Kill Your Darlings

Like it or not, no matter how productive or efficient you think you are, there is no way you can ever complete everything you might want to complete, because there just isn't enough "time" in the day, the month, a life. It isn't about prioritizing what is important for us, it isn't about making more time, because that is impossible - all we can do is recognize that it is a losing game, so we have to decide on what are the most important things and with everything else we want...

Kill our darlings.

In writing, the idea of "murdering darlings" is to eliminate anything that doesn't add value to the story, whether it be extra words or sub-plots - even if the ideas themselves are great, we should be ruthless. So, perhaps we should be a little more heartless when it comes to the bits of our life that don't add to our own story.

One piece of advice I have heard at some time, was listing the top 20 or so most important things of our lives and then organizing them into a hierarchy. And then, cutting everything that doesn't make the top five. The reason is that those are the things that would distract us and draw our attention from putting effort into the five things we most want to spend our time on, essentially diluting our ability as we are spread too thin.

I have not yet contemplated what my top five would be.

But, since I believe that the most valuable thing in a lifetime is our relationships, at least one or two of them would have to be centered around building, developing and maintaining the important relationships in my life. Just like money, relationships can't be taken with us when we die and we can't pass them down to others through inheritance. They are momentary, contextual and tied to a single life - the epitome of personal. Any connection to others is an independent relationship that may form, but it will never be the same. Relationships are non-fungible. We earn them, we can trade on them, but we can't swap them.

But, the bigger question is considering what are the handful of things that we are going to focus our time and energy on throughout our lives, with our average eighty or so years. Perhaps in the past it was easier where there weren't as many options as there are today, or perhaps that is because we were content to live an average, to limit our range and be satisfied with the family, house, car and a holiday. Maybe now with not only the explosion of opportunity, but also the constant barrage of advertising in its many forms, we need to develop new strategies how to come to terms with the conflict of infinite choice, and finite resources.

No matter what we do, we are always living in scarcity. An "abundance mindset" doesn't factor in time and infinite choices, so like it or not, we are going to have to come to terms with limitation - even if we had all the money in the world. We can't be in two places at once. we can't put all of our attention on two points of focus. We can't have our cake, and eat it too.

We need to kill.

Maybe what a lot of us end up doing is trying a bit of everything, so that way at least we get to experience more range. But, does this lead to a better quality of experience or does it make us more aware of what we are missing and that we are constantly failing to put in as much effort as we would like? Would it be better to murder the majority of our targets of desire and pour more of ourselves into fewer activities?

There are many challenges in whittling down the list to the top five, because most likely there are interdependencies that we would have to consider, where for example one want requires resources that come through an unwanted activity. Pretty much, anything that takes money to provide the opportunity, requires getting that money somehow, with working being the most common form - something most people try to avoid.

Can we only do what we want in this life?

I don't think so. At least in the sense that we commonly see doing what we want. Of course, we could reduce our wants to the base form, but I believe that even then, we will still have too many wants to fit into a day, so even when we are doing what we want, we will still be faced with the current condition of not doing what we want also. The only way that we might be able to do this is to be in a state of unconscious flow all of the time, something that I don't think is possible. We are conscious beings, so we are going to evaluate our world and make comparisons, as we have no choice.

Maybe this is why so many turn to drugs.

Maybe with drugs we are able to "forget" all we are missing. Perhaps this is the attraction of entertainment activities too. It gives us reprieve from the reality of our world, one where we are always falling short, always facing scarcity of some kind to not get exactly what we want. And, even when we get what e want, we immediately recognize that we have more wants, so the cycle starts again.

No matter what we attempt to do in this life, the list is always going to be longer than our life itself. This means that we can never complete our wants and we will always have to leave opportunities on shelves and our journey incomplete. It is a journey that ends with death, but we can never reach the destination we want, because what we want doesn't fit into that lifetime.

Unless we want for nothing.

But is that living?

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]