What happens in the long run?
What is your favourite thing to do in the world? Mine is not doing anything significant. I enjoy reading a lot and I enjoy writing a lot more but left to my device, I’d rather spend time just staring out into the oblivion. It’s very natural for me to connect dots and identify patterns. I notice what others miss and I spend hours—inside my empty head—postulating this and that and everything in between. My social awkwardness is rooted in my isolation. If you and I ever meet, chances are I’ll learn more about you than the other way around. This has more to do with my interest in you; nothing to do with my observational skills or ceaseless curiosity.
Coming back to the subject of how we spend time, assuming that the time that we are allotted on this planet amounts to anything at all. When they say that if you are good at something, you shouldn’t do it for free, what they are suggesting is that there has to be a value attached to the time you spent on perfecting something. How else are you going to measure time?
Money comes dangerously close.
Moreover, if it’s free, people are not going to value it anyway. Look at online content, for instance. People have been bombarded with free content for years that they find it very, very difficult to pay basic subscription charges. This common behaviour is not peculiar to India but one can’t overlook the struggles of behemoths like Netflix, Prime and Spotify in our country.
So, yes, time has a lot of value but the transactional units aren’t clearly defined. Yet. A maid’s chores will never be granted the same premium as a designer who took barely 13 minutes to come up with a new logo. In a way, it’s easy to understand the yawning gap between necessity and luxury. In a way, it’s best to let the market decide what it wants to pay for, and also, how much, depending on the cardinal principle of supply and demand.
Now, in such a wonderful world, if you think you are so amazing that without you taking some time out for yourself, the whole system would come crashing down, then you ought to take a step back and greet face-to-face with your irrelevance. In the long run, whatever we do, means very little. But that doesn’t mean we don’t do anything either. The trick is to be conscious of what’s going on.
Perhaps, there is a middle ground in there somewhere in the alley of wisdom: to be fully aware of certain little pockets of truths. If we don’t preserve some time out for ourselves—even to do something as random as noticing the moving clouds or appreciating the migrating birds fly by—then what is the point of not wasting time?