You Cannot Waste Time

I wrote this Quora answer some time ago. It never caught fire like my near-viral reply to "How do I tell if somebody is intelligent?", and it's a bit half-baked and bumpy, like many of my efforts to explain counterintuitive, nuanced things in short form (Quora's even harder, because I can't use a zillion links to explain sub-issues). But I'm republishing it here 'cuz it's timely.


I am in my late 20s and feel I have wasted a lot of time. Is it too late for me to achieve something worthwhile?

You can't waste time. You can only fail to match some imagined standard. Trying to make reality match up with imaginary standards is the way human beings make themselves miserable. It's also delusional, because only reality is real. When reality itself - how it is, right here and right now - isn't your standard, you're in big trouble. Look around you! Here you are! That sense of inhabitation (i.e. your aliveness, i.e. reality) will be exactly the same whatever becomes of you. It's always the same guy/gal looking out your eyes it's always been, no?

Your free will is in the moment; what you choose to do right now. You can't make yourself rich, or thin, or famous; those are the culmination of myriad factors, and we make one decision at a time. You may choose not to waste this money in your hand, not to eat these potato chips right here, and not to be staring vacantly into your iPad right this moment. You maneuver the boat with the tiniest momentary proddings.

And that's why success usually comes later. Proddings aggregate OVER TIME, and that takes a while (unless you're lucky and/or something extraordinary's going on). Thats' why your 60-ish uncles drive nicer cars.

These momentary proddings are all you've got. It's what you do right NOW. One choice, for example, would be to engage in endless rumination and self-conscious self-measurement. This stock-taking, worth-measuring wide-lens movie view of your life is a fake-out. It's not real; there's no such thing. You're not in a story. You're right HERE.

Even if you were a billionaire Nobel Prize winner, your life would still be experienced as "right here" - in your momentary decision-making. And that's how you get there - by inhabiting the moment rather than gauging your performance. People who do great things don't spend their moments feeling super-marvelous about their accomplishments. That's as useful and appealing as smelling your own farts. Rather, they spend their moments making choices, micro-navigating the boat with glee. That's how they got there in the first place! The desire to see yourself as super-marvelous stems from the big-view abstraction of your life, which is a fake-out and from which nothing real ever happens.

It's a fool's errand to try to accomplish worthwhile things in order to feel accomplished and worthwhile. That's not how it works. It's about experiencing a burning desire to do something very specific, and so enticing that your momentary decision-making falls, over time, into synchronization with what's needed for that thing to really happen. It's all about the doing of the thing, not the "wanting-to-be-able-to-say-you're-someone-who's-done-the-thing" thing, which is the most weak-ass thing there is.

Consider: Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing. And that's why most singers are so awful.


tl;dr version: simply do what draws your passion and stop gauging your own progress.