how we make time bearable

if you have met me, and you are a friend, there’s a high chance you already know my other friends too. one of them is rahul. he’s going back to my school to introduce 12th graders to pure sciences and academia. he is currently pursuing a bachelors at iiser bhopal. and like any sane person would, he doesn’t want to be accountable for any advice he gives to students who are about to make life-changing decisions.

we were talking about this right now when we met for tea at 12 am. yes, we do that often. he’s not in the city for most of the time, so it feels worth stepping out whenever he is. i don’t remember how we arrived there, but the gist of the conversation slowly boiled down to one question: why do we do what we do?

for a school-going kid who was happy doing nothing and having fun on the last bench (i personally think the last bench gives you more attention. if you want to be ignored completely, sit somewhere near the front), this question doesn’t even exist. how do you explain to a kid like that that one day it will matter what he works on? or that he will have to work at all? and why does it suddenly matter whether he likes what he does, or whether he’s good at it? why does he have to choose?

my opinion on that is inspired by charles baudelaire’s famous poem "be drunk".

you have to be always drunk. that’s all there is to it. it’s the only way. so as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
but on what? wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. but be drunk.

i have loved this poem ever since i first read it. baudelaire understood that time is a burden. if you really think about it, it’s overwhelming to realize that you are moving toward death every second. not that this is something to fear, or even something to avoid thinking about entirely. i actually believe death is the only real certainty we have in life. but if you keep that fact in your head all the time, you are going to be miserable.

so what do we do? we get drunk. metaphorically. and in my case, literally isn’t even an option. i live in gujarat. it’s a dry state.

baudelaire’s suggestion isn’t escapism. it’s engagement. be interested in something deeply enough that life doesn’t feel like days are just passing by. something that makes you forget about time altogether. something that makes you want to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

i think even if people were given the choice to do nothing at all, most of them would still end up doing something. humans don’t sit well with emptiness. we look for friction. for attachment. for meaning, even if we have to invent it. without it, i don’t think it would have been possible for humans, as a collective species, to have survived this long. there’s a really good veritasium video about how humans are wired for meaning.

i hope my opinion changes in the future. but then again, isn’t everything a facade? not in a fake sense, but in a survival sense. we do what we do to feel alive. to feel like we are more than just bodies moving through space and time, following instructions until we stop working.

i spend hours on my computer doing things that might not make sense to anyone else. staring at text. breaking things. fixing things. building things that may never matter. but to me, that’s what makes me feel alive. it gives shape to time. it gives me a reason to wake up excited some days. i love it. we partly do many things because we don’t want to think about the things that are wrong in our lives.

and i think this is what humans have always done. we find something to be drunk on. something that gives us a sense of meaning, even if it’s fragile or temporary. what does a family give you, if not that? a sense of belonging. a reason to show up. a purpose you accept, or sometimes consciously create for yourself.

around the same time, i was watching the "tomorrow war". it’s not a deep movie, but there was a line that stayed with me. the plot is about people from the future coming back to the present to recruit civilians to fight an alien invasion. the main character agrees to go, not because he wants to be a hero, but because he wants to see his daughter grow up.

there’s a line where he says something like:

i’m not a hero. i was trying to save my daughter. if i have to save the world to save her, then i’m damn sure gonna do it.

that line stuck because that’s purpose in its rawest form. not noble. not abstract. not philosophical. just deeply personal. and strong enough to make someone walk into hell willingly.

which brings me to a question that always comes up. there are so many people who don’t do what they love. they don’t chase passion. they don’t romanticize work or purpose. how do they survive?

i think the answer, at least partly, is love. i genuinely believe that someone in a healthy romantic relationship can survive almost anything. love gives you a reason to live that exists outside of yourself. you don’t have to invent purpose every day. it’s already there, waiting for you in another person.

and not everyone gets that. not everyone wants that. so it seems we find our own intoxicants. work. curiosity. ambition. faith. people. ideas. responsibility.

maybe that’s enough. all i care about is if everyone is smiling.