Penultimate Wastefulness
Daily Meditation #125 — 6/27/2022
Getting home from work, your spouse asks about your day.
“Same as always,” you grumble, almost annoyed they would even ask.
Heading into your bedroom, you slip into your sweatpants and throw your work clothes on the bed and floor.
“What’s for dinner?” you ask, hoping they haven’t made any plans.
“Well,” they start with a dash of hesitation, “I was thinking about making some chicken breasts, mashed potatoes, and broccoli or something like it for a side, but…man, I’m friggin beat after my work, today. I don’t know.”
There’s not much of a pause before you both knowingly look at one another, “Want to just make a frozen pizza?” you ask, your hopes being fulfilled.
And so, you make a delicious pizza and spend your evening watching 4–5 reruns of The Office and snacking on the couch.
Life is truly hard. It is exhausting.
Full of duties and responsibilities — children, jobs, aging parents, arguments, mowing the lawn, cleaning, pets, illness surprises, events — life truly is a hamster wheel of bullshit that we keep running on.
The unfortunate thing is, doing these basic and minimum expectations like cleaning and eating and bathing aren’t excuse enough to treat your time so poorly.
If you only have a $100 bill to last a week for everything, how do you spend it? Carefully and assiduously! Every single dollar is carefully meted out.
If someone gives you $100 of their own money, how do you spend it? Frivolously and recklessly.
This is how so many of us treat our time — like it’s plentiful and cheap. Like it’s free money.
This attitude is why stories of the dying are always so tragic — so much regret and wishing they would’ve spent their lives more meaningfully.
To have traveled.
To have learned another language.
To have spent more time with their friends or parents.
Just as you don’t carelessly waste money every day, don’t waste so much time every day!
Wake a bit earlier.
Spend a bit less time watching TV.
Spend a bit more time cooking.
Take some time to listen to the wind whispering in the trees.
You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be a little better.
Time is the most underutilized commodity in our very tragically short lives, so treat it more preciously!
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
