Although there are people who believe we are in the midst of a time war in the schizo sense (time-travelling Nazis, Lemurians vs. Atlanteans, etc.), there is nothing speculative or conspiratorial about what I have to say here.
You really are in a war for your time.
Corporations, governments, intelligence agencies, and even individual people are all expending tremendous amounts of well-directed energy to steal your time, your consciousness. Some do this for money, others for vanity, and others still for more sinister reasons. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but you are being attacked from all sides, at all hours of the day, with weapons of unparalleled sophistication.
The consequences of losing this war for your time are catastrophic, and most of us are losing.
Everything that is valuable in life - health, wealth, community, art, etc. - all these require the deliberate and focused investment of time. Even the simplest things like rest and relaxation require time. If you allow your time to be conquered, you’re willfully giving up parts of your life. In fact, losing the time war means losing your life; it means being poor, unhealthy, lonely, and boring - or at least more poor, unhealthy, lonely, and boring than you could otherwise be.
The siege has been going on for quite some time, but most of the besieged don’t take it seriously. The average person doesn’t even know they’re losing because they don’t fight; others fight poorly and get slaughtered. I have been struggling with this lately, and my goal here is to give you all some practical strategies for winning your own war against the forces of chaos that are siphoning off your life force.
Putting Things Into Perspective
Before we talk about the correct use of time, let’s first consider how much of it we have and how to conceptualize its consumption.
If you sleep 8 hours a night, that leaves you with 960 waking minutes. To make the math easy, let’s assume that you only sleep 7 hours and 20 minutes, which gives us an even 1,000 waking minutes.1
When you think about it like this, 10 minutes is 1% of your day.2
This is very important to keep in mind. 10 minutes doesn’t feel like a long time, but 1% is significant. Most people don’t think of an hour as being that long, but it’s 6% of your day.
Consider Technology
The average adult aged 18-24 spends about 186 minutes on social media alone. That’s about 20% of their time every day: a fifth of their energy.
That’s 1,131 hours.
That’s 73 days of the year.
That’s 28 forty-hour work weeks.
This is an insane amount of time. And what do most people get out of it? NOTHING. I have never known anybody who wished for more time so they could watch more memes.
This isn’t meant to be an article about social media, but it’s just one example of the temporal massacres that take place every day. The first step to stopping this incessant slaughter is to recognize that it is happening.
It’s also worth recognizing the breadth of what we are up against. Previous generations had their own problems, but they didn’t have to deal with anything like phones. What worked for them simply will not work for us.
How to Fight
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