Satiation — drawing the line…

Following are some thoughts that often come to my mind. I wrote it one night around 1. It’s mostly a rant about the two sides of the time conundrum. Would you rather not take stress, and give up things to focus on the “important” tasks at hand, or take your time and not worry about being a little late to the “goals” that you or the society have set up? It’s definitely incomplete for now [27 Dec '21]. Will add more to it if I can ever let myself stay away from my headphones long enough to ruminate.

I’m doing well. Things are good enough. However, I often find myself thinking about two opposite sides to the time problem. One side of it is the “hustle culture” —some will go on to just claim that you are wasting your time if you are not working towards something all the time. There are entire self-help books that ultimately intend to help you make every waking moment of your life productive. Ironic? I’d say.

So, the dilemma is this… Do you follow this hustle or calm down and stop worrying too much about life? That is to say, either you don’t take every little thing super seriously. (By no means do I mean that you let life happen to you). Or, you strive to make the best out of everything? For instance, and this might seem too trivial, say I’m watching a happy-go-lucky group of adults in a TV show maneuver life but, does watching that do anything for me? For some, there’s a couple hundred hours of their life they’re never getting back. They’d rather watch a show, an overhyped one, that will lead to more conversations when they meet people. It would give you more inclusion in society. It’s very well possible that you end up really liking that show a lot, but there will be a nagging voice in your head saying that you are letting society affect you too much.

Let’s think about the first perspective: you don’t take things too seriously. Say you are in the 11th grade, and people are rushing into this race of joining these elite colleges. They are taking a lot of time out of their lives and giving their all to the preparation. You have, however, decided to be more chill about it than the masses. So, you don’t change your lifestyle. You don’t put in those extra hours or give up on plans with friends. Best-case outcome: you do almost just as well as the others, feel very good about yourself, get in a good college, and life goes on. Average outcome: you tank the tests. You don’t get the college or the stream you wanted to pursue, and you take a year off. Does that really affect you in the grand scheme of things? Say you graduate a year later than your peers. Say you get that job and start earning a year later. Would you feel that you’ve let yourself left behind? Take another example. You are in college. You are living a typical undergrad’s life. Enter senior year placement season. Everyone is hell-bent on getting into their dream company. Not you. You are not stressing over this stuff. What if you get into a company that’s not that great? It’s decent, just not what one would aim for. Do you care enough to let that bother you? In a few years’ time, you’ll gain experience, move on to a better role. Does that really affect your plan in life? Meh.­­­

Well, there’s a lot of subjectivity involved in all this, which you must have guessed by now. It all boils down to what you are willing to put up with. What satisfies you? It’s not just about you, though, is it? There’s your family, and then there are the people around you. You can try and convince everyone that you are in fact capable enough to have gone the conventional path, but we all know how people love “pics, or it didn’t happen”. What were the pros along the way? Minor setbacks didn’t faze you. You had time on your hands when most of the people were busy being busy. You looked at the little things, and I mean really noticed them — not posting-a-pretty-evening-sky-on-Instagram noticed. Is that experience worth more than having that car or that house by that age benchmark that society has planted in your head?

We should look at the other side too. Say you hustle, and you hustle. You do mind that one-year gap that would be wedged between you and your peers if you don’t hustle; if you don’t get a job at par with theirs right from the start. What does that say about you? Is it judgment on your ability? Not at all. But maybe circumstances haven’t been kind to you. Maybe they have forced you to crave those societal “goals” or social acceptance. Nothing wrong with that. After all, you are building a good life for yourself. Just not spending the now very well. Sure, you don’t get time to stop and look at more sunsets. Sure, you’re not star-gazing or sitting around in parks as often as you’d like. But you will reach that stability quicker. You will have that satisfaction as early as you want (well, if everything goes as per plan that is).

Lastly, there’s peers. I’ve been talking about them in a general sense up until now. However, the same set of principles applies to the people around you too. Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely; to be friends with and have such people as your peers who have similar thoughts as you do vis-à-vis this discussion…