S
Shaant
Guest
Restoring rhythm and presence in a life measured by deadlines.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
There were moments when it felt like time was just a ticking clock, a clock on a wall of a hospital corridor.
And when a cousin of mine got sick, I was struck by seeing one of my uncles lost in a never-ending stream of political videos on his phone, as though his anger-filled commentary could spare him from the built-up dread of uncertainty.
He could fill his day with these endless streams of debates so disconnected from our lives.
I felt the absence of a guy that would call me and share the cricket highlights, or float a film for us to watch.
But back then, it was at 6:00 p.m. that he would turn off everything to watch the news.
When I came to visit during that time, I stayed up longer than I should have just to stretch our few hours together when he could watch a movie with me.
I cherished those quiet evenings.
But I could not ignore the extent of his time being consumed by screens to the exclusion of social connection.
The urgency of loss in those moments hit me sooner than I anticipated.
At the time, it felt like time was a thief.
Every minute that I was not spent with a loved one, felt stolen from me.
And the more I wanted to try to hold on to those minutes, the quicker they slipped away.
Chasing freedom but living on repeat
Much later, when I had developed my own career, I felt like I had learned how to control time.
Working in fintech in another country, my life was organized into projects, meetings, and jam-packed schedules. I tried to convince myself that if I worked hard enough, I would eventually be able to buy my stability with all those hours staring at screens.
However, instead of freedom, I found myself stuck in a lot of repetition. I woke up, logged in, sped through emails, completed tasks, and dragged myself to bed.
Weeks upon weeks blurred together, and I kept telling myself I could make up for it on the weekends. But, they resulted in nothing more than pit stops to recover for the next five days.
I was aware that others around me found ways to cope. Some opted for earlier shifts in order to be finished by mid-afternoon and have a taste of daytime. Others dulled the pain with mindless scrolling and fast food.
A handful disciplined themselves into evening routines that required them to go straight from work wear to workout gear, refusing to flop on the couch.
I tried variations of all of these, but none addressed the deeper question gnawing at me.
Was I in fact exchanging my life for cash?
At that moment, the word burnout morphed from a concept to the mirror in which I was able to identify myself.
The lessons I carried from breaking points
I recalled one of my older relatives, a man who spent decades hustling for βfreedom.β
He moved here and there, city after city, searching for the opportunities. Feeding himself a story, telling himself this new contract would finally diminish the chaos.
As he hopped from location to location, I know it wore on him.
In the end, his marriage fell apart. There was stability everywhere but in his life. He presented no roots because he sacrificed them for the life he chased.
I was haunted by this story, because I saw myself reflected.
I had been sprinting after success all along, impressed Iβd finally convinced myself that motion could equal meaning.
Then I thought again about my uncle and his 8 hours of political debates.
His obsession was also a war against time. Rage allowed the illusion of control in a world that had stolen work, health, and uncertainty, most likely in that order.
His hours in front of a screen were hours quietly asking him to ask out of his life.
They both demonstrate the same truth.
What we feed time shapes the arc it takes.
Feed it with fear, and it becomes a cage.
Feed it hurry, and it becomes a blur.
Learning to let time walk beside me
The change happened when I stopped asking how I could beat time, and started asking how I could befriend it.
I started small. I deleted the apps that were eating my attention. I began to treat weekends as sacred time, not as a place to recover, but as a place to truly live.
I wrote βbucket listsβ of experiences, no matter how small, and then checked those experiences off, a hike, a meal made slowly, a class that I had registered for simply because I wanted to learn.
I started to realize that work was not my life. It was a ticket that might somehow help me fund the life I wanted to live.
I also began to pay attention to rhythm instead of hours.
Some days, I could feel my energy was sharper in the mornings, so I moved tasks that required creativity into the morning and kept the afternoons for admin.
Other days I was slightly drained, and rather than physically fight the wind into my sails, I let myself walk more slowly, knowing that time would not punish me, because time was no longer my enemy.
The more I did this, the more I could see that time had wanted to be a friend all along.
It made room for giggles during a film with relatives, even if only for two hours.
It got me to work when I felt very tired and rewarded me with shared meals, where I had the choice: cook or scroll?
It gave me perspective when I recognized that the true stability in my rhythm didnβt come from the obsessive act of locking hours into a calendar.
True stability came from trusting myself to meet life as it would unfold.
Now, as a 30-year-old man living back in India, with what feels to be a steady career and a girlfriend that I truly love, I no longer perceive time as a capitalist currency I needed to conserve or spend wisely in order to survive.
I see time as a rhythm to be tuned with, as a companion that walks beside me.
Time doesnβt steal.
Time observes.
How I Learned to See Time as a Friend, Not a Capitalist Enemy was originally published in Coping with Capitalism on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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