My “meta-idea” has to revolve
around time. I think about how my time is being used and how I
describe it. I think that well before you can engage in an activity
or not, the consequences will carry, your thoughts will carry, well
into what will inevitably be your current mind. I don’t, even when
I’m doing conceivably “nothing” genuinely feel like my time is
being wasted. Perhaps the only aspect to respecting and enjoying your
time is making as many active and self-espousing decisions while
you’re using it.
Time frames how I think about money. It
frames how I think about the pursuit of money and what money is
really good for. Money, to me, is more of an exchange towards a
purpose. If you have no purpose, you have no reason to care for
money. If you’re purpose involves redefining or re-purposing money,
it becomes less of a burden marred by ideas about paying the bills or
feeding yourself. I can do a lot with a little bit of money. Whether
it means getting something priced cheap, the easy old way to look at
something, or in the kind of dividends you get when you’re paying
for a chance to express who you are.
So I don’t pay the back taxes just
quite yet. The consequences just aren’t of the kind that would
significantly negatively impact my life. I don’t work 80 hours a
week. The dividends paid out from my psyche would literally start to
change who I fundamentally was. I may splurge a little on dinner or a
night out. Nobody spends their time talking about the hours they
spent reading a book or studying a topic. Of course doing such things
helps inform and shape the moment, but it’s snippets you’ll
remember over time. It’s snippets you’ll reflect on that will be how you define entire years or people. There’s a million ways I’d
like to be remembered than “eh, kind of a cool dude, I guess.”
An obsession with time frames how I
think about time frames. I simply know how long it takes me to
understand something or make things happen. Delays happen because
people don’t pick up phones, answer emails, say they’ll do it
tomorrow, spend time complaining or stressing about restrictions,
were told not to from someone on high, were given conflicting
information, didn’t understand what you meant, or deliberately
slowed down because they’re a dick and why not. Therefore, I know
what needs to happen so things happen now, or in an hour, or by
tomorrow morning, or holy shit what did we just create this week.
This time-centric view puts things in
perspective, provides a plethora of answers, and makes it easy to
form rules. It helps mitigate risk, define what’s worthwhile, and
decide the very reasons to even bother existing. I am playing a game
after all, and games are either finite or infinite. My life is
finite, the impact I may leave on existence though, who’s to say?
So I won’t spend that time
pretending. I won’t believe in god because I’m not schizophrenic.
I won’t call you friend unless I can see, feel, and think about the
positive impact you have on my life. I won’t double-speak unless
I’m pulling some 1984 shit. As long as I have a voice in my head
that can be persuaded to make me feel shitty about myself, I need to
be doing the kinds of things that can fight back. It’s a voice we
all have. A voice I see so flagrantly expressed outward lately as the
stress of life appears to be beating the ever-loving shit out of my
friends.
An important component to “taking
over the world” then, is to put you on my time. When the world
around you operates in a manner that exudes my values, then I’ll be
truly confused when too much ran awry. I’m already happy, and
that’s my biggest problem. As Jay-Z would say, I’m already home.
My existence therefore needs to extend farther. It needs to include
more to think about, more contingencies and responsibilities. I need
to inform my perspective in a manner that goes beyond being a
basically functioning human being just getting along.
I can’t tell if this seems too hard
to understand sometimes, or if it just comes in too abrasive a
package. I don’t consider hurting feelings or “being a dick” to
necessarily be a personality flaw. Wanting to make people feel bad is
the personality flaw, but that only tends to happen when I’m
addressing something that barely resembles what I’d describe as
“people.”
I question because I am endlessly
intrigued by how and why you spend your time. Mine isn’t riddled
with damn near any of the bullshit that most describe as a waste of
their time. I want to know about your relationships and the extent
they keep you happy. I want to know the heart of your interest in a
topic so I can understand why it’s worth my time to even hear about
it or explore further. My mind is already in a million different
directions and picking a specific path to focus on takes something or
someone special. It has to be something/someone worthy of advocating
across my interests or to anyone. Something story worthy.
The best stories can connect with a
million people in a million ways whether it’s because of the moral
it espouses or because it’s speaks so close to something you’ve
maybe never had words for. I can write a million blogs that will
never match what it means to operate that kind of machine I envision
for the future. There will probably be a handful of people in the
thousands I’ll meet that I’ll trust to work alongside with, to
help write part of the story. Certainly, it will take people who know
it can’t be about “them,” but us. Hopefully, there will be a
kind of truth that wasn’t force fed, but always existed waiting to
be accepted.
