How much is your time worth?
How much would I have to pay you to sit there and do nothing for an hour? A month?
It seems like an absurd question and this post was originally going to be titled addiction or absorption or something along those lines, but I think this is the best approach. Money is the most common value metric (even though a moneyless mindset is priceless, both literally and figuratively). So, for example, if you count each day as being worth 33,000 dollars, you’re going to have a million dollars by the end of the month. That’s $1,375 per hour. Do you feel like your hour is worth $1,375? If less, why? If more, do you show that through your actions?
Many people don’t think about their time at all. I sure don’t. You read about how you ought to savor each moment, but it’s a rare occurrence at best. Even after reading great works about it — On The Shortness of Life for example — it just doesn’t register.
There seems to be this ultra-thin line between satisfaction and addiction. Most of my past satisfaction, thus far, is characterized by forgetting about reality through an activity. Drug addiction does the same thing, makes you forget about the world. You can also see evidence of this forgetting/addicting with media, music, food, movies — yeah, the fun stuff. Each one is, first, an immersive experience. Holding your breath before going back up. And second, addicting. A couple empty bowls of crackers later, you wonder why you bothered. Of course you know why, as for however long you were chewing and browsing you were just Not There and that feels amazing. You’ll want more.
There’s a lot to be said about forgetting the Self. It’s said that Boredom is the awareness of time passing. You could reword it to the awareness of your Self going through time. Only when you shift your focus to the world around you does boredom go away. So immersive experience isn’t necessarily bad. With the dichotomy of work & play, it’s hard to see how to make immersive experiences be to your benefit, beyond making you forget. It doesn’t have to be that way.
I don’t think all immersive things are purely isolated, addicting, where you’re stuck with the brunt of reality when you go up for breath. The only reason one gets whacked is because usual immersive activities often leave you with nothing. You’re still the same person before and after. It doesn’t build toward anything. So you just have to live in a way where it does.
Note that this doesn’t have to be the case with the current fun stuff. Do you think a film buff and you are still the same after a viewing? No way. The film buff noted everything about what made it a superb watch. They probably learned more about film-making and will write a thorough review about it after. Then they went on to incorporate it into their own film-making, creating new worlds with their newfound inspiration. Meanwhile most (including me) walk out of the theater and say, “whoa, good movie” and that’s it.
So if you’re attentive enough, skillful enough, I sincerely do believe they can be merged. You can reap the benefits of ‘work’ while it feels like play. And the only way to get there is to cut out the more superficial playtime, I suppose. The benign ones, which will always leave you worse off than before! Opportunity cost. Any immersive activity that doesn’t add to us makes us worse off, as we lost however much time doing it. It’s up to you to decide which activities those are.
So that’s why I titled it “A Million Dollars” — by setting your hourly rate to be 1,375 dollars, you remind yourself to build up. What activities are worth $1,375? The ones that build you up.
You may not have a million dollars in a month, but you’ll feel like a million. Imagine a year!