I spent forty-seven minutes this morning watching videos of people I don’t know doing things I don’t care about, knowing full well that I have exactly seventeen days to finish a project that matters, knowing that my father calls less frequently now because at eighty-three he’s running out of conversations, knowing that my son’s childhood is disappearing one bedtime story at a time.
The mathematics are brutal and clear: I have perhaps thirty more summers, maybe fifteen thousand more dinners, roughly three hundred more meaningful conversations with my mother. Yet I scroll through an endless feed of strangers’ breakfast photos as if time were an inexhaustible resource rather than the most finite thing I possess.
Why do we waste time we know we don’t have?
Maybe it’s because acknowledging the scarcity would make every choice feel impossibly heavy. If I truly internalized that this afternoon will never come again, that these hours with my family are numbered, that every mundane Tuesday is irreplaceable, the weight of that awareness might crush me under its significance.
It’s easier to pretend time is infinite, to act as if we have endless reserves of moments to squander, as if tomorrow will somehow contain more hours than today did. We live in elaborate denial of our own mortality, not because we don’t know we’ll die, but because we can’t function while constantly calculating how much life we have left.
But there’s something else at work—a strange rebellion against the very preciousness of time. When we’re told something is rare and valuable, part of us wants to prove we’re above such concerns, that we’re wealthy enough in moments to spend them carelessly. We waste time as a form of psychological luxury, as proof that we have enough to waste.
I think of the hours I’ve lost to meaningless arguments on the internet, defending positions I don’t even care about to people I’ll never meet. The evenings vanished to television shows that didn’t entertain or enrich me, watched out of habit rather than choice. The weekends dissolved in errands that could have waited, social obligations that drained rather than nourished, busy work that felt productive while accomplishing nothing meaningful.
Each wasted hour feels insignificant in the moment—what’s one evening? What’s one afternoon? But they accumulate like compound interest in reverse, depleting the account of available life while we tell ourselves we’ll start paying attention tomorrow, next week, when things slow down, when we have more time.
The cruelest irony is that we often waste time precisely when we’re most aware we don’t have it. Facing a deadline, we suddenly discover seventeen new ways to procrastinate. Knowing our parents are aging, we postpone visits. Recognizing our children’s fleeting childhood, we choose work calls over bedtime stories.
Maybe this is how we cope with the terror of finite time—by proving to ourselves that we’re not governed by its limits, that we’re free to squander what we can’t afford to lose. It’s a form of psychological rebellion against the ultimate constraint, even though the rebellion only tightens the chains.
Or maybe we waste time because we’re afraid of what would happen if we truly valued it. If every hour mattered, then every choice would matter. If every conversation could be our last with someone we love, then every word would carry impossible weight. If every day were truly irreplaceable, then living would become almost unbearably significant.
Sometimes I catch glimpses of what it would feel like to live with full awareness of time’s scarcity—usually in moments of crisis or beauty when the preciousness becomes undeniable. A child’s fever that reminds you how fragile everything is. A sunset that stops you mid-sentence. A phone call that changes everything.
In those moments, the waste feels obscene. All those hours spent in distraction while life—real life, irreplaceable life—happened around me. All those opportunities for connection, presence, meaning that I traded for the temporary comfort of not having to face how little time we actually have.
But maybe the waste isn’t entirely waste. Maybe some of it is necessary—psychological downtime, emotional rest, the human equivalent of fallow fields that need to lie empty before they can grow something worthwhile again. Maybe we need some meaningless hours to appreciate the meaningful ones.
The question isn’t how to eliminate all waste—it’s how to waste consciously rather than unconsciously, how to spend time intentionally rather than by default, how to recognize the difference between rest and escape, between necessary downtime and empty distraction.
Tonight I want to try something radical: I want to spend one hour as if it were my last hour, not in panic or desperation, but with the full attention and appreciation that scarcity deserves. I want to see what becomes possible when I stop pretending I have endless time and start living like someone who knows exactly how precious each moment is.
Because maybe the arithmetic of denial only works until you do the real math—and realize the equation was never in your favor to begin with.