The fear of not having enough time

“If only I had more time, then I could do what I actually wanted to do..” I think I’ve lost count of the number of times I must’ve said this. The fear of not having enough time, and ultimately being left unsatisfied by modern life, is real.

Time seems to be this limited, finite thing that we can’t seem to manipulate or find the perfect formula to use to our advantage. Often we blame our routines – work gets the most votes for favourite scapegoat. “By the time I get home from work, all I want to do is eat dinner, watch TV and go to bed.”

I’m guilty of doing this, too. A 1.5-hour commute one-way is oddly draining, even if you’re just sitting on a train for most of it. But now that we’re stuck in the middle of a pandemic at home, we can’t use the “there’s no time” excuse.

But still, at the start of this lockdown in July, I found myself filling up my newfound time – not with things I had always wished to do more of if the holy grail of “more time” was available – but with TV! The electromagnetic box that I know saps my energy and which I usually limit to one episode per week during no lockdown.

But I went from watching 1-2 episodes of TV per week to sometimes 4 episodes a day. Staring at the TV for this long numbed my brain and made me even more tired than the commute, so why did I keep doing it?

I honestly have no idea. All I know is that it took a conscious effort to pull myself away from the hypnotising box and put myself back into activities I like doing, like writing and playing the piano.

But something was clear; it seems like when I finally do have more time, I waste it or complain of boredom.

It made me come to this conclusion: The excuse “I don’t have time” is my personal cop out. I have plenty of time, even on the days when I used to commute to the office. It’s just that I often use the time doing stuff I don’t plan to do – just wasting time.

It’s important to relax, but there’s a difference between watching a couple of eps of Indian Matchmaking and binge-watching the whole series in a day (*clears throat,* just a random example, obviously).

Because time is finite. The average lifespan of a person is around 30, 000 days. If you have things in life you plan to do, that you want to discover, achieve, or experiment with, you’re on a timer, just like the rest of us.

It seems like when we have more time (e.g. on the weekend, during lockdown) time feels infinite and expanded, but that’s just an illusion.

Time is bendy, and there’ll be periods that it seems elongated and stretched and limitless and fat (like now, in lockdown). But there’ll be times in our life when it seems as long as the circumference of a grain of sand, during busy periods.

Having this perspective – I find, anyway – helps me better appreciate time when it’s all stretchy. This is my number one method for not getting bored – thinking about times in my life when I’ll have what feels like “no time” in the future, and making the most of now.

I do this a lot – thinking of future me who will one day not have any time for myself (like when I, one day, have a baby) – then switching back to the present and feeling grateful for this abundance of time for myself. I’ve been told (lovingly) that this is a bit weird, but hey, it works for me!

While it may be hard to imagine now, there will be a point when we look back at this lockdown and be jealous of our past selves for having all this time.

Lockdown won’t be forever, and so we have to hug the chubby, cute body of generous-bellied time we have now and start doing the things we’ve always put off because there was no time before.