The difference between optimising your time and valuing your time
On living life versus endlessly learning about it
I made the mistake of googling: ‘is time real or a concept’ and following a brief wander into the theory of relativity, quantum physics, the subsequent explosion of my brain, a cup of tea required to assemble the pieces of it back together, here we are, working with the basis of psychological time, that we measure and log events as they happen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about time recently, after watching podcaster Steven Bartlett getting an utter drubbing for saying that a couple of glasses of wine ‘ruined three days’ of his life and that he ‘podcasted worse’ as a result. He then went on to describe the domino effect it had on his sleep, his eating habits, his gym-going, and how he was checking his fitness tracker and noticing with dismay his cortisol and dopamine levels.
Aside from the crime of trying to make ‘podcasted’ a word, the main problem wasn’t Bartlett trying to over-dramatise minor alcohol use (he wasn’t referencing an alcohol problem for context) but rather the endless raking over personal behaviours in order to achieve Maximum Optimisation of Life. The idea that every part of your life should be tinkered with and measured so that you’re living the best possible existence at all times.
As someone who has stopped drinking, I fully understand the benefits that quitting has on pretty much every single aspect of your life. But I would also be lying if I said that there is anything in sobriety that can replicate the hedonistic, loose fun that you can have with alcohol.
In any case, this isn’t about alcohol use.
My new non-fiction book SHE WANTED MORE: Reimagine your life and live by your rules is out now. It’s a bold memoir-meets-interviews book that looks at women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, to help chart a life course that is right for you.
This is about Bartlett and his fellow podcast bros optimising their time to some unattainable degree framed as a new concept, which is actually one of the oldest concepts, chiefly the human folly of trying to cheat death.
It’s like the plot to a Disney film where a bunch of intrepid adventurers go into the Amazon to locate the pool to everlasting life, except way, way worse because they’re wearing tinted glasses, slamming down shots of pre-workout, going from a grey office to a grey gym, checking their fitness trackers and suffering a personal crisis because their dopamine levels aren’t optimal because they ate the wrong kind of almonds.
