How to spend your time.
Each year, I’m invariably blindsided by the overwhelming, unguiding freedom that a clear summer schedule provides. And I’ve been very consistent in underutilising them.
I had my final exams for my BSc Theoretical Physics this May, and I’ve felt rather floaty in the interim, waiting to receive my final grades. When I stop and ask myself “What do I want to do?” I tend to come up quite short. I’ve written exhaustive lists of my interests to try and formulate the right direction to go in, but, as if adding cake to a stew, unfortunately the combination of loved things does not necessarily improve them.
When it comes to Physics, or to be precise: “when it comes to Physics and me”, it’s the discovery of those parts that I’d never heard of before until that day that really make it interesting. I didn’t know of the Geodestic Equation \(\ \frac{d^2 x^\mu}{d\tau^2} + \Gamma^\mu_{\nu\rho} \frac{d x^\nu}{d\tau} \frac{d x^\rho}{d\tau} = 0\) and it’s analogous nature to the second law (in curved spacetime, the apparent acceleration of a particle arises from the Christoffel symbols, which themselves are derived from the metric, meaning that curvature acts like a force). Or just how interpretable Lambda-CDM is with a bit of guidance. Or how everything seems like it’s a Harmonic Oscillator.
If it’s the unknown or unexpected or the discovered parts of things that you find out along the way that I or maybe we all enjoy, then how can anyone plan for happiness? So I’ve not figured out what I’d like to do yet.
"What kind of brain do you want to die with?"
- An A.I. Chatbot
The source of this quote being an A.I. makes me anxious, but I’ll decide not to read it as a threat. I think it’s a good question we should all ask ourselves, as it really gets to the heart of what you strive to be. I really like the energy of this quote, it revs me up somewhat - it makes me excited to “build the brain” I’ll die with. So, if I don’t know what I want to do I’ll focus on building the brain I want to die with. The new question then becomes: “What do you give your brain?”
“What should I learn?”
So I want to learn everything, of course, but I only have abouttt….
before I reach the end of the ride. Factor in the sleeping and the unknowable setbacks that will hit me in my future (hoping to keep all limbs at the minimum), and I give myself:
275000 hours
to work with. And worked with, they shall be: You spend most of your time at your job!
So, if I want to use my time effectively to have the brain I want, it would be nice to do that at work. So I need a job that gives me the brain that I want. Or, a job that allows me to accumulate the most time spent on my own pursuits, to build that brain. I think there’s probably two categories here:
- high-earning jobs quickly provides the means to no longer focus on gathering resources.
- The other is minimal working / no working: maximise the time you have for your own pursuits. No security when things go wrong unforch :/
The worst place to be, where we all are, is somewhere in the middle. You don’t really have enough free time to build the you that you want, and you probably don’t earn enough to access that time when you’re older.
But, hang on, what kind of brain I want is a very personal question and it won’t be the same for everyone, so we’d probably part ways at this juncture, we’d all follow different careers to become what we want to be. Congratulations if you believe you’ve found the right path.
I think it takes a lifetime to figure out what you want to spend your time on, and how you want to spend your time might change from day to day. IF it’s a fruitless idea to try and plan so far ahead, we should focus more on short term goals and those things we want to get done in ~ 1 year or so. That’s why I’ve been making LifeMap, because I think it’ll help me manage those things I want to do.