Running Short On What I Have The Most Of
Why There’s Never Enough Time and How I’m Not Where I Thought I’d Be Or Wanted To Be
Every day, I find myself realizing how few hours there are in a day. How few minutes we get to do the things expected of us. Before you know it, the sun has set and your bed is beckoning.
We have more time than ever before, and yet I find myself running short of it at every turn.
There has been, in my lifetime, a great shift in the idea of time. It feels like there is always an immense pressure to remain doing something at all times or time is wasted. Even now, I drafted this as a thing to do when I have a 9–5 job and was taking 4 courses in university. I am victim to the same mindset that has consumed us with the hustle culture.
The argument that time not spent being productive is wasted is silly to me for two reasons: 1) we need to rest, so time spent resting is not wasted, and 2) if you are enjoying the time you waste, I do not think it is really wasted. Life is too short to worry about such miseries anyway.
But why do I feel like I am always running short of time? Time is the most abundant resource we have in our lives. It is with us from the moment we are born to the moment we die. More than dollars or breaths or water or anything else. Our time begins and ends with us. And yet we never have enough.
Despite the ample time we have in theory, many of us feel like we are constantly running short, and that often leads to a gap between where we are now and where we thought or hoped we would end up. That famous old saying goes, “Life happens when you’re busy making plans.” Time waits for no one, certainly not for any of us.
The Paradox of Time
A Modern Dilemma
Modern society has created a disillusionment around the concept of time. It is both limitless and yet finite. We have, as humans, found ourselves with more free time with each passing era — though it feels we have found new ways to arbitrarily fill that time with mindless drivel.
Time as money is often quoted as a means of saying that to waste time is to waste money, but I take it much more at literal value. Time is money; time is a currency. It is a finite resource that, once spent, cannot be given back. We must choose where, why, and how to spend this currency.
This idea that time is money (or a literal currency to itself) is part of why hustle culture has taken its hold on us. We often feel that time wasted equates to money wasted, and I think the majority of us know that we could always use more of both. It’s a bit paradoxical to chase one at the expense of the other, but there is no other alternative aside from managing this exchange more effectively and equitably.
Despite huge advancements in technology and productivity, we are somehow busier than ever. How did this happen? I like to think that we should be working even less than people 100 years ago, but we are starting to work more.
With more time spent on trivial, mundane things, we have less time to spend doing things that truly matter, like enriching hobbies or spending evenings with friends and family. Time spent being human rather than being tool, I think, is what we begin to lack.
We should be reaping the benefits of such organized industry by having more free time to spend how we see fit. Instead, it seems we have taken the instantaneous services now offered and stuffed our days with more and more trite activity. I can grocery shop and make meals quicker than those 100 years ago. I can drive cars to get where I need to go faster than 100 years ago. I can look up information, do banking, communicate with people, and so much more from the comfort of a computer system in the palm of my hand.
Yet despite the time savings, there is never enough. It becomes paradoxical in that the more time we are saving, the more we are somehow spending. This is a phenomenon seen with salary increases too where the cost of living of an individual rises with the income, resulting in no money saved despite making more because they spend their money on more things. We are doing the same with time, and like with discretionary income, I feel we may be spending it on things not worthwhile.
I think it leads to an anxiety of never having enough time. Just as a person whose salary increased still feels like they don’t have enough money. We raise our spending to our earning, but time is not earned, it is lived, yet we fill it as often as we can, and we see boredom as an enemy. And it doesn’t help, surely, when every app on our phone is always vying for our constant attention to take more of our time. After all, seconds on site is a big metric for platforms to track these days. So, what gives?
Time vs. Attention
Time is a constant resource. As I said, time is lived, not earned, so it is always there, both coming and going at the same instance. Attention, though, is not constant. It is finite. I don’t think I have to tell you about how hard it is to focus intently on something for long periods of time. Humans are not built like that, and it takes a lot of consistent effort to get truly good at concentration.
Our attention span is dwindling as a society, I fear. This often means that our attention (as a resource) and our time (as a currency) are constantly in flux and flow and being pulled to and from all sorts of different places. Much mental energy of the everyday is then given to a job or to schooling. These two items often result in a third of our time per day and, if I had to hazard a guess, two-thirds of our attention spending.
And in what little time we have, we must be productive in some set or perhaps feel guilty otherwise. The idea of hustle culture has us wanting to chase side hustles, social media wants us to give our last attention to meaningless gossip and trends, and we still have familial and social obligations — and this doesn’t even scrape the fact we have to take care of ourselves and our home with shopping, grooming, eating, and the like.
Simply put, there is not enough time to do all we want to do in a day, and so many things draw our attention and burn out our focus. It means we are having our ability to use time effectively chipped away.
Further, multitasking is rampant. People try to stack things up to “save time” and end up, generally, more stressed and perhaps performing tasks poorer as a result. I am guilty of this as well, though I have moved to an efficiency mindset where I try to tackle items in a more logical order one at a time. I.e. I would say go to a bakery and then to the drug store because they are next to each other, saving one trip out of the house, but I would not try to cook a meal, fold laundry, and clean a bathroom all at once.
Multitasking burns out the attention resource more than probably anything else. Work and school has us focused on one thing for long enough, but the mind still tends to wander and focus on other things too. So even this mental multitasking ends up burning our attention and reducing our active focus. And it causes what? A sense of lost time or misused time.
Attention and time interplay in a lot of ways with motivation to spend time in better ways than however we may currently be doing so. I think we’ve all had moments where we say things like, “I will start tomorrow,” and then tomorrow becomes next week and so on. Our attention on the matter dwindles and time passes and we’re left feeling down because we have wasted the time. Thus, wasting time in this manner begets a feeling of regret for not being where you wanted to be after X number of days or weeks had passed.
Unmet Expectation
Personally…
Obviously, we all feel the tug of wasting our life away from time to time. I have spend a lot of time in my own life spinning tires in the proverbial mud to end up nowhere but where I was before — sometimes even in a worse place because of the stagnation.
I hate change as much as the next person, it’s uncomfortable and raw at times, but I hate staying the same so much more. The concept of wasting time weighs heavy on me, always, and I have made a lot of missteps in my own life as I’ve gone through it because… well, how do we avoid making missteps anyway? It’s life. Shit happens. There’s nothing we can do but our best, and sometimes we stumble. That’s okay.
But despite all the positivity I can throw at it, I am still not where I thought I would be. Some part of this is societal, bigger than me and bigger than what I can control, but some of it is in me wasting my time, not pushing when I should have, and letting time pass without spending it meaningfully.
I spent a good chunk of time lost career-wise. I went to college at 18 for something I ended up not pursuing. I went back starting at 24 and now have a university degree in something completely different. But I wonder where I could be now in my career had I not wasted the years after my first graduation. I would be six years further along into my career — I would likely be where I want to be.
See, I have a path forward, I know what I have to do, and I know it will take time and a consistent progression, but had I started at 18 rather than 24, I would be there already. And I, of course, cannot be made at my past self. I do not harbour any regrets. I made the best choice for myself at that time with the information and desires I had then.
Perhaps I would even have a house if not for the insane cost of living increases happening all over the place and particularly in the urban areas where I lived, live, and will continue to live.
I feel like I have fallen behind in so many aspects, that I have wasted too much time to recover from. Even today, I still find myself struggling to maintain the attention and motivation required to spend time meaningfully, but I am working on it, as I think all of us should.
Externally…
There are numerous societal and external pressures to the way we spend time, and I do feel myself pinning my life milestones to that of the average for the rest of society even though I am still “ahead” of the curve.
For example, the average age of a first-time home buyer in Canada is 36 years old (RE/MAX). And the average age of a CPA candidate is 29 (Becker), which I guess I am right on the money for (considering my educationally wasted early 20s).
There’s also this bizarre downward pressure from older generations. The idea that we should have it “figured out” because they were further along at our age than we seem to be now. I think a lot of that can be delegated to things being more expensive and society placing more and more focus on higher education, so we are typically “starting our lives” a little later than average.
Some people reach their milestones earlier or later — and some people may never reach them — but when we compare our milestones to those of our peers and to society at large, we can feel better or worse. Are we where we should be? Who’s to say? The only timeline you can work on is your own. I remember to tell myself that sometimes. I am doing my best to work it out on my own time, and I try not to compare externally too much.
Why I’m Not Where I Thought I’d Be
Life Happens
You know the saying. Life happens when we’re busy making plans. And life gets in the way a lot when we’re doing little more than trying to live it. Time passes despite our best efforts to save it or spend it wisely, sometimes, we just cannot be as effective as we want.
Life events can — and do — occur which shift priorities and causes certain things to be put to the side only for us to look back on and feel a tinge of melancholy at having not had the time for that thing anymore. Unexpected challenges — like financial strains — can bar us from doing many of the things we wish as well. Trips we could take are suddenly unaffordable, and we’re left to regret it in time, if only we had had the money to do it.
Personal struggles, changes in goals, and changes in priorities all put a damper on our plans to live life and spend time to the fullest. Often times, our time is claimed at the expense of someone else too. We drive our kids to school, we drive friends home, and we drive our spouses to and from doctor appointments. Our time, as much as it is ours, is still at the whim of things beyond our control.
Given how unpredictable life can be, time has a central role in all we do. And in that vain, time is at the whim of things we don’t plan for. Health issues can arise out of seemingly nowhere, relationships can shift and change, you could lose your job tomorrow, and a family member may fall gravely ill and require your care. All those things would immediately swamp your time and attention resources, and there is little you could do otherwise to stop it once it has started.
These events reshape time in our minds. We set aside things we want to do for the things we need to do, as needs must come before wants, but looking back, perhaps selfishly so in a sense, we regret not having had the time to chase after those other things we wanted. Ergo and in short, we did not have enough time.
And So Does Growth
But over the course of our lives, we change and grow. The things we wanted ten years ago are not necessarily the things we want now, and so I think that plays a role into how regretful we may feel over the time we have or have not “wasted.”
Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t choose to go into my current career at 18, it took until I was 24. When I was 18, I chose I wanted then. Not what I would want later, because I didn’t know what I would want later on. How then can I say I wasted this time? It’s paradoxical to me that I feel like I wasted this time when I did not know any better.
And this goes for so many, many things. Take a relationship for example. You cannot say it is wasted time because it doesn’t work out in the end and the relationship breaks down. It is only wasted if you knew the entire time that it wasn’t working out. But love is complex. Trying to work things out with someone is a noble pursuit, I think, if the love is there. And time spent with someone who you like, even if it doesn’t work out in marriage and a happily ever after, is still not time wasted — not in my eyes anyway.
So, self-discovery and change comes from time passing. Hindsight shouldn’t make us regret the time we spent or how we spent it. I know it’s easier said than done, but remember, you make the choices with the best information you have at that time. You have no crystal ball to see the future, and you’ll never know what you want when you get there. So enjoy the time you have now to the best of your ability and worry about it later.
Yet there are still goals and dreams we wanted to achieve, aren’t there? That feeling of not being where we wanted to be and having all this time between the past self who dreamt of a better future to the current self living in a disappointing present is the epitome of regretful, wasted time after all.
As I have pointed out, we are all living on our own timelines. We are not accountable to society’s expectations of where we ought to be because each life is so vastly different. We can only compare to ourselves, and that's a one to one comparison for which we are the only benchmark.
So even though I feel like I am not where I wanted to be, I understand that life has its setbacks. I know I will get where I want, and where I want to go changes sometimes. All of this is okay. It’s part of the process, but we have to be okay with the fact that sometimes time is slippery no matter how hard we try to force it to fit into our idealized version of a future yet to come true.
Time Slips Like Sand Through Our Fingers
Busyness is not productivity. I feel like that is something that needs to be focused on here. Time, as it slips away, is wasted on things that keep us occupied but not satisfied.
See, there’s a propensity in society to focus on the idea of hustling and productivity, but how much of the time we spend in aimless pursuit of productivity is actually productive. I argue most of the time is meant to keep us busy more than it makes us meaningfully productive.
Feeling busy, though, makes us feel productive. Having a day full of errands makes us feel productive. Doing something rather than nothing is productive because it’s busy, or so I think we think. But I don’t think that should be the case. You can be busy as a bee and make no progress on your honey. Busyness only matters if the progress is meaningful, otherwise, it may be more wasted time in the end.
I’d surmise that we all have this innate desire to control time. Schedules, goal planning, and to-do lists play into this desire to control where our time goes. However, these also risk making us feel busy while also frustrated with a lack of progress or personal fulfillment. Controlling time, oddly enough, seems to make more likely we fall into this pit where the idea backfires and we end up wasting time on busyness instead.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, when we run out of time to do even the meaningless busywork, we feel bad because of the lack of time. It can lead to feelings of inadequacy. The gnaw of “I did not do enough, so therefore I am not enough” grows wearisome inside the chest — some days more than others.
So, even while we seek to grab a hold of time, to control it through something, we still end up losing time in the end. It goes to something it was not supposed to. It, like sand in our fingers, slips away. It is unable to be grasped, unable to remain controllable. It simply falls and melds into a thousand other moments which all appear the same as the next: wasted, preoccupied, and not where we wanted them to be.
Reframing Time
Prioritize
I think a main way of reframing how we view time can be by achieving a different level of prioritization in the things we expect out of life.
If we shift our perspective from achieving some external milestone as validation for time spent, we can allow ourselves to find more personal satisfaction in the present moment we are living.
If we allow ourselves to understand that wants, needs, and desires all change through our lifetime and to not live with regret so long as we always make the best choice for our contemporary selves, then that is a good step in understanding that time spent is not wasted just because we look back with more information now than we had then.
And instead of focusing on wasted time and the time we don’t have enough of, we can reframe this through the lens of the time we do have. There is still plenty of time to stop and do the things we love despite life getting in the way. The things we find important are things we will make time for. We must remain hopeful that there will be time while acting as if every moment is still sacred because time passed is still time we cannot get back.
Doing Less To Accomplish More
Perhaps the real focus on “more time” comes from “doing less.” There is an argument to be made that the strain on our attention has led us down the rabbit hole of wasted time and anxiety about never having enough.
Intentionality and focused efforts may yield better results in this area. Making consistent efforts in more focused areas can help us alleviate some anxieties around not having enough time. The time, like wasted time, stacks up. Even ten minutes a day can make a difference over the course of a year.
So, I wonder then, if slowing down and simplifying our lives would lead to less time-induced anxiety and more feelings of fulfillment. I argue yes. I think that by removing some “busyness” and focusing on intentionality, we are better equipped to spend both time and attention resources more effectively.
For me, I have decided to stop mindlessly scrolling social media in a desperate attempt for dopamine as much. I have stopped trying to take on a myriad of side hobbies when I have hobbies and passions which fulfill me already.
And more to prioritizing is learning when — and that it’s okay — to say no to things. Nobody else is entitled to your time but you, and you have to make sure you spend it in the ways you want — and intentionally so.
Time Is As It Is, Not As We Want It
Though, I think that maybe the biggest thing is to reconcile with time and understand it as more of a thing that we experience than a thing we could even hope to control. We are dragged through time whether we want to or not, a river with a current we cannot fight against.
It is important, then, to embrace where you are now. Even if the place you are is not where you wanted to be, there is always more time coming. You can make changes today that will set you up for a better tomorrow.
Acceptance and trust in the process will lead to patience and an understanding that there is an alternative to the relentless hustle of time and busyness. Break from that which aims to steal your attention without meaning, without offering value for the time spent.
Embracing time for what it is can help set us free from the confines of feeling like we wasted it. We are, after all, living for the first time. We do not have the foresight to know for sure where we will be only where we want to be. Life cares little for our plans.
Years ago, I wanted to be a radio host, an author, and a YouTuber or streamer. Today, I want to be an accountant, an author, and a cook. My passions have shifted with time. I have embraced it and developed patience that as long as I make the right choices for my contemporary self and that I act in accordance with a philosophy of intention and meaningfulness that I will stop feeling as though I have wasted all my time.
Conclusion
The idea of having so much time in our lives while never having enough is so paradoxical. Time is fleeting, and that’s why every moment is beautiful in its own way.
There are limitations to how we can spend and control time — often because of clashes with real-life limitations, expectations, and obligations. But I think we can overcome the feeling of dread with more intentional and focused efforts on spending our time wisely, perhaps even through simplification of our desire to remain busy as a measure of productivity.
It’s important to remain intentional with our time then and focus on things that add value to our lives. Wasting time only comes when we care more about busyness than about memories or meaningfulness.
While I am not where I thought I would be, I do not think it is a negative thing. Life happens and time passes, and all the living we do and memories we make happen between here and there.
Yours truly,
D.
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