On The Waste Of Time
Wasting my time was always something I feared. Time is a scarce resource, making every second important. I fear that the way I'm using it is not the best sometimes. Obviously, there's not a right way to spend it. No one is telling you how to live your life. Still, this feeling comes to me frequently. Looking to it now, I see good things in it. It is clear that we shouldn't avoid dissapointments. They, somehow, serve as a pathway to reflection. It is through them that we can define how to continue.
For me, time wisely spent is the time we pass doing things to elevate our spirit (here I don't mean the traditional concept of spirit, but a rather symbolical figure). There are activities that make us engage more in the world and in ourselves. This is what makes me love mathematics. By studying it, I learn about myself and the world around me. Mathematics is about beauty, afterall (see this this post in Thricegreat's Webpage on beauty).
Yesterday, I was watching a news report about Antônio Carlos Jobim, the composer of 'The Girl From Ipanema' and many other bossa nova songs, who died 30 years ago. There, for a brief moment, in an old interview of him that I couldn't find later (I can't link the full news eport too), a phrase of his caught me. There, he explains that, in his view, there are different types of music, for every single situation, and what he liked to do was composing music to 'approximate of God'. This view of art is what I see as elevating one's spirt. This is contradictory since I'm an atheist, however, as I've mentioned, I view the concepts of 'spirit' or 'God' as pure symbolical concepts.
Morever, I also think time shouldn't be viewed as a commodity, nevertheless sometimes it is unavoidable to do that because of the system we live in. Portraying this dimension of reality (as it happens with space) as a product transforms our entire existence in an asset. My view of wasting time becomes a paradox because of this, since it portrays time as a commodity, however it seeks to avoid things that consume your time as product.
In short, spend your time wisely since you'll never go back to what you were.