An Average Tuesday > Vacation
Some thoughts on living deliberately
When I look back on my life so far, there is an interesting paradigm- the events which occurred to me years ago in childhood, high school, and university are far more memorable than my past 2 years working full time, despite my past 2 years being far more recent. I always wondered what the people meant when they said “wow my 20s felt like a blur” and now that phrase is staring me in my face.
So what changed? The most significant difference between my academic and current life is the prevalence of monotony. During school, everyday felt different despite being confined to the same weekly schedule. The morning math classes on Tuesday felt novel and the event organizing meetings on Thursday night felt exciting. There was this youthful magic of compressing a weeks worth of adult life into the chaos and the longevity of a given day.
Meanwhile, present days pass in a blur. The systematic repetitive actions of putting on the same sneakers, taking the same path to the office, working on the similar project, hitting the same gym, and taking the same path home to do the same chores have produced clones of a once unique schedule. Weeks and months have distilled into a singular day to be persisted into the dearth catalog of recent memory.
As I live more forgettable days, I am particularly frightened. What is the point of living a life if all I remember of it is a single day that I repeatedly perform on autopilot?
The solution is pretty straightforward: have more novel experiences (ie: travelling). Generating more “memory units”, these outings assign more memories to the same block of time when compared to a monotonous routine. This makes time appear slower. It’s no wonder that week long vacations feel significantly more lengthy than their work week counterparts.
But, I can’t stomach this. I refuse to believe that life is to be defined by a set of highlights: special moments preluded by an increasing amount of anticipation and followed by a period of profound joy before the devils of the status quo return. If a year is comprised of 52 weeks, why should the year only be remembered by the 20 vacation days I meticulously allocated towards these highlights? Where did the rest of the 48 weeks go? Is that time not an opportunity to make life exciting and create more invaluable memory units just like the times where I used the sacred PTO?
Given that spent time cannot be re-spent, every moment is distinctly precious; each passing moment is an unique and nonfungible instance in a brief waking existence sandwiched between two periods of mysterious eternal slumber. As the seconds pass and the cursor blinks while I process what to write next, time moves forward, continuously discarding the present into the past, an increasing pile called history. There will never be a July 11, 2024 8:32pm. That time is simply gone, spent by me crystallizing my superfluous and elusive thoughts into a digital representation.
I have come to believe that life is not to be defined by the poignant highlights but the accumulation of the average day. Sure, the Pareto principle may apply in favour of large unique experiences- 20% of life being attributed to 80% of life’s meaning- but there is still the 80% of life that has the potential to grow into something more meaningful. By taking these common days for granted, a large proportion of life is ignored.
This shift in prioritization is best summarized by Tim Ferris’s quote “crushing an average Tuesday.” In this sense, the ambition is not to have high highs, but to have higher baselines. What does a really good average Tuesday look like? Given that life is really just a string of average days interspersed with notable memories, if the meaning and happiness of an average Tuesday can be maximized, the meaning and happiness of life itself can be maximized.
And yes those highs will still exist and be cherished while an average Tuesday is crushed. But who needs help being told to vacation and make profound memories?
Following this logic, I am starting to approach a given average day differently. Some actionable steps I have been experimenting have been:
Making a deliberate decision of what I will do for a given amount time. Time should never be killed by doing any activity even if such activity is traditionally “productive.” Passive commitments towards everyday activities such as reading, grabbing drinks, and sleeping are shifted to the forefront of low stakes speedy decision making.
Being ignorant towards what is not important. Just as there is an active decision towards what I want to spend my waking time on, there is a deliberate decision towards what to ignore. Time is simply too brief for me to engross myself in all the information available. I am perhaps one of the most clueless people when it comes to pop culture (I only found out Dune was a big deal two months ago). I am also getting better at saying no to what I am not interested in.
Living in the present. This means being mindful of what I am doing at a given point in time and removing the distractions which can tempt my attention away. Installing feed blockers for social media and disabling recommendations for Youtube have been game changers. Also, I am now more accepting of my bad texting tendencies.
Exploring what I am interested in. Being among the unlucky many of still not knowing his passions, I reject the concept of working just for sustenance. Work does not have to have a negative connotation. Work does not have to be “work.” Perhaps more controversially, work-life balance does not have to be a concept if work itself is an interest. Work-life balance just becomes balance if work is synonymous with life. The amount of balance can then be debated.
Still being aggressive for the opportunities of novel experiences. Despite having a larger focus towards the regular day, I still treat novel experiences as sacred events, actively and sometimes spontaneously pursuing them even if there may be reasonable excuses not to (there are always reasons not to).
Though, it is still to be seen what will be the longer term consequences of these steps, I now feel more optimistic about shaping my day to day. Yes, there may be a slight existential feeling looming over the day to day, but there is an inspiring sense of agency that I am in control- whether that be real or a mirage- and that is a tradeoff I’m willing to make.