Apologies in advance for the cringe

I want to live intentionally and I want to live authentically. Because "so much wasted time" is a realization I’d rather not have when it’s too late to do anything about it.

Time isn’t a mortal enemy, but it is a finite medium that we’ve become incredibly efficient at losing. It’s not just about one mistake or a series of bad decisions but rather the way entire spans of life can simply slip away in a blur of existing without being present. I think our modern world is designed to occupy us, only rewarding us for defaulting into paths we didn't exactly choose for ourselves.

It is easy to lose time now, not through some dramatic failure in our lives, but through a concatenation of unknowing, unwilling surrenders. Five minutes becomes an hour, then a break becomes an entire evening. We trade hours for a feed that offers no intellectual growth, no creative spark, and no real memory. Eventually when you snap out of it, you realize that while your time was spent, nothing meaningful was actually gained, and you feel drained and empty.

The part that actually unnerves me isn’t just that time passes, but that it can pass without leaving a trace. Living intentionally doesn’t mean every second has to be "productive" in a traditional sense, but rather just being aware. It’s the difference between letting your time be taken from you and choosing how to spend it.

On paper, a lucky life is about 5,200 weeks. It sounds like a vast estate until you begin the audit. When you take away the mandatory obligations like sleep, work, and the maintenance of survival, the remaining "leisure time," the time that is truly yours, is now down to 298 weeks. And yet, we often spend that remaining sliver performing. We worry about how we are perceived or whether we fit into structures that were never meant for us.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Imitation is suicide." While that usually reads as a call to implore people to find their creativity, in this context of time, it is more of a warning. To spend your 298 weeks managing how others perceive you, or conforming to a standard to avoid critique, is to commit a slow end of your own personal brand.

If people perceive you through their own narrow lens, that is their prerogative. It is not your responsibility to correct their vision, and it is most definitely not worth subjecting or taxing your limited time to suit their expectations. As Emerson advocates, the only thing that is ultimately sacred is the integrity of your own mind. In other words, just be authentically you. ♥

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods because he "wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." He wanted to "suck out all the marrow of life" so that when he reached the end, he wouldn't discover he hadn't lived or missed his own life. Despite the fact that another reason why he did this was to avoid taxes, I think there is something to learn here. For Thoreau, "living" was a physical and mental engagement with reality, unaltered by what society deemed important.

Living for the "marrow" really means reclaiming those 298 weeks and living for things that actually leave a mark in your life:

• Intellectual growth and learning not for a grade or a career, but because of pure curiosity
• Creativity and imagination
• Companionship and adventure, prioritizing the "real" over the "easy." A conversation that challenges you or a risk that exhilarates you is worth more than a thousand hours of digital noise.

Choosing the real, to live more deliberately is to reclaim the habit of questioning. It means doing things because they are actually fulfilling and generate exponential amounts of happiness in your life. It’s really all about:

Intellectual independence: deciding what matters before the crowd decides for you Refusing to perform: recognizing that your time is too limited to spend it as a character in someone else’s script Being present: realizing that a moment of unpolished living is the only thing you truly own

At the end of it all, I don’t think anyone wishes they had conformed more or scrolled longer. The goal is to look back and know that you were the one making the choices and being imaginative, adventurous, and a little unpredictable.

So so corny, I know, but I want to spend my time being fully myself. I want to choose what feels authentic over what looks right because at the end of it, the only thing that really belongs to you is the time you actually claimed.