The question implicit in many people’s early January ponderings is essentially this: how do I – or how should we, collectively – plan to use the coming year? Your answer might involve getting fit, or finding a soulmate, or making a million dollars selling virtual kale snacks online to idiots. Or it might focus on activism, or just on getting by, and staying moderately sane in trying times. But it’s worth noting that all these different goals share the same underlying assumption, one so basic it’s easy to miss: that time is best approached, in the first place, as something you use.
But is it? The problem with treating every year (or week, or hour) as something you’re supposed to put to use is that you end up living permanently focused on the future. The more strenuously you try to get something out of life, the more emotionally invested you become in reaching the point at which you’ve succeeded in doing so – which is, necessarily, never now. In other words: try too hard to make life meaningful, and it becomes impossible to derive any meaning from your present-moment life.
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