Life is short.

Life is Short

• Life is actually short.”

• have children

  • Convert time, a continuous quantity, into a discrete quantity
  • There are only 52 weekends I can spend with my 2 year old.
  • If the magic of Christmas lasts from age 3 to 10, there are only eight times a child can be seen experiencing it.

• Life is too short for x.”

  • Bullshit.
    • The definition of bullshit is “life is too short.”
    • Unnecessary meetings, pointless arguments, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

• There are two ways this kind of thing can enter your life:

  • Is it forced upon you?
  • It is deceiving you.

• To some extent you have to put up with the bullshit forced upon you by circumstances. You need to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. In fact, the law of supply and demand guarantees the following: the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. It may be that less bullshit is being forced upon you than you think. There has always been a trend of people quitting their default jobs and going to places where life feels more authentic, living in places where there are fewer opportunities in the traditional sense. This may become more common.

You can do it on a smaller scale without moving. The amount of time spent on bullshit varies from employer to employer. Many large organizations (and many small ones) are immersed in it. But if you consciously prioritize avoiding bullshit over other factors like money and prestige, you can probably find an employer who will not waste your time.

If you are a freelancer or small firm, you can do this at the individual customer level. Firing or avoiding toxic clients will reduce the bullshit in your life more than it will reduce your income.

But while a certain amount of bullshit will inevitably be forced upon you, the bullshit that sneaks into your life to trick you is no one’s fault but your own. And yet the bullshit you choose may be harder to eliminate than the bullshit that is forced upon you. Whatever lures you into wasting your time must be really good at deceiving you. An example that is familiar to many people is an online argument. When someone argues against you, they are in a sense attacking you. Sometimes the attack is quite overt. Your instinct when you are attacked is to try to defend yourself. But like many instincts, this instinct is not designed for the world today. Paradoxically, it is often better not to protect yourself. Otherwise, these people are literally taking your life. (2)

Arguing on the internet is only incidentally addictive. There are more dangerous things than that. As I have written before, a byproduct of technological advances is that the things we love tend to become more addictive. This means that we will have to make a conscious effort to avoid addiction.

As well as avoiding bullshit, one should actively look for what is important. However, what is important to different people is different, and most people have to learn what is important to them. Some people are lucky and realize early on that they like math, taking care of animals, or writing, and figure out how to spend a lot of time on it. Most people, however, start out in life with a mixture of important and unimportant things and gradually learn to distinguish between them.

For young people especially, much of this confusion is caused by the artificial situation in which they find themselves. In middle school and high school.

Translated at www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/人生は短い using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.