“…try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.”
—Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin
Suppose you wanted to claim that you are someone who does some activity, such as a writer, a programmer, a teacher, a runner, an artist, a boxer, or whatever. How much time is required and on what time scale?
Let’s assume weekly blocks of time. A week has a 168 hours. Suppose we sleep for 50 of those hours. So, we have a total of 118 hours to do some activity. Let’s assume another 18 hours are consumed by doing things like eating, personal hygiene, etc. So, let’s say there are a 100 hours available to do something. Now, let’s try a few examples:
It occurs to me that it is possible to be something without practicing it. It is possible to both be a father and spend no time doing any activity with a child. So, there is an ontological argument. It is possible to be artistic without making art. But, this does not apply in other ways. Hard to imagine being a programmer than does not write programs. Writing programs is not an intrinsic activity that people can do “naturally”.
People do “naturally” run. But, it seems strange to claim to be a runner, without spending some significant percentage of your time block on the activity. What should that percentage be? Perhaps 5%?
For running, we can compute the mileage. If we run at a 10 minute pace, which is relatively slow, 5 hours is 30 miles. This is probably more than most self-described “runners” run in a week. It’s probably safe to say it is more than 2 hours, which would be 12 miles. So, maybe >2% is the right amount to claim some activity as intrinsic to your identity.
But, if you aren’t reading a book for two hours a week, are you a reader? I think you have to include Twitter, Facebook and other social media with a reading component. If that’s the metric, more people might be readers than ever before.
What are you spending >2% of your time on? Is that who you want to be?
“The most effective way to make time for traction is through timeboxing, an actionable application of a well-researched technique psychologists call, “setting an implementation intention.” In other words, you make a commitment to do something you intend to do, not just in theory, but at a certain time. It’s a technique that can be used to make time for traction in every area of life.
To create a weekly timeboxed schedule, you need to decide how much time you want to spend on each domain of your life. Start by creating a weekly calendar template for your perfect week. You can find a blank template here.”
-Nir Eyal, “If You Don’t Plan Your Time, Someone Else Will.” nirandfar.com. January 19, 2022.
“In one of the last dreams in Lightman’s book, Einstein imagines a world not too dissimilar from our own, where one ‘Great Clock’ determines the time for everyone. Every day, tens of thousands of people line up outside the Temple of Time where the Great Clock resides, waiting their turn to enter and bow before it. ‘They stand quietly,’ wrote Lightman, ‘but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.'”
-Joe Zedah, “The Tyranny of Time.” NOEMA. June 3, 2021.
I wanted this to be more interesting than it was, but I did like this last passage.
When I die, I want the ashes scattered in the wind, overboard on some slow moving ship, that leaves a trace for an hour, maybe two. Our lives are like ships traveling in the night; silently, we move along. If the water is small enough, we can make quite the impression, maybe even block transit and be a name on everyone’s lips for days. But, then it ends, and before long, no one remembers it at all. Maybe with the help of the written word, it lasts a moment more. But, even when it doesn’t fade, the paper still whole and not flaked yellow, disintegrating, even then time eventually wipes the significance and meaning down to a streak wiped with cleanser. A mere memory, a blotch on its way to becoming a clean slate with a few more rubs of the sands of time.
Everyone an Ozymandias, except with a little self-awareness, we realize that we can look upon our works and despair. Every place is dunes, with an occasional oasis or flower, struggling for life, this moment. And in the fullness of time and across the landscape, every spot has its moment, and some have many, but the only constant across them all is that time will wipe it all away, and return it to a clean slate. Nothing remains, except a tell-tale blemish that only an expert can read. Indecipherable by the mass of humanity, as each of us are, every moment. We are even a puzzle to ourselves, most of the time, already dead. In the end, time devours us all, leaving no trace, a true wake of meaning. The last human skull, in a field, a nest for a bird that hasn’t evolved yet.
“I ask Grant Heslov about his friend’s decision to step back from acting, to direct and otherwise live his life. ‘This is how he put it to me when I was trying to do something during the summer recently,’ Heslov says by way of an explanation. He says Clooney proposed an exercise. ‘Let’s sit down and try to figure out how many summers we have left,’ Clooney said. ‘Let’s say we were 55 at the time. So let’s say we have 25 more summers left—25 years, 25 summers. That doesn’t seem like that many if you lose a whole summer, right?’”
-Zach Baron, “George Clooney When We Need Him Most.” GQ. November 17, 2020.
Reminded me of Warren Buffet’s 20 Slot Rule and Wait But Why‘s Your Life in Weeks. Also, there’s this chart from the CDC. If you make it to 65 years of age, you’re more likely to live longer than average. Obvious, when you think about it, but it’s still a point worth remembering.
“‘I’ve learned a little in my life,’ he said. ‘Not much. But I will share with you what I do know. I hope it will help.’ He lit a cigarette, looked at the ceiling, then said, ‘I know only two things. The first is this: There is no such thing as time.’ He explained that time was an illusion: past, present, future. Eternity was “without a beginning or an end,’ and we must come to terms with what underlies time, or exists around its edges. He quoted the Gospel of John, where Jesus said: ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ That disjunctive remark upends our notions of chronology once and for all, he told me.
I listened, a bit puzzled, then asked: ‘So what’s the second thing?’ ‘Ah, that,’ he said. ‘The second thing is simply advice. Rest in God, dear boy. Rest in God.’
Auden’s two points of wisdom have taken decades to absorb. He was telling me, I think, that our frantic search for meaning in the calendar and clock — the race against time — is foolish in the context of a larger universe or God’s eternity (one can define ‘God’ in so many different ways). ‘Ridiculous the waste sad time,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, urging us toward ‘the still point of the turning world.’
The advice to rest in God seems more and more relevant to me. It invites us to relax into the power of the universe that sustains us, that holds us up, embraces us — even to the point of death. This is, I think, the Easter message in a nutshell: trusting in God’s power to transform our lives into something better.”
-Jay Parini, “What W.H. Auden taught me about Easter, God and surviving a season of Covid-19.” CNN. April 9, 2020.
h/t Alan Jacobs.
“…a life under constant threat of novelty isn’t a life; it’s exhaustion.
Washing dishes by hand, I give myself the chance to remember that this is wrong — that most of life is ordinary; that ordinary isn’t the enemy but instead something nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock upon which the rest of experience ebbs and flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the bubbles and the steady passage from dish to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly, the breath of actual time, a reality that lies dormant and plausible under all the clutter we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indecipherable call to another bird, a song from a passing car warps in the Doppler effect and I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I need a lot less than I think I do and that I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.”
—Mike Powell, “Letter of Recommendation: Washing Dishes.” The New York Times. June 4, 2019.
I have never been one to wear a watch all day long. Today, it seems more of a fashion accessory since the time is always available from our phone, and our phones are always with us.
But, watches also seem to be making a comeback as a replacement for phones in the form of “smart watches”, activity trackers and the like. The problem I have with these types of electronics is their aesthetics, price and durability.
In the past, I have used Timex Ironman and Polar products for time and measuring difficult of workouts using my heart rate as an indicator. They were perfect for a run. Water resistant and ugly. They weren’t something you’d were all day long.
They also used to be a lot cheaper too. You would spend half of the current price of $50-$150 on the entry level model. But, as they move into the premium space and try to replace phones, they have climbed up to phone prices for the premium models.
And like phones and other electronics, these devices are not built to last. Either the battery is not replaceable because the expectation is you’ll update to the new model when the battery is exhausted or replacing the battery tends to compromise water resistance. There’s also the problem that many of these devices aren’t durable. It is clear that smart watches like Apple Watch, Fitbit and many of the other brands in this space aren’t going to take much punishment. Those that look like they can take punishment are an eye-sore.
At this point, I saw this review of a Seiko SKX007. Since it is an automatic watch, it is wound by simply wearing it. There is no battery. It is a diver’s watch that can go down to 200m. It’s tough, and with NATO straps, you can get rid of those metal or resin bands.
Searching eBay, I was able to find Seiko SKX007 watches for sale that were essentially new for $175. But, since I’ve never worn a watch on a regular basis before, it was a lot of money to spend on something I was not sure I’d wear.
This is when I discovered Vostok Watches. They’ve been making automatic dive watches for the Russian military since the end of World War II. Reviews called them the best dive watch for under $100. Amazon has Vostok Dive watches for $89.90. If you can live with 30m water resistance, they least expensive option I found was $49.90.
Of course, you may still prefer a Timex Ironman. But, a Vostok is worth some consideration.
After wearing a Vostok watch for a week, I have found that I am much more aware of time passing and how long it takes to do something. I also find that it cuts down a bit on phone use since you are not reaching for it to check the time. Recommended.
“She describes it as ‘peace privilege,’ approaching the world from a stability that allows for simplifications.
There’s always a lot of denial going on when trauma interrupts our safe outlook on life. We know that people in general don’t want to see horror except in comfortable contexts (like fiction) so seeing human beings systematically torturing, starving and hurting others makes us feel vulnerable, impotent or responsible. It makes us question the comfortable assumptions of our own lives and why have we grown in a safe environment (could it have been by chance?).”
—Manuel Llorens, “‘Peace privilege’ Also Means Disgust for Someone Else’s Suffering.” Caracas Chronicles. May 3, 2019.
And if it is by chance, will the dice roll differently, for me, sometime soon? Fix space and flow across time and we all live in a Caracas, It’s just not Caracas today.
Example: gun control is trying to reduce the systemic risk of individual violence while, at the same time, increasing the systemic risk of organizational and state violence. Are people in Caracas safer when all the guns are in the hands of the colectivos, police and military? What happens when the place you make your home becomes Caracas?
cafebedouin.org 