thing is you want. I am content with the awareness that sometimes I have to stop doing something and instead to move onto something else. It could be a supporting factor which, while not directly the thing I want to do, helps me get closer to the thing I want to do, and most importantly, distracts me from the fact that I’m feeling upset.

Whether you want strict time-blocks or systems which are more fluid, as long as you’re using your time intelligently, it’ll probably be okay. Analyze why and how someone has a system of time usage, see if it would fit your needs, and if it does, use it, if it doesn’t, don’t, and feel free to try creating or finding different systems. Once there, test the system, see if it works, and if it does, that’s awesome! Keep using it, but don’t forget to question if the system could be better, or if you could make it better. Think about what parts of it work well, and which ones don’t, and keep thinking about it. Be willing to open up to more systems of time usage as well.

Something to note, that’s of very high importance, is the fact that you are the one deciding what and when time is considered maximally used. Your expectation for yourself to do and use time in whatever fashion you design or use is all up to you in the end. There’s no one that could tell you that you’ve used time inappropriately, or to the best of your ability. There might be some who try, but remember to keep your expectations aligned with yourself. You are the one who knows you best, and this means you should be realistic and willing to adapt to yourself. Expectations are fine if the expectations are rationally created in reference to yourself. Comparing yourself to others, to what they can complete within a given time-frame, is silly, because you aren’t them, you’re you, and so what you can do has the potential to be the same, more, or less, than them.

Maximizing time is a big deal to me. I want to use time in the best ways possible, but I also have to be reasonable with myself. What I mean is that, I can use time maximally but also be open to using time in an ineffective manner. There are periods where we crawl, walk, run, and rest, and I’d consider the moments where I’m trying to maximize time as periods in time in which I am not resting. The reality is, we need rest, and the forms in which rest appears extend beyond merely sleeping.

You might use up all your fuel. Whether it be exercising, studying, practicing, maybe all of these, parts of these, and all the possible variability within any of those things. We can’t always be perfect machines that commit to actions. Actions require steady amounts of energy, and if you want to obtain the most out of any action, a prerequisite will be focus, which will require even further amounts of energy. At one point or another, you’ll run out of energy; you’ll require a period of re-fueling. When you require a moment of rest, as in, fuel, it will differ from person to person. There’s no need to compare to anyone else, just listen to your mind and body when this needs to happen. Rest, a requirement for life, is unavoidable, and rest is generally categorized as sleeping, napping, and other equivalents.

When we sleep, we aren’t worried about using our time effectively. We’re asleep! It’s the period of time when we are resting, and so we do, and hopefully, after this sleep, the end result is a feeling of recovery. Unfortunately, we don’t always feel recovered from slumber, and sometimes we feel even worse after sleeping. Even so, we have to deal with the cards we’ve dealt. If we slept great, and we ate great, and we feel great, then we can keep on. If we slept great, and we ate poorly, but we feel great, then great! It comes down to how you feel and that is dependent on the things that have happened to you and what you have chosen, alongside your reactions to the things outside of your control. If you can sleep poorly, eat poorly, and feel fine, then maximize your time, then that’s fine, do what you feel is best.

Many of us cannot always minimize our negative reactions to things that feel like they’ve had a negative impact on our ability to maximize our time. There will be times when the sleep feels as if it was so poor that you shouldn’t have slept at all, and times when the food mentally slows you down, rather than rejuvenates you. It is what it is, and if we can’t get ourselves to being okay with these things, if we can’t circle around them, avoid them, or be content with them, there are things that we can do. There are always things to be done, even when in such terrible states of being.

I’d like to imagine things like shows, video games, and playing to be within the realm of things that most do not consider necessitating the maximalization of time usage. When we play a video game, we aren’t trying to play as much of that video game as we can, we’re just playing the video game, and it’s whatever. We’re enjoying it, and we can enjoy it, and it doesn’t require a higher-level amount of effort. I’m speaking for myself here, some might be trying to playing video games to their fullest, and that’s fine, but you can use whatever you consider easy to do that’s still enjoyable as a replacement for video games. The idea is, if I can’t do the things that I consider most important, the things I want to use my time on the most, then I have to drift away from the anguish of my inability to maximize time and instead do something that might bring enjoyment. For me, playing video games is not a productive or meaningful task in the sense that it doesn’t bring me closer to anything. Distractions are a gradient in my mind, and I’ve categorized the distractions to have meaning to be ones I want to maximize my time with, while ones that lack meaning, I’ll minimize my time with.

And so, in my imperfections, I can drift away to the things I would normally keep minimal in order to recover, in a sense. If I have tried the things that have worked in the past, and they fail to work in the present, the next step further is to be content with how things are and then work with what I have. It can really hurt sometimes, there will be times where you want to do a thing so badly but you are held back in some way, but you have to be okay with it, otherwise you’ll be not okay and idle.

There is another layer to this. In my mind, we do all kinds of consumption. It’s food, but for the mind, and we can shift what food is going to impact us more or less. There is an active choice here, and there are limitations, like trying to lessen the impact of a thing you’re perceiving but you continually expose yourself to the thing, thus perceiving it often, thus it is inevitably going to be larger part of you than something that passes you by. In being able to choose what food we eat, to a limited extent, we can also satiate parts of our minds that we might have been neglecting, or it might just feel good, which ends up being enough. For me, reading acts a mental food. Sometimes reading easy or fun literature will give me what I need, at other times, it could be something more abstract, and if I’m feeling awful, it’ll probably be the former type. I’m content with this, and I think it’s important to explore what things might work for you in this way.

It’s fun, it’s playing, and there’s no stress on me to read a certain number of pages, or to complete a certain number of chapters; I’m just getting lost, and by getting lost, I can forget the anguish. While forgetting the anguish, I can embrace a new type of food for my mind, a food it hasn’t seen before, and that food can be added to my mental energy, my mana, my water, or however you want to think about it, and by eating, I can also use that energy. Of course, there are moments where I want to focus, to get as much as I literally can out of the words I’m reading. The reality is, those are moments when I’m maximizing time, if I’m not mentally in a position to focus like that, then I won’t, and I have to be content with that, and I think that growing content with that fact can enable you to be okay with how things are.

For me, it’s a matter of being with or without intent. The reality is that there will be times where both are necessary, and the rejection of one will only harm the other. Both are necessary, and being okay with both, being okay with your shortcomings, being okay with who you are, where you are, and at what point you are, will enable you to maximize your time usage. Really, it won’t even feel like time is being minimized. It’ll just be time, and you’ll be in it, and it won’t hurt nearly as much as it used to, or at least that would be my hope. All systems are fluid, and this is no exception. It’s always a work-in-progress, when you feel like you have it perfect, check it again, and once you’re done checking and you feel like it’s good, check it again.

Time is passing. Always. No matter what we do, no matter what we think, no matter how we act, time is in a state of moving forward. Well, I think that’s how it might work, it’s not like I can verify this, but I can admit that I have my experiences. These tell me logically that time moves forward, and I also feel time moving forward. Whether it is because I know more than what I knew a week ago, or because I notice my eye-bags darkening, or more wrinkles on my face, I can visually see the alteration of things. The transformation or alteration of one state into the next. With the ability to perceive change, I can, within certain timeframes, see things come and go, things grow and die, and the distance between that beginning and ending can be used as a measure of time. For us, at least most of us I think, we use the rotation of the Earth, it ends up being 24 hours in a day, and that is the day. The day is always 24 hours. Not to say it will always be 24 hours, nor that it was always 24 hours, but now, it is.

This isn’t really a big deal, time passes, things change, we change, so what? Well, the real kicker is that we die. In death, we cannot do, but in life, we can. To me, anyway, this means I want to maximize the amount of “doing” in order to maximize my experience of life, because as far as I understand, I won’t have another chance. I have found myself attempting to maximize this to the fullest, using everything I have to make specific things stretch as long as possible and to absorb as much of it, whatever it is, and hold onto that, for whatever purposes I’ve come up with. Doing this, day-after-day, without a break, besides literally sleeping, believe it or not, will cause a strain. Despite all that I’ve tried, I’m not a machine, I am a human, and the reality of my biology enforces that rest must be taken, and this rest is beyond merely sleeping.

Despite my maximizations, no matter how hard I try, unless I decide for myself it is enough, whatever it is, then I will feel upset and dissatisfied with whatever result my day ends with. This means I can try my hardest, but no matter how little or how much I’ve done, I have to be okay with what has been done. How hard I try is variable, because I can’t try my hardest every single day in the same amount. Once again, I’m not a machine, so I have to be okay with my shortcomings, my weaknesses, my mental-fatuousness, and whatever else. Time will pass, no matter what, and in all the time I have, I can make the most out of it, but why would I need to? Why would I be so upset about the inevitability that time will pass? Why would anyone else not be okay with that?

This obsession to make the most out of time is rooted in comparing myself to others. This ended up being pretty silly, especially as I would be comparing relative to those who had not experienced all I had, nor had the same genes, and, well, that’s because they aren’t me. Not only that, this comparing would go on even when we’re at completely different developmental stages, who knew that someone ten years your senior would have more wisdom and knowledge than you do. I wanted to be more, I wanted to reach those points in less time than them, I wanted to be, well, more than them, in less time. I don’t think this is a terrible thing to want. That’s what knowledge is about, or teaching, or something like that. We have the idea, we break it down for the next generation, so they can systematically learn up until the newest point, they don’t have to figure everything out for themselves, they can just use and learn from those who already experienced and learned the thing. This happens, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take time to get to the most recent point in knowledge, nor does it mean I can push myself beyond my own capabilities, the mental ones, which I can’t even accurately measure. I want to measure them, I want to know my worth down to the numerical value, but that’s not going to happen, and I have to be okay with that, because if I’m not, I’m always going to be upset, and I’m always going to be agonizing about how much time I need to spend on things.

Time doesn’t care how fast you learn, nor how you spend it, and not even if you count it. It moves perpetually forward, at least in our perception, so even after all the agonizing, it won’t change its ways. Knowing this, why agonize? What good would that bring? Maybe if the agony led to time slowing down, then it might make sense, but it doesn’t, things don’t change. We intellectually know that time will always move forward, and we see it with our bodies, our withering skins tell no lies. If something is inevitable, greet it with open arms, running away from it will only tire you out. Let it carry you, rather than trying to outrun it, because you will get tired, and it will catch up.

Being upset at the inevitability of time passing could also be the result of discontentment in the present. This is what I’ve described thus far, with the comparing, with my lack of mental absorption, and whatever else that would make me less than imaginary expectations that have no grounds. If I were content with the present, I wouldn’t be thinking about what I could be, what I need to be, how I’m going to get there, and so on, I would already be in a state of thinking that I’m where I need to be. What I didn’t realize was that this is a choice.

No one has to think they’re not enough in the present. I did this because of several reasons, some self-imposed, others external, and these intermingled, making it difficult to find each reason selectively and break it down so it would leave me alone. One of the core reasons I acted in belief that I was not enough was because I thought it could be used as a catalyst to make me grasp for more. In grasping for more, in obtaining more, in becoming more, I could be someone else, and that’s what I’ve always wanted. The reality being that, yes, I am someone else, in a sense, but I am still me, too. I might know more, I might act differently, I might have more, but it’s still me. I’m still me, no matter how much I can know, or how much money I have, or many friends I have, or whatever it is. This was a terrible fact that acted as friction against me whenever I wanted be okay, being okay was an impossibility as long as I was me, and I genuinely thought this way.

Maybe it helped a little as a catalyst, but it did more damage, and it make me obsessed with time, and no matter how much I would try, I would always be me. Instead, the reality was, I had to be okay with me, and with this, I can move my eyes elsewhere, no longer must they count every grain of sand. There is a fear when we experience change, even internal change, or internal systems. A feeling grows that as a result of change, we would lose everything, or that things won’t work correctly, but the reality is, if that really happens, old systems can be brought back, nothing has to stay the same. In this awareness, I could move on from self-hatred and focus on the fact I am me, and being me is something that is okay. I can be content with the urge to learn and understand things, and those things will take time, but that’s okay, because I have the time. If I didn’t have the time, I would be dead, and I’m not dead, not yet.

The fact that time is passing might be scary in-of-itself. Aging, breaking-down, losing what was, and eventually death, are all unavoidable. These are all closely related, it’s just the stages in which the thing experiences the completion of the cycle. We live, so we must die, it’s part of the game, but we don’t flip a switch from life to death, at least not in our perspectives. We have to grow, and even during this stage, we’re aging, and then we start breaking-down, and after enough of that, we reach point until we cannot break down anymore, and so we die. This doesn’t even account for all the things that can happen in this life. A heart-attack? Hit by a vehicle? Poison? Cancer? Even if we try our best to maximize our lives, the unpredictable can snatch our efforts straight from our hands.

Growing content with aging and death is not an easy process. Watching our loved ones die, our pets die, honestly, even seeing our plants die is upsetting. Not to say all of these are equal in their ability to upset me, but the idea is, the ending is upsetting. We weren’t thinking about the ending of any of these things because we weren’t at the end, until they were, and when they were, it was over. Confronted with this, we might believe that focusing on the ending will allow us to avoid that pain of ending again, if we’re always aware of ending, always thinking of death, cognizant of every wrinkle, then perhaps, it won’t hurt like it once did before.

A defense mechanism against pain? I think so. Beginnings and endings, both are required, and if we get so upset at one side, perhaps we haven’t recognized or appreciated the beauty enough in the other. Instead of focusing on what has left us, what no longer can be, we can appreciate what can be now, and sometimes, with moderation, we can look back on what once was, and appreciate what that was too. The past, the present, and the future, all with their own aspects to love. We could focus on all their dirty parts, all their ugly parts, or we could not. In the same vein, we could look at the beauty and the ugliness as what they are, no longer holding onto them for dear life, as if that helped anything.

Time is passing right now, and that’s okay. I’m okay, and you’re okay. Time will keep on passing, the good will pass, the bad will pass, and all that lies in-between. The sand might fall between our fingers, but knowing that no matter how much grip we use, we won’t be able to hold onto any grains, perhaps we should stop trying to hold onto each grain so dearly.

Our perceptions of time change quite often, but we usually don’t realize it. Time is not a thing we experience the same, all the time, in the same exact way. It, like many things, actually can feel a lot more fluid than we realize. We can think of time speeding up or slowing down, relative to whatever our baseline of experience is. How we go about perceiving time in a way different than from our baseline selves can differ from person to person. For myself, I find that time speeds up in times of utter and complete focus, where I’m lost in whatever the thing I’m doing. On the opposite end, time slows down when I am doing something I don’t want to do and then not focusing on that, and I find it slows down when I focus on each second, every moment, focusing on feeling the distance between each motion.

To start off, I’ll focus on speeding up time. My perception of time is altered in a way that I forget that I’m actually experiencing time, and because I’ve forgotten it, and have become so completely absorbed in whatever it is I’m doing, I forget that time is passing. I would consider this a good feeling too. I love being totally lost in whatever it is I’m doing, rather than being focused on completing something by a certain time, or feeling that I have very little time to complete the things I want to do. I’m lost in whatever the thing is, and that means I’m not worrying.

It feels like time is speeding up because the distance between when I last thought about time and when I remember that time exists is greater than my baseline. This is why many state that time flies when you’re having fun. When you’re having fun, you’re focused on fun, not time, not how much time you have left to have fun, nor how much time you’ve spent having fun. Instead, it is the fun that has occupied your mind, and that is all there is. If you were having fun and then thought about time, thought about what you have to do later, what you have to do tomorrow, going on-and-on about all the things relating to time, that would probably take away from the fun you’re having, or so I believe it would for me. Not focusing on time feels liberating, and liberation means that time loses its impact on you, until you are once again shackled by the thoughts of time.

Something that I’ve had a lot of fun in has been Team Fortress 2. This is true for the present and the past, but it hasn’t always been the same amount of fun. Sometimes I don’t care for video games at all, while at other times, I’m very content with playing. Supposing this is a time that is fun, and I want to play, even within that, there can variability in how I perceive time. A match can be really fun, we’re winning, both teams are balanced, I’m not dying often, and it feels like I’m having a meaningful impact on the match. I won’t know or realize how time is passing as I’m playing, as I am so totally lost in the video game that I have forgotten about time. On the other hand, even if I really want to play, I might be having a bad day. The matches I get in suck, I can’t play well, my team sucks, and it feels like each match is dragging on forever. I’ll be concerned with how much time is passing, especially considering the fact I’ll probably be seeing a countdown from each death, making it feel like time is moving even slower than usual. This applies to something I’d consider fun, and how when it isn’t fun, how I perceive time also changes in direct correlation to having fun or a lack there-of. There are obviously things that I don’t consider fun but time passes very quickly when focused on them.

I would say something like, practicing scales, is something that isn’t fun. Ascending and descending a scale is not fun. Playing guitar might be fun, but that specific thing is not fun. However, I can be focused on it, and it is because of that, the focus, that time passes quickly. If I’m not focused on practicing my scales, then time won’t pass all that quickly, but if I am, it will, despite being something I wouldn’t consider fun.

This plays into something deeper. It is the fact that by doing something with immense focus, we lose track of time. With focus, we lose sight of the mental notes telling us what to do later, what to eat, what has to be done, and at what time, and instead we become enraptured by whatever it is we’re doing. The pattern that has been recognized in society has been that we can focus more easily on things that are fun or interesting. If we looked a little deeper, it is the focus that changes our perception of time, not the thing that we are occupied with. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, what matters is that we are lost in it. The only exception I would give to this would be focusing on time itself, which would alter our perception of time to make it feel slower, rather than faster.

Instead of focusing on doing something, becoming a part of something, being lost in something, we can focus on time in specific. By counting each second, each minute, each hour, we can then mentally track how long that actually is. Sure, we still are perceiving it, but I would say this is one of the ways that we can perceive time in one the most accurate ways. We know exactly how long a second is, and how many seconds it takes to reach a minute, but to know this intellectually and then to feel it are two different things. With the intense focus, we feel it, and it becomes a part of us. I think evidence of this would be an example set in school.

I think for many, school was awful, exhausting, and it felt like it sucked out every bit of your soul from you, and on top of that, it did it for hours, five days of the week. While in this state of being in an awful place and feeling awful, we’re thinking about how it would be not to feel awful, which would then be the moment we’re allowed to leave the failing institution. That of course, we would then measure by time. Watching the clock, checking our phones, watches, or whatever, to see how much time has passed, how much more time has to pass, and how we’re going to deal with that. By focusing on time, we felt like time was moving slower, and then we emotionally connected our misery to school, and then connected that to the slowness of time. It wasn’t misery that made time slow, nor was it the fact that school sucked, but instead, the fact we focused on time, instead of something else.

I think proof of this can be described in much of my experience in disassociation. I’ve spent a lot of time in places where I didn’t want to be, and I had to figure out how to make this acceptable, so that I wouldn’t harm myself or others. The method I found to work very well, ended up being disassociation. Instead of being where I was, I wouldn’t focus on that, and I wouldn’t focus on time, I would focus on nothing. By holding intense focus on nothing, and automatically functioning in however I had to, and then popping back into reality, when necessary, I could make it through the day. What’s important to note is how I perceived time, which is to say, I didn’t perceive it much at all, it moved exceedingly quick, which is what I wanted. Being in what I would consider a miserable state, I could minimize my misery by minimizing myself, which wouldn’t be concerned with time, and thus, time wouldn’t be concerned with me, and the days would fly by. I did this at home, in workplaces, and at school.

I’m sure there are more ways to alter how you perceive time, but these there are some ways that have worked for me. Whether I was having fun, not having fun, being miserable, or disassociating, or maybe a mix of these, I have been able to perceive time as moving faster or slower. I hope to find new ways to change how I alter my perception of time, as I often want to maximize particular moments, but it’s hard to do so if I must also focus on the moment itself. You can’t always have everything, I suppose.

Things will take time, but you won’t always be in a state of believing this. This has been a constant battle for me, and it is because I have not been okay with things taking time, that I have caused myself so much stress and confusion. I am finally inching closer to being okay with things taking time, and I’ll talk about how I’m getting closer to that, and then I’ll describe much of what happens when you aren’t okay with things taking time, although as you probably guessed, it has to do with burning out.

I have been walking towards the feeling that it’s okay that things take time. What this means depends on whatever I’m doing. Whether I’m writing something of a larger scale, or I’m learning something, or anything that I’m working towards that is not immediate. I would like to imagine I have patience, but this quality is mostly applied to things outside of my control. What I believe to be in control are things like my ability to learn and my ability to create. These things, while I have some amount of influence, I do not have full control over. It hurts to admit that, and I want that full control, but I have to accept that it isn’t meant to be, and I have to work with what I do have.

The first step is that acknowledgement, that willingness to accept that things are the way they are, and I’ve found this out by verifying that it couldn’t be another way. Thinking that I could get by without contentment with things taking time, I thought perhaps I could use it as a force to push beyond my present-self, which is silly. It’s okay to yearn for more, to want to be more, but this requires some healthy checks. A verification that you aren’t pushing yourself in a way that’s going to harm you in either the short-term or the long-term. Guess who didn’t do any checks?

Instead, I now try to be more balanced and content with how things are. If I’m focused on one specific thing, then I have to be okay with that, and I recognize a pattern, this ebb and flow in interests, so while I could worry about not doing things, I know that the interest will arise again. I also know that others will go away temporarily, and I have to be okay with that as well. I didn’t want to accept this as reality, so I would try forcing many things at once onto myself, and maybe it worked for a while, but in the end, I was not okay with my progression in many of those things. So, what happens when you aren’t okay with things taking time?

In this case, I experienced burn-out. I lost the ability to do things, and that was terrible. I felt like my old depressed self, unable to do anything, and that feeling, I wish upon no one. No being should have experience what it feels like to lose the will to live. At the bare minimum, while in that state, I couldn’t force myself to do things like before. Due to this, it brought me back to a place where I had nothing, and it was reminder of what it feels like to be like that. As much as I wish I had gone without the experience, it refreshed my memory of I had been not so long ago, and with that, I slowly started to heal.

To be able to do anything is enough, and the fact that I’m doing anything, I am then pleased with myself. I refuse to agonize over my inability to be more than what I am, and I refuse to be upset that I’m unable to do everything in my mental hierarchy. I am doing all that I can, and maybe I’m not doing the most I physically can handle, but so what? Must I act in that way? I already know what it leads to, that burnt-out feeling, and I know I don’t want that again.

Short and sweet, straight to the point. You have to be okay with things taking time. If you don’t, you will end up harming yourself. With such harm, you will do more damage and slow yourself down more than if you had taken a slower pace in the first place. Trust your feelings, and work with your mind to combine these two ideas to make decisions that are logical yet appealing. I was only interested in the logical mind, and despite it being in the form of the external world, and I really was doing things, it didn’t matter, because what I had to focus on was my heart, which I ignored.

What I’ve been spending my time on has been variable throughout the last few years. I’ll go through some of the things I’ve spent most of my time on, but I won’t get into every little thing I’ve ever done and spent time on. Additionally, what I’ve spent my time on recently has varied considerably, and so that is also changing. I also have identified an ebb and flow, so some things have taken priority, the majority of my time, and then after a month or two, sometimes more, sometimes less, they have floated back down into the ocean of my mind. Based on all these things, I also have some expectations of what I might spend my time on in the future, but I can’t be fully certain on what the future brings.

Most of my teenage years were exemplified by playing video games, watching media, internet browsing, and texting people. These were the things I had chosen to spend my time on, because obviously, just like now, I have things that I don’t have that much choice in, and during those years, it was school. In school, I participated in doing some of these things during class, but they were limited. I could be upset over the fact I wasted so much time like this, but I know why I acted in such a way, and the past is over, so being upset over it changes nothing.

The video games I would play were Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, Terraria, some rhythm games, Roblox, and a few others that I spent a few hours in but not many. I think these games are fine now, but I don’t feel the urge to play any of them besides TF2, which even then, is awfully infrequent. Video games are okay, and I have nothing against them, but I don’t think they were a media that worked well for me.

The types of media I would watch come down to two main types: anime and YouTube. The anime would vary greatly, I find it hard to even name all that I watched, there were just so many. Some were definitely good, but others I don’t think really mattered. Even some that I remember bits and pieces of, like Initial D, I wouldn’t want to rewatch nor would I suggest anyone watch it. Some were true time wasters, like One Piece, and the benefit from watching that? What I did learn? What is the ongoing moral of the story? I wish I knew! Obviously, there were good anime, like Death Note, good enough for me to rewatch them. On the other side, I watched a lot of YouTube. This varied greatly as well, and honestly, I find this even harder to deduce what I watched. I know I watched a lot of junk, but there were some gems in there, I’m sure, but to remember names? It’s rough, but I have thankfully moved on from this, most of the time, anyway.

What’s funny is that with the internet browsing, I also struggle to remember what I spent so much time looking at. What did I stare at? I have no clue. It definitely had some amount of doom-scrolling, I had social medias at one point or another, and I know I would stare at garbage, but to remember the garbage in specific, I cannot recall. I also did some website browsing, jumping from site to site, maybe reading forums, especially the Steam Forums, and these I can vaguely recall. Occasionally now I will open the Steam Forums on automatic, realize no one has any meaningful to say or they’re trolling, then I close it, because I’d rather not read garbage.

I generally would text people on Discord. We could be talking about various things, but the things being talked about would usually come back to whatever I was consuming then. I would talk about a video game with other people if I were playing that game. If something new came out, I’d talk about that. If there was technology that had caught my interest then, I would talk about that. My chats lacked depth for the most part, but here and there I would have a real conversation, but that was the minority of the time. I would join servers, trying to chat with people, and sometimes it would work, at other times, I left and tried a different one, hoping to find some people to talk about whatever thing had caught my interest in the moment.

The present is generally noted by reading, writing, video creation, and learning. There are some other things that belong to the ebb and flow category, like music and drawing. These have a tendency to come and go more than something like writing, why this is, I don’t know. I think it has to do with incompetence, at least relative to my ability to write. As the cycle continues, I inevitably will improve at my ability to do those two things, and so I imagine I will actively have them part of a daily regimen, at some point, without having them go away at certain times.

What I read hugely varies. Sometimes I want a fun story, sometimes I want to be overloaded with information, sometimes I want a mix of both. I’ve spent some time trying to read philosophy in the past, and sometimes in the present I will give a book a try, but I don’t care for it as much as I used to. I find that I think in a pragmatic way, and philosophy, in many cases, does not help with my ability to create or do things. I like science fiction for the most part, but I can find fantasy fun as well. I usually don’t mentally note the genre of whatever I’m reading, I will instead have someone or something inform me of the content withheld in a book, I will save the book, then I will add it to my collection of what needs to be read. At one point or another, I’ll just feel out what needs to be read. Basically, I’m partially using intention, partially not. The intention is when I save the book and get it ready to be read, but then I usually don’t start reading then and there. It sits for a while, and then when I finish a book, I get ready to read another one, which could be anything that I’ve saved, so whatever feels right, I’ll read.

The writing has been mostly focused on my thoughts, ideas, and feelings. The form I’ve written these in has been direct, I haven’t been writing stories, nor have I been writing poetry. Instead, I’ve opted for something that clearly gets to the point, and not only that, something that is presentable to an audience. This plays into the video creation. I’ve been writing with the intention of sharing it with an audience, and the things I’ve been writing have been what I would want to share with other people. It’s pretty clear what I have been writing, all you have to do is look at what I’ve posted so far. Sure, there are things I have not shared, but they are pretty old and I wouldn’t want to share them. This method has also worked very well, I feel like I’ve been able to get out a lot of feelings and ideas with limited strain.

The learning, while consistently trying to learn, has been all over the place. Some things have stuck around, and some things I need to work at on a consistent basis in order for the information to become a part of me. Things I’ve been learning have been withheld in textbooks, talking videos, prerecorded instruction videos, and those types of things. The ones that I don’t consistently work towards are ones on using Photoshop, Premiere, and other software to make my content better. At times, I am very focused on them, then they dissipate away. Japanese is something that I have to consistently work towards, and by not practicing or thinking about it for a day or two, I find it hard to get back into it, and so I’m, probably when this is shared, setting up a schedule that forces me to practice daily. The learning generally comes down to improving on what I already know or learning about what might interest me. There are times where I learn things unexpectedly, and that’s fine too, but I already did that by doing something that was setting me up to learn, like reading a book.

Based on the past and the present, I can create some expectations for what I would want to spend my time on in the future. Many of these things are going to maintain the same, like what I’ve presented for what I do in the moment, like write or read, but I also want to tap into some of the specifics of that.

I want to learn what I have described here, but I also have things I want to learn that will help me write something on a larger scale. I have some ideas, which I will not share here, despite that being what I usually do, but I want to learn certain things in order to execute those ideas. Some are already known, like my interest in drawing, but I would have to grow an actual ability to draw well. I also want to learn more skills that would help me in my professional life.

I want to continue the video creation, but I want to hopefully make something a bit more interesting. I think this is a good first step. Something of a larger scale, and then systematically breaking it down into different parts. I think that’s ideal and it works well, but I also want to work on making things on the smaller side, but making them exceptionally well. These things will take time, but it is among my expectations for the future.

I’m also willing to acknowledge and accept that I might do things completely unexpected to me now. I’m perfectly content with that and I will allow for that to happen it wants to. If my interests lead me down a path, and it is a path that causes me no harm, then I will go down it. This could mean I do nothing that I expect, or I might do all that I expect, I’m unsure, but despite being unsure, I have a contentment that things will work out fine.

How I have chosen to expend my time in the past is very different from how I choose to expend my time now. From playing video games and watching videos to reading and writing, to the future possibly bringing even more changes and differences. I am merely hopeful that if changes occur, they will be positive ones, and that I will continue to learn and grow, and as long as that happens, I’m content with whatever the little details might be.

As we have progressed technologically, there has been a clear and distinct pattern, which is that with technological growth, we spend less time on whatever technology has been implemented to do the thing that we once did. For the most part, it can be summarized as automation, even in the forms we wouldn’t normally assign such a label, like on a computer. With this in mind, we can ask ourselves, how might we create a future that will enable us to have more time? What could cause us to have less time? Are there things that won’t change the amount of time it takes to produce? Well, I’ll try to answer those questions to the best of my ability.

With the industrial revolution, we no longer had to use our hands, we could assign a machine to do the same task, and eventually, it became so good at that task that it was wiser to use a machine instead of a man. Even in the cases that we do use our hands, like the assembly like, we often use tools, and often it has been constructed in order to maximize the production of a good while wasting as little time as possible. This is a clear example of what we have done to obtain more goods, or a greater ability to produce goods, with the same or less amount of time. Based on what we’ve seen already, what other tasks might technology take on which would allow us to have more time?

I think with the progression in robotics, we could see a lot more humanoid robots taking place in the workplace. The faster and stronger they get; they can then be used in more situations. The more that are produced, the cheaper that they will become, and more businesses will be able to buy them, instead of hiring a human worker, and because more are being bought, they will only get cheaper. Now, I don’t know when this will happen, but I find it to be inevitable. Keeping that in mind, I haven’t exactly described how this will enable the man, who was once the worker, to have more time.

There are a couple ways this could come about. We might introduce universal basic income, and so many of these individuals no longer work because they have lost their jobs, and so we had to make sure we don’t ruin the lives of millions of people. We might introduce means of increasing the skills of these workers, to take on positions that a machine cannot. What’s to be noted is that, in any of these theories, people will end up with more time, because if they lose their job, they have time, and even if we somehow are able to increase the knowledge and skills of workers. Even so, the one’s that have lost their jobs to machines might not be required in the modern technologically advanced workplace anyway. This might mean they work less.

I think there is a possibility that we shift from a society focused on production from within the context of business to production from within the individual. We can continually create superfluous jobs, like we have been for decades, and we can create methods to doing more work with less time and effort, and then ignore these, but at one point or another, we’ll reach a peak where things must change fundamentally. I think in this fundamental change, it will lead to individuals having more time, maybe not in the ways that I’ve described, but I view it as a real possibility. It’s a thought based on history, we have progressively spent less time on work, many of us no longer having to work the same amount that our ancestors did, however, the world is cruel, so many still do. However, we have also become evermore specialized to deal with the lack of work, this might continue too, but I’m not so certain on that path, as eventually, it will have to end.

Besides work, I think menial tasks that we currently have to do will be done with technology. At one point or another, technology will progress to the point where we don’t have to do many of the tasks we used to do. Laundry? Dishes? Cleaning? Taxes? A robot could gain the capability to do all these things for you. While I’m focused on obtaining more time, we also can’t ignore the fact that, we might also spend more time working and less time on these other things, just like we have done in the present. I also don’t want to focus on all the downsides that come with this, as we are probably going to allow corporations to take over, and we’ll have no control or ability to repair these machines, and that should be worrisome, but something I’m not concerned within the context of time.

I think all tasks can eventually be automated. The only exception to this automation is, in my opinion, the arts. Humans that lack the creativity of others have tried to create tools like neural networks in order to grab as much information as possible and force out an outcome with specific terms. I wouldn’t consider this something which has caused to save time, at least not yet, but instead, it takes away the only thing that makes humans interesting. These are the things we would want to spend our time on in the world of automation, the things that have color and meaning cannot be immediately labelled. What we have now does not create art, but instead, it vomits out a result that has weighted labels arbitrarily assigned by its creators. It has uses, and the uses are limited, as the creator might want to use the tool in a limited and focused manner, which would allow them to maximize their creativity.

All things will require no human intervention, at one point or another, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves. With this in mind, we will have time to do whatever we want. I imagine we’ll create nutrition pills so that we no longer have to spend time eating, too. Then our time can be spent in whatever way we’d like, rather than on the things we believe we must do because someone else has told us it has value or that it must be done above other things. It would be a liberating future, but if it will come to us, I’m not so sure.

It turns out that after thinking about time enough, I really want to focus on something else. With this focus on time, I hope that I won’t have bad feelings about it anymore. It just is, and time will keep on moving forward, no matter what forces we have in place to slow it down. I hope there were some ideas that you enjoyed, if you have any input, criticisms, or thoughts, feel free to share them with me. Until then, I hope you enjoy how you spend your time, and I suggest you spend it wisely. Time is the most valuable resource, after all.