Temporal Balance: Youth
As with many aspects of human nature, there are two conflicting goals in terms of time management for many of us: prioritizing the short term and the long term. It’s not easy to balance the two, and although I have only lived for 16 years, it seems to me like there is a steep price to pay for failure. If you prioritize having fun in the short term and let your grades slip away, it may impact your ability to maintain a financially stable life and be able to afford the items that you want. There’s also a powerful materialistic culture that motivates people to think that they need more items to be happy. Personally, I think the goal of making money is to earn freedom, to not be dependent on pleasing others to make a living and to be able to live your life in any style you wish. But either way makes use of wealth, and prioritizing the short term too much can irreparably damage your prospects of wealth, especially if you lack the creativity necessary for some kind of startup that can make money without the credentials offered by an advanced college education or good grades.
When you prioritize the short term, you can also damage your physical health. This obviously includes eating junk food and not working out, but it’s not such that you can make up one year of not working out next year. The issue is that our brains become more set in their ways as we grow older, and we become less adaptable and more reliant on established routines. So if the routines we use in our youth are insufficient, we can’t simply make it up later because it will be harder to change them.
Although it’s less often talked about, it seems to me like there is a remarkable danger in only thinking about the long term as well. As humans, we have the capacity to conceptualize the past and the future, but we only really know the present, and if you are always looking into the future, you might be missing out on a lot. Youth comes into the picture again here, because if you spend all of your youth optimizing for later, you might find out that you missed out on a lot. For example, your chance to bond with easily-made friends through school or become an amazing athlete might disappear with your youth, in spite of everything you’ve done to prepare for the future.
So it’s clear that a balance is needed, but what kind of balance? Well, I try to manage both in the present by mixing both working hard and playing hard. I also try to take advantage of my youth to a small degree by devoting more free time to, for example, playing difficult video games (which I’ve talked about before) instead of more passive activities like watching movies that can still be intellectually engaging, but which don’t require any sort of youth to participate in. And to be clear, I still think that there are some active hobbies that are suited to older people as well, like having philosophical conversations, where people benefit from experience rather than liveliness and vigor.
To me, the goal of all of this is to figure out how to not waste youth. Youth is a gift, and a temporary one at that; trying to make the best use of it seems like a worthy use of energy. But by trying to optimize youth, are you wasting your youth? I wonder…
When writing this, I am briefly reminded of the Greek gods, who I enjoyed learning much about when I was younger. Many gods and goddesses are often pictured as eternally young, both through their appearance and their liveliness. However, that youth can sometimes show through their flaws, like Zeus’ immature affairs with other women that he knows put them on Hera’s naughty list. Youth might be a gift in some respects, but it has tradeoffs in experience, naivete and wisdom that are worth remembering. Maybe the real goal, especially in this information age, is to take advantage of the knowledge of other human beings to try and embrace the advantages of youth while using their experience to help combat the lack of your own. After all, when I become an old man, no one will be able to give me the ability to become the best athlete in the world, but even as a boy, I can learn far more than I could ever experience myself in my own lifetime and apply that knowledge to my daily life.