The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [72]
It’s web access and social networking. If a watched kettle never boils then I promise it only takes a second while you’re checking Stephen Fry’s status updates (which are unendingly delightful, BTW). The constant distraction of being connected is robbing us of our time. More specifically, it’s robbing our AWARENESS of time. Ultimately, if an hour feels like ten minutes, isn’t that important? What good is an hour if you lack the awareness to experience it? I can recount numerous times in 2010 when I was playing Fieldrunners and realized “Well, whaddaya know? I’ve been doing this for three hours.”
Concentrated game blocks aren’t the enemy, but filling every available minute connected to a computing device in some way can be. Notice how, when you start downloading a file, you get an “estimated time remaining”? How often is it accurate to absolute time? Almost never. It may jump from “an hour remaining” to “4 minutes remaining” and everywhere in between. This is due to a variety of factors, naturally, like connection speed, traffic on the server in your area, and traffic on the server from which you’re downloading the file. The point is that web time is intrinsically distorted, and it has interesting parallels with how we perceive time while connected to it.
I’m not recommending a total freeze. If you want time to go faster, by all means distract yourself at all times. Your life will soar by. Just know, though, that if you feel compelled to always be distracted you might be avoiding something emotionally, and you might want to have a chat or several with a therapist. It’s humanly counterintuitive to wish your life to expire faster. On the contrary, if you want to feel time crawl, go live in a cabin for a month with no technology. Or get arrested and go to jail. Ya see, prison could actually FREE you from your self-constructed TIME PRISON in a flippity-floppity twist at the end and blah blah blah M. Night Shyamalan.
While pursuing your goal of time-lordery, you shouldn’t have to take one or the other extreme, but as long as you know that you can extend the sensation of time by unplugging at regular intervals and simply becoming more AWARE of it, you shouldn’t feel as cheated of your minutes and hours when popular social markers like “New Year’s Eve” or “my fucking birthday” come around. Be mindful to inject some nuggets of quality into your time to enhance its value.
CHARACTERCIZE
Spend one day with no Internet and see if you feel a difference in the length of the day.
BECOME AN EVIL GENIUS
Yes! YOU! The time has come for you to take your place as a plotter of plots and a doer of deeds, all under the auspices of a grand master plan. Evil geniuses get an exceptionally bad rap, but any reasonable person would have to admit that they drive a good story forward because they are momentum in human (usually) form. Granted, some can be a pain in the ass—what with their carelessly snuffing out innocent lives in the selfish pursuit of their desires and all—but when you dissect their mental DNA, you find an EXCELLENT time manager that is willing to stop at nothing to achieve greatness.
Evil geniusing has a long and storied history dating back millions of years to Davor Tosselrack, an australopith who threatened to break the sun with a rock were the sum of one million unmarked tubers not paid to an off-continental account. He was later devoured by hyenas in a bar fight. I may have made a lot of that up, but one thing is for sure: Nerds make great evil genii. An evil genius is nothing more than a Nerd with a tragic revenge story.
NERD + TRAGEDY = EVIL GENIUS
While I can’t recommend wiping out California for beachfront Arizona property and killing millions in the process, I can recommend taking an evil genius approach to your life and career. ATTN CRAZY PEOPLE: DO NOT use this as