What do you live for?

It sounds like the slogan of some kind of military recruitment drive, but it’s a phrase that’s been popping up in my mind a lot recently.

The question, and endless variations of it, has been asked by many people (just check out google), and probably all throughout history. Perhaps it is a question that most people ask themselves at one point in their life. Or perhaps it is a question that appears more commonly today than ever before, because we have somehow managed to strip much of the meaning from our lives through our overabundance of convenience and comfort.

There are many ways to answer it, depending on your perspective. But for me this question is one I tend to ask whenever I find myself in one my habitual patterns of media over-consumption that, for me, signify a downward spiral in my life.

When I find myself simply moving from day to day doing only the bare minimum, and every other moment of my time is absorbed by the need to ‘fill the gaps’ rather than actually doing anything productive. Work, watch TV, sleep, work, repeat. Sound familiar?

We work when he have to, get paid what they allow us to have, with that money we buy our allotted rations and then we eat and consume the media the algorithms pump in out in their constant feeds, designed to keep us sitting in our chairs, to keep us anxious and depressed and just a little bit hopeful, so that we have just enough strength to pull ourselves out the chair, and go to sleep only to do exact same thing tomorrow.

Now, I don’t want to talk about the conspiracy theories about whatever dark forces and secretly controlling the governments of the world, or how our education system in the west is apparently designed to produce the modern corporate equivalent of robots and nothing else, or any other range of conspiracy-esc topics that, the longer you look into them, the more it seems they might have a point. I could, but I won’t. I have certain negative opinions of modern society that some people may not share, I am not at heart a conspiracy theorist, but some of them do make a lot of sense to me in a certain light.

But what I will say is this.

It is not mankind’s natural tendency to be kind and lovely. Just like the world tends toward decay with time, and even the prettiest things age and rot. So too does the human heart and mind. Just like a garden, our hears gets overgrown when we stop being tended to. We get lazy, we get selfish and we get down right unpleasant, among other things.

Evil and decay creep into our lives, whenever we stop actively pursuing good. This is what I have noticed.

Relationships can get worn and frayed if you do not remember to be kind to each other. Friends fall out of touch when you do not bother to communicate or spend any time with them. Muscles and skills deteriorate when you don’t use them. Good habits, quickly turn into bad habits when we don’t keep up our routines. Bed times get later and later, homes increasingly less tidy, and those vegetables in your fridge will just keep rotting if you don’t do something with them.

And so, with this in mind, I would like to reflect on a particular area of rot in my own life that I have noticed in recent days and would like to do something about.

Time rot.

This is perhaps not the best name for it, but it’s the best I could come up with for the moment.

The question is simple. What do you spend your time doing?

Most likely a large chunk of it will be spent doing the things you need to do in order to live, working, eating, sleeping, studying, making sure your children haven’t killed themselves or each other. But what about your leisure time? The time you have to sit down and relax, and let the world take care of itself for a few moments while you catch your breath.

Now I’m not here to tell you how to use your time, or how to live your life. But just to ask you, how do you want to use your time? Do you use your time in the ways you would like? Or do you, like myself, increasingly find yourself using up your limited time on small meaningless, time wasting activities, like watching things just to fill the time, or aimlessly scrolling through social media?

My opinion is roughly this. You could say that the things you spend your time on, equate to how important that thing is in your life. The things you spend your time on, are the things you live for. Sort of.

There was a period in my life when I spent much of my time, hours and hours of my day, watching shows on the internet. They were fun shows, enjoyable and there was nothing wrong with watching them per say. But it felt like I was doing nothing else but watching TV, and consuming endless amounts of media just to feel that vague lack of emptiness. Was that really what I wanted to live for? Consuming media, wasting time, and getting that increasing illusive dopamine kick that comes from such addictive activities?

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Now there is a whole science about these things, and the dopamine that they produce inside your brain, which is very fascinating, and very interesting for those who want to now. I’m won’t go into detail, because there are many people who can explain it better than me, but here’s the situation as I understand it. Dopamine is the brain’s reward system. You do a good thing, and brain sends out chemicals that make you feel good, so you’re more likely to do it again next time. It’s a great biological system we have, when it’s working well, but it’s also a primary driving force behind addictions. Some things produce a massive kick of dopamine, certain substances, like caffeine and sugar to name a few, and behaviours such as playing games, which make you feel amazing in the short term, but then you tend to feel worse a while later when the feeling wears off and your dopamine level drops back down. Now you feel all empty and hollow and depressed… so you do it again, and for a short while you feel better. The cycle continues.

Now that was a crude summary, and I don’t want to go into addictions any more here, as, like I said, there are people out there who can explain it much better, and far more accurately than I can.

But it is something that is good to be aware of I think. There are some of my own behaviours, that I feel I need to do, solely because I feel empty without them, even if it’s something my conscious mind does not even like, or want to do. I don’t like those feelings, they are dangerous, and very annoying.

Now, I don’t know what your situation is, and how much time you spend doing what, and frankly it’s none of my business. But it certainly is yours.

These days algorithms and news feeds actively try to keep you watching, keep you scrolling (she says writing blogs on the internet…) to eat up your time, and give you just enough of a dopamine kick so you don’t look away. This of course is so that they can force as many ads down your throat as they can possibly get away with, or extort money from you some other way.

Your time is a valuable resource, they know that. Do you?

Watch your show, live your life, that’s fine. But remember to keep on eye on what you spend your precious time on, so it doesn’t slip away from you and start to rot.

What do you spend you free time doing? Would you like to be doing instead?

Personally I like creating things. I got sick of the fact that I was always watching things and never making any of my own. It felt like I was living solely to consume. Consume, consume, consume, and never do anything else. I felt like I had to keeping watching things, keep feeding my brain some kind of media, to feel like my life was complete. I felt empty without being fed something by some algorithm. When I realised what was going on, it horrified me.

What did I want to live for? Certainly not to consume, living to only consume what is being fed to you sounds like a pretty boring life. Images of slaughter houses come to mind.

I wanted to create things. I wanted to create more than I consume.

Maybe some of the things I make can help a few people, maybe make them laugh, or brighten their day in whatever small way I can, if so that’s amazing. But even if nobody sees the things I make now, I still wanted to make them. My soul feels better when I make things. I get a fun sense of achievement when I make something. That’s dopamine the healthy way. Also I can learn things, experiment with things and increase my skills by trying and doing, and often failing, so that I can make better things and maybe one day, make somebody’s day brighter.

That was one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. I was something I always wanted to do, and so I figured I could try it. Even if nobody reads it, it’s been fun.

So, my word of unasked for advice, is to just keep an eye on what you do. And ask if that’s what you want to be doing? Sometimes we don’t have much choice, or we have very limited time to speak of, that happens too. But just beware, and ask yourself, what do you live for?