I have been doing something illegal, and I’m not scared to say it out loud! I have been converting YouTube videos to mp3 to listen while cooking. Most of those videos are part of a series on philosophy by Darío Sztajnszrajber, an Argentinian philosopher. They are in Spanish, but here is a link, in case you are wondering.
One of the episodes is about Time, the first reason of why I found about philosophy. In my desperate attempt to understand time from a metaphysical perspective, I looked around every corner trying to find answers that remain unresolved.
So this episode was attractive, and in some sense, shocking to me.
At some point in the class, Darío proposed his theory of why most Sundays afternoons are really sad. According to him, they are sad because we have time to think; the rest of the week we are in autopilot mode, switching from one task to another, having almost everything of what we decided beforehand. The problem, then, is to think.
I have been struggling with time all my life, and, as part of a society that puts values on achievements, I have been obsessed micromanaging my life and worrying about how I spend my time.
What if we go to the other side? what if we think about every action we do, every moment? Well, I believe that’s insanity too. Autopilot is helpful because it helps us to get things done, and if you ask me I would say that it’s a basic instinct.
Not surprisingly, as with many other things in life, the answer is in the gray areas. Balance is everything.
How we accomplish this balance is something that I’m still trying to figure out. So far, I believe that the key is about being pragmatic, looking what works best for every situation, and forcing ourselves to think. A good start could be to recap what happened in the day before going to bed, and pairing that with our feelings and concerns.
Following this path, the next step (at least for me), was to think about the purpose of doing all this if the clock will keep ticking no matter what. The time will keep draining out of our hands and there is nothing we can do about it. Why bother?.
There isn’t a definite answer for this, and I can’t explain in words why (call it the mother nature doing her job) but I want to live. I want life and all that comes with it: I want suffering, happiness, love, to waste my time, and to think about this stuff….
I need to put a lot of thought into this, but for the moment I decided to take some preventive measures. The most important are to have more free time, procrastination is not always bad, and could lead to even more productivity. I don’t want to live in autopilot all the time.