An insomniac's rant

 

I feel good when I write. It makes me happy, calms my mind down. The train of thoughts we have and the myriad of experiences we gain every day get lost and buried under piles of stress and our inherent forgetfulness. Before we can either cherish the moments or digest the lessons they teach us, our experiences become past and recede fast into faint memories. Writing helps us re-live those memories and also enables us to learn better from seemingly unimportant incidents in our daily lives. We are able to gaze into our life more meaningfully when we write because we think back and masticate our experiences.

I often contemplate writing. And I want to write on anything which comes to my mind. It helps me understand myself better, scrutinize my activities and my thoughts, my actions and my conversations with people around me. It also helps me think about broader plans in my life, about the things which I have procrastinated (which is not a good thing) and about how I want to feel about myself when I retire, if I am alive by that age, that is.  

Scarcity of ‘time’, however, pushes my writing desire down the priority list. I guess almost everyone is super busy in modern times. There is just too much work and too little time. There is more and more volume of work at office/college or whatever our profession is, and then there’re commitments on the family front. So, ‘time’, is just precious. As technology is helping us accomplish things faster and more comfortably, the time available at our disposal also disappears proportionately because technology provides us with infinite options to spend time in entertainment or in learning.

If I spend time writing for the sake of my happiness and feel-good factor, I need to sacrifice time for some other task, some pending work perhaps – maybe revising a student’s paper, or spending less time with my toddler, maybe not respond to those emails or not get some sleep. If I sit down to write, I inherently start writing about the scarcity of time which I (we!) face, and today is no exception. It’s nearly 4 am at night (morning!) and I am burning off some sleep to write what might seem a meaningless post.

Utilizing time in the most efficient manner is a critical component for achieving success, or even for finishing one’s work on time. And this is no rocket science. But, there are quite a lot of distractions. The mobile phone is the most dangerous factor which wastes time, in my opinion, because it is the quick gateway to all kinds of information and entertainment, be it social media which feeds on our intrinsic narcissism or the gazillion news channels that flood our brains with useless and pointless information. While the internet and the cell phone have eased gathering information and learning, sometimes I wonder if it is preventing us oftentimes from indulging in fundamental thinking or in critical analysis because information is a click away. With an ever-dwindling attention span and an ever-increasing need for instant gratification, the mobile phone is perhaps a reason why we, or at least I, have not been able to come up with a more productive schedule or an efficient work-time.

Sometimes I wonder the number of human-hours the world loses due to the use of mobile phone and internet, social media etc. Even if 10% of Indian population uses social media & the internet every day for 1 hour for useless chats and IQ-degrading forwards, it amounts to 130 million human-hours per day. I wonder if 130 million human-hours or even 1% of it (1 million human-hours per day) could be put to creative, constructive and useful pursuits, our country would probably be doing spectacular in terms of art, literature, science, business, and what not.

Life is not just about productivity and development, not just about creativity and hard work, but also about being happy, being able to do what one loves doing, and being able to spend time doing nothing – someone may argue, to counter my point. Sure, I agree. Hence, it’s my opinion that we’re losing millions of human-hours every day on meaningless chats and useless polarizing political debates. And my opinion is not a Biblical truth, it’s just an opinion.

Whether we lose so many human-hours or not is secondary, what is primary is that I am losing sleep and it’s now 4:17 am. If I am able to wake up early, I can at least revise that pending paper or reply to those pending emails from various people. Perhaps in my next post, I shall try to write on more meaningful topics. But I felt good now, writing random things after a long time.

(typos/grammatical mistakes are a consequence of writing fast with a sleepy brain, and without much thinking, and doesn’t reflect my English writing quality!)