{"id":665,"date":"2010-05-16T14:40:29","date_gmt":"2010-05-16T18:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/?p=665"},"modified":"2010-05-16T14:40:29","modified_gmt":"2010-05-16T18:40:29","slug":"the-preciousness-of-time-the-concept-of-the-meaningful-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/2010\/05\/16\/the-preciousness-of-time-the-concept-of-the-meaningful-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Preciousness of Time & The Concept of the Meaningful Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just come off one hell of a week.\u00a0 Each day’s work started by rising before 5am (at least once by 3am) and involved a rather large number of hours.\u00a0 In the case of Monday’s work, I played a 7-foot-tall costume character and had to navigate the obstacle-laden innards of the New York Stock Exchange, even moving to the famous the platform to clap as we rang the opening bell.\u00a0 Tuesday’s work meant a 4:15am departure to arrive by 5:48am for a calltime for the film\u00a0The Smurfs<\/em>.\u00a0 The other days were on the television show White Collar<\/em> doing crosses and finding time to rest as I started to succumb to my first cold in ages.<\/p>\n

When my days are taken up by work, I am left with just a few hours left in my day to get other things done\u00a0before I get to sleep.\u00a0\u00a0Oftentimes it’s not a few hours but simply an hour, or maybe even just a few minutes.\u00a0 In that precious amount of time, I have to cram things that are demanding on my life that I can’t do when I’m at work or asleep.\u00a0 It is at these times I can become irritable and grumpy, or I might\u00a0just spontaneously scream because I’m conflicted: I have two or more goals I need to achieve without enough\u00a0time to achieve them both, at least comfortably.<\/p>\n

It is in these extremely busy periods that my life becomes meaningful<\/em>.\u00a0 That is, nearly all of my minutes must work toward the achievement of my goals.\u00a0 When I’m spending my time toward the achievement of my goals, I\u00a0am relatively productive.\u00a0 If I do not spend these precious minutes toward the achievement of my goals, I waste my time and I limit my ability to achieve my goals.\u00a0 I\u00a0am relatively\u00a0unproductive.<\/p>\n

It is this value that is high in general semantics: Productivity<\/em>.\u00a0 Productivity, as I will choose to define it,\u00a0is progress toward the achievement of goals<\/em>.\u00a0 Time spent toward those achievements is meaningful<\/em>; time not spent toward those achievements is wasteful<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This would mean that the concept of the meaningful life is the concept of spending all of one’s time on this planet while alive toward the achievement of one’s goals.<\/p>\n

You probably don’t have much of a care to live a meaningful life when you are young.\u00a0 When you are young, you have what seems like an unlimited amount of time to live.\u00a0 Time does not bog you down.\u00a0 However, as you get older, you slowly start to become more aware of the limit of your time.\u00a0 Then you experience a death in the family, and you become all the more aware of the limits of time.\u00a0 Or you have a near-death experience.\u00a0 You quickly reshape your values.\u00a0 You start to care for your productivity, your progress toward the achievement of your goals.\u00a0 You realize if you waste your time, you won’t achieve your goals, but if you\u00a0appreciate<\/em> your time, you just might achieve them.<\/p>\n

I have to live a relatively meaningful life because of the obvious limits of time my work puts on me.\u00a0 My work often doesn’t tell me until the night before when I need to be up the next day.\u00a0 My work doesn’t tell me when I’ll be done.\u00a0 My work doesn’t tell me if I’ll be working tomorrow.\u00a0 If it does, it doesn’t tell me when I’ll know if I’m working tomorrow.\u00a0 My work may be on the same project or on a different project, and my being on a different project may take no sympathy on my having a good night’s rest.<\/p>\n

I am forced<\/em> to care how I\u00a0appreciate my time, because if I don’t care, my\u00a0goals can consume me.\u00a0 I can drown in unlaundered clothes, lack of food at home, marathon goals missed, webmastering backlogs, and a number of other productivity problems.\u00a0 I can mismanage others’ expectations about when I’ll be able to get something done for them, if at all.\u00a0 I can invite social problems.\u00a0 I can invite a whole heap of negative by not spending my time meaningfully.<\/p>\n

This is but a taste for now of the concept of the meaningful life.\u00a0 I have other things I need to be doing right now.\u00a0 Other meaningful things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just come off one hell of a week.\u00a0 Each day’s work started by rising before 5am (at least once by 3am) and involved a rather large number of hours.\u00a0 In the case of Monday’s work, I played a 7-foot-tall costume character and had to navigate the obstacle-laden innards of the New York Stock Exchange, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,7,17,10,71],"class_list":["post-665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-acting","tag-concept","tag-goals","tag-meaning","tag-the-meaningful-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}