In spite of time.

Why we waste precious moments.

How much time do we have left, individually and collectively?

I like to think I have many wonderful decades left. It’s a comforting thought. But of course, I have no idea.

Ernest Becker believed the ‘terror of death’ was so depressing, so crushing, that we humans would do anything to avoid it. We escape it through distraction: doom-scrolling and “drinking and drugging’. Or we dedicate ourselves to creating ‘immortality projects,’ dreams that outlast us like culture or the next Amazon.

When I bumped into spirituality, my fear of time became crippling. Oh my god, life matters and I’ve already wasted so much of it. I felt behind, too slow, and late for a destiny I could barely sense, like a distant shape in the fog. And yet, I wasted time.

You would think this anxiety would have propelled me forward with great urgency.

You would think the uncertainty of time would make us savor every moment, treasure it like the last glimpse of a rainbow.

But the opposite can be true.

Midjourney

In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky wrote about his years in a Siberian prison camp. One little passage always stuck with me. How strange it was, he observed, for the prisoners to “labor in the harshest conditions for a month,” and then spend their money “to the last kopeck” on a night of drunken debauchery.

To be sure, it would have been difficult for the inmates to save their money. But Dostoevsky sensed something deeper, a longing for “one moment’s forgetfulness” and the “freedom of action.” His fellow inmates wasted their money because the future was too uncertain, the present too depressing, and because they could.

It was a tiny act of free will, one of the few remaining choices.

You and I are free to save our money, but we remain imprisoned in life’s relentless march toward death. What we waste in rebellion is time.

Wasting time devalues it. If I squander this day, I must be confident I can make up for it tomorrow. It is a self-defeating act of spite, a tiny fuck you to the universe and its impenetrable timeline. Procrastination is our way of spending our last coin on cheap prison moonshine knowing the hangover will be awful. Because we can.