What I wish I knew when I was 18, er 26

A reader named Aatash set up a site called When I was 18 that asks cool people (like me) to answer the question, "What's the one thing you wish you knew when you were 18 years old?" My response is below.

(Go ahead, Aatash, put me right between Gretchen Rubin and Guy Kawasaki.)

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The Money Value of Time

My biggest regret from when I was 18 was treating time as preciously as a leftover bologna sandwich.

That’s not advice, just an observation.

I don’t want to pollute Aatash’s impressive collection of wisdom with a tired cliché about our most precious resource and blah blah.

It’s true, of course. Truer than I realized at 18. But probably less true than I currently think.

Time matters. Then again, if you must announce that something “Matters,” it probably doesn’t.

I keep a spreadsheet by my bed that reminds me that I’m getting old. And I have a blog that notifies me when I am a certain special number of days away from a milestone age. The idea is that if I am not aware of the fleetingness of time, and in some vague sense the imminence of death, then I am at risk of floating through life with such a passivity that calling it “life” may be a misnomer.

This temporal awareness has significant advantages. I plan. I reflect. I pay attention. I reflect on paying attention. I try new things. I plan on trying new things. This is what I take to mean living.

The cruel thing is that any advantage in one respect is likely to show up as a deficiency in another.

To be grotesquely simplistic, it seems that those who most highly value time take one of two forms:

1. Sure, pass me another beer, I’ll be dead soon.

2. No, I won’t chit chat with you, I’ll be dead soon.

Just as the drunk drinks pleasure, the businessman contributes contribution. The first type we offer treatment, and the second type we praise for their go-getter-ness. Neither is inherently good nor bad – useless concepts if there ever were any – but it ought to be clear that neither is without deficiencies.

If I could look into the future, I think I would tell my 26 year old self that finding value in life is not the same as finding value in time.