I’m uncomfortable with the passage of time. I dislike it, and because time flies when you’re having fun I retain a slight antipathy for having fun as well. I usually try to have fun anyway, but a bit begrudgingly, acutely aware of the cost. I suspect that this awareness makes my fun less fun.
At the end of the day I feel caught between two unpleasant sensations: One, the sensation of having not done enough, of having lived another day without achieving enough of a change in the state of the world to justify losing that day; two, the sensation of having not had any time, of the day ending prematurely before I had any chance to note its passing. The more I fight the first the more I feel the second: Time, of course, does not only fly when you’re having fun, but when you’re fully engrossed in any task. The inverse is also true: If I try to relax a little, take things slowly and enjoy them, I get to the end of the day and wonder how I got so little done.
This, probably, is part of the reason I persist in what I generously refer to as ‘self-employment’, which means that I don’t have a job but I still pay rent. A job would make things a lot easier, but the last time I had one time passed so quickly, and at the end of the year I felt like I could remember very little of it – and, as well, that everything I had achieved within it was for someone else’s benefit. Thus, I decided to pursue my own projects and work to my own schedule, and now I maybe don’t get as much done but all of what I get done belongs to me. I keep trying to push myself to be more productive and effective, but whenever I make strides forward I feel like time starts passing faster and I pull back. I frequently remind myself of the character Dunbar in Catch-22, who is constantly doing things he hates because it makes time go slower, since the more time passes the more missions he has to fly, since the more missions he has to fly the more likely he is to die.
There’s no real resolution to this conflict. The conflict is simply that a limited amount of things can happen in a given amount of time: I can try to do more of those things, but that doesn’t make more time, it just makes me busier, and the busier I get the less I’ll be able to perceive time that passes, the less I’ll feel like I can keep up. It’s perverse, the parts of my brain which keep me from working point to the longer days made by less work and say “see, isn’t this nicer? So much more time to work on important things”, and hide from me the fact that I only created that time by not doing those things.
What can I do? Do I go slow and enjoy the illusion of creating time? Do I push myself to work more and feel like the world is passing me by while I’m not paying attention? Am I capable of even making a decision here and sticking to it, or am I incapable of seeing past my subjective sense of more or less time, more or less productivity, to actually negotiate a path through the day that doesn’t make me feel like I’m living half of a life?