Time Anxiety is a stressor worth dealing with
I don't know how many suffer from it or to what degree nor the extent to which things that seem to be other stressors are really disguised time anxiety, but I do know that it is out there and that our culture, naturally, encourages it.
Zo, some info:
Time anxiety is a real thing and here are strategies to cope https://boingboing.net/2021/02/10/time-anxiety-is-a-real-thing-and-here-...
Links to https://www.fastcompany.com/90579824/feel-like-you-never-have-enough-tim...
Daily time anxiety: This is the feeling of never having enough time in your day. You feel rushed. Stressed. Overwhelmed.
Future time anxiety: These are the “What ifs?” that ravage your brain. You feel paralyzed thinking through everything that may or may not happen in the future depending on your actions today.
Existential time anxiety: This is the overall anxiety of only have a limited time to live your life. No matter how much you race ahead or push forward, there’s only one finish line.
Also: Unfortunately, most of us are pretty bad at planning. We believe that eight hours of work means we have eight hours of time to schedule. However, study after study shows most people have at best 2.5 hours of truly productive time a day.
Proposed quick and solutions in boing-boing piece
Daily --"What is the one task that will make tomorrow easier for me?"
Future -- I keep a digital "Worry About it Later" list in my phone where I add whatever I am worried or anxious about in the moment and then I forget it. Anytime I add something new I reread my past worries and if they no longer matter (which is always) I apply the strikethrough style.
Existential -- my favorite tool is WeCroak, which is an app inspired by Bhutanese culture who believe you can attain more happiness by contemplating death five times a day. https://www.wecroak.com/
This seems to be available for both IOS and Android. Dunno how good it is, thought I might give it a try -- Miyamoto Musashi would surely approve.
all be well and have a good one
Comments
I'm not sure it counts as anxiety
But I often feel that time seems to just evaporate. It goes by much faster than I expect. It takes longer to do things than I think it will. Maybe some of that is being slower as I get older and thinking I can do as much in an hour or a day as I used to.
I look forward to reading the article.
Good morning Granma. Time seems to move faster for all
persons as they age, I guess by now we should have the experience to not give a shit about that, or about our self-imposed to do lists or something.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Thanks for the essay, el ~~
When I was teaching personal finance, I used to talk about gross domestic product versus gross national happiness, espoused by Bhutan. I would show them a film on Bhutan and their efforts to enhance the happiness of the entire population. Wonderful to aspire to.
Time is man made, which is why people have so much trouble with it.
Cheers!
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
Good morning RA - GDP and GNP are great frauds and hoaxes.
Gross national happiness is a great concept, but quantification can be tricky. OTOH, happiness might just be never having to quantify shit.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Thanks el, for sharing all your philosophical and exploratory
thoughts and questions, as well as your knowledge.
I don’t know if I would call my ‘existential thoughts’ an anxiety, but I do appreciate the culture of Bhutan. Thanks for 'wecroak', a wee speck in the bigger picture.
Good morning Janis, thanks. I guess I'm like some sort of
monkey or jay, or still a weird little kid "Hey. look what I found, dunno if it's useful but its interesting".
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I'd agree about all
I might add to 'weird little kid', naturally curious and quirky.
Hi again Janis, forgot to mention wecroak. I
installed it and turned it on, then shortly later discovered that I had a ton of apps running in background and hit "close all", so I still haven't tested it.
Wills traditionally start with "being of sound mind and in contemplation of death", but I wonder how much any of us actually do contemplate death. Schopenhauer said something like after you die you are what you were before you were born, noninformative and dismissive in a way, but also somewhat unarguable. (though arguably nonsense per Wittgenstein et al). Miyamoto, who had a lot to tell us in his own way advocated going through life with a . "profound acceptance of death" or something like that (in Japanese)
Anyway, I don't know if being presented with pithy aphorisms about death at random intervals helps or not, maybe the idea is to make you bored with death and hence not apprehensive.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
That comment is going to take some consideration,
thank you el.
Here’s hoping Bhutan can keep from being gobbled up by India
which is what happened to their next-door neighbor, Sikkim, which also used to be an independent country, with capital Gangtok.
The West tends to let India get away with whatever it wants to do. Unlike China with Hong Kong and Macau, India didn’t see any need to negotiate about former Portuguese enclave Goa — one day they just marched right in.
Good morning lot. India v China could be quite an
exploration and thesis. Maybe, in part, Gandhi = hero & Mao = villain.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
When it is time to go
Those around me have embraced that time as a release from suffering.
Mostly, the anxiety is in how it will effect those left behind.
Which is silly, as when your time runs out
there is nothing to be done about any of it.
question everything
Is there an time anxiety for
always being in a situation where you have to wait, long periods of time, before you can do something, as a result of external factors, like having to wait out the stigma of bad credit for 7 years?
Having to wait, like forever, till others wake up to the fact that one can not support themselves on minimum wage in this country?
Hell, I had to wait 5 years before my wife said yes...
Of course I was introduced to "hurry up and wait", when I joined the military at 18.
I had to always "wait till you get older" to enjoy something...
Evolution is f-king slow ya know... I knew I was born at the wrong time when I learned as a little kid of 5, that we are just sending our first manned spacecraft to the moon.
waiting on a paycheck...
waiting for a reply to online support...
I'm a patient man, but damn, I do hate to wait.
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
In my professional life,
my current employer makes sure that I never have less than 5 Priority 1 tasks active at any time, in addition to innumerable Priority 2, 3, and 4 tasks. None of these top-priority tasks are any less important that any other of them, and they all are at least 1 month and often as many as 6 months late. Usually, they are months late before they are even assigned to me. Whichever one I choose to focus on, I inevitably learn that they wanted some other one focused on first. For some reason, some of upper management believe that they get the best out of people by keeping them under the time-stress gun at all times.
I disagree, of course, but that's not germane. I recently spent a week and a half in the hospital from a series of GI bleeds that could well have ended me (a story for an essay I'm currently working on and will publish once the last of the bills come in), driven largely by stress. But if I'm to be employed by my current outfit, this is simply how it will be. My potential replacement wouldn't be bothered by it, so I can't be, either. Nobody is hiring 60something engineers anymore, anyway (especially since I refuse to get run through the mill to get a security clearance to work for the military or gummint), so there's not much in the way of opportunities to bail and go elsewhere. To misquote ZeFrank, "This is how Americans do".
My retirement plan has been "Die at my desk", ever since I lost my consulting business in 2015. I didn't think I'd get this close to actually executing on that retirement plan this soon. Not a fan of time stress, not at all.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
We once had a management type who was notorious for
pushing endlessly for everything to be done yesterday. One day, while being particularly aggravating toward a particular employee at day's end he accidentally stepped on the guys toe. The guy went over to his desk, took report out of a drawer and said this is 2 hours from done, but that just cost you a week, and locked it up and left and spent the entirety of the next week in the field.
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I appeared in a felony case years ago.
My client, the judge, the prosecutor, court staff was already seated. The judge reamed me out for making everybody wait, held me in contempt, kept me under "courtroom arrest" for 5 hours before he released me with another scolding. I got the case against my client dismissed.
I had walked into the courtroom 10 minutes early, by the way...
I have 30 days to respond to pre-trial discovery requests, or to appeal a judgment. 5 days to seek a new trial from Justice of the Peace court. 30 days prior to final trial ends pre-trial discovery. Temporary restraining orders are good for 14 days.
I could go on and on, but time and deadlines are just a thing. I have never been late to the airport!
I think about my end as the time when I have no possibility of helping anyone.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981