Am I Making The Most Of My Time?

Or: chronophobia and the paralysing dichotomy of doing too much and nothing at all

Chronophobia: the fear of time and moving forward; the fear of time passing

Sometimes I get this weird restless feeling. It usually comes from nowhere; I could be busy doing something or just sitting around on the couch. But it’s this sudden realisation that I’m doing…nothing. And it’s the want to do so many things at once. To be somewhere else, to jump into the future and already be the rounded, perfect version of me I envision in my head. And a lot of this feeling is contingent on the need to be successful. I think about how I should be doing whatever I’m doing quicker so I can move on to the next task, or how I should maximise my time, even my breaks, to be productive. I can’t let myself have a second to spare because I’m afraid that it’s gone to waste.

The idea that I’m wasting time occupies my mind pretty much every day. It’s almost paradoxical: I think about how much time I waste and waste my time thinking. It’s not so much of me thinking I’m lazy either, but moreso that I could be doing something with that time and I’m not using it properly. I can see the seconds fading away in my head. There’s this invisible clock and I can hear the soft ting and all I can think about is how time is ticking away. There’s so much that I want to do—but then, when faced with this, I’m stuck doing nothing because I don’t know where to start. And the cycle continues. And what ends up happening is this paralysing, not so much just fear, but maybe a mix with procrastination, that follows. I put off everything I want or need to do because, again, if I don’t do a good job, is it even worth doing?

I don’t want to blame social media for everything, but when it comes down to it, it really does play such a massive part in our day to day lives. Everyone looks so busy—with school, hanging out, concerts, travelling—and it’s this picture perfect painting that spirals you into thinking your own life is somehow inadequate. Like some weird version of FOMO. How do I do that? How can that be me? It looks too hard, could I even do it? My work is done up from the start. I get too scared to even try, and I stop before I even begin. Having recently turned 21, I feel this more and more. Where should I be by now? Do I even have enough time to do what I want to do? Do I have the skill?

But the reality is that social media is a cultivation of someone’s best moments that ignore all the gritty parts of their lives. Social media is an image in itself of itself of what we want to be: of what we share, post, write about. Am I objectively wasting my time or do I think I am based off of others’ standards? Standards that don’t relate to me? I literally just started my twenties. Of course I have no idea what I’m doing. I talked about this in another post, but there’s this expectation for you to know exactly what career you want and what you want to study and you aren’t given a lot of time to figure it out. The world is still relatively new to me.

What does it even mean to waste time, anyway, and what’s an activity worth doing? That’s really the question here—and how you define time well spent. Capitalism and the job industry is a massive factor (which, incidentally, is the theme in most of the chapters in Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is In The Library). Work defines us and entrenches on our lives and even on your days off it’s hard to think about anything else besides work. I’ll sit down and read a book and feel bad about it because it’s like I’m doing nothing. But if I’m learning things from the book…is that not doing something?

Why does purpose only have to come from our jobs? Is reading in it of itself—or our hobbies, not enough? Not everything you do has to have a purpose and it should be enough to just exist outside of that. Getting out of that ‘grind’ mindset is really difficult when it seems like the whole world revolves around it, but hopefully I can shed a little light on it through this post.