Questioner(Q): How do you balance that work and life and fun relationship together?
Acharya Prashant (AP): You will have to start from seeing where your time is actually going. See, time is not necessarily purely objective. There is one thing called the material time that you look at in a chronometer, in a watch, you could call it a chronological time; and there is another thing that we experience—time in the head as we experience it, time in the head, mental time, psychological time.
Psychological time does not run the same way as material time. Intervals that are borings to us, distasteful to us, dislikeable to us, stretch within; they are experienced as bigger and more important than they really are. So, for example, I took around one and a half hours coming to your college, I am at Juhu. But these one and a half hours appeared longer than one and a half, right?
Now, if I am not being very objective about my time, I will feel as if of my, let’s say, seventeen-eighteen waking hours, and the fourteen odd hours that I have available for work, to and fro commute has taken away six hours, whereas objectively how much has been expended? One and a half plus another one and a half, so that just three. But because the Mumbai traffic obviously is not something anybody can relish, because you cannot relish it, because every moment feels like a tax, a burden; so, internally this expands to six, and that’s ok. And that’s ok to know that this time is not likeable, so it is appearing longer.
But it is a mistake when that internal appearance is transported to outer calculations. Internally, it appeared like six hours. Now, if I take that six hour as an objective figure, as a material reality, then I will entitle myself to say, “Oh! I have all in all fourteen hours available to myself in the day, and out of those fourteen hours, six hours have been taken away by the commute.” I am not deliberately deceiving anybody, it’s just that I am not mindful of the fact that experiencer shapes the experience; I do not know that.
The experiencer of three hour can shape them to make them appear like, feel like 6 hours. All that is within, all the six hours are within, not here. Here there are only three hours. But the moment I say, “Oh! I lost six hours out of fourteen,” I have entitled myself to feel like a sufferer or a victim. Not only that, I have licensed myself to say that a huge chunk, forty percent of my time is being needlessly spent on something; and I am helpless in that regard because I can’t change my commute time. So, what do I do if my academic results are not that good, or if I do not get time for my cocurricular activities, or time for socializing, or time for sports, or time for entertainment; so many other things that a young person wants to have in life?
The thing is, we ought to be objective; we ought to know where it really is going. Are we keeping a record? Try keeping a record, try seeing where it actually is going. And you might find that nobody is actually all that short of time. Time is there, it’s just that when time is expended in activities that pleases, we try to hide that time; because it’s our little joyful secret. “I spent one hour doing something that is very pleasing, but at the same time not productive at all, not useful at all. There is no creativity in that, there is just a very average kind of, or low kind of pleasure in that.”
Will I admit to myself that one hour of my active time, waking time is being taken away by that activity daily? No, I will not admit that. So, that one objectively will be reduced to zero internally, and three hours of commute objectively will be blown up to six internally; so, the calculations will go haywire.
When you put the numbers on the sheet, if you are not being objective, if you are just going by appearances and experiences, you will feel, “Oh my God! I am just a victim. I am a poor victim because I am a Mumbai girl, and the traffic is so bad and the college timings, they are so oppressive. What do I do? I have no time for self-development, for cocurriculars, and I want to visit libraries, and you know I want to have a nice little walk on the beach in the evenings; and none of that is being possible because just the entire system is oppressing me.” That’s not really the case.
If you will be honest, you will find that significant chunks of your time are being taken away by activities you do not even want to admit to yourself. All of us are involved in activities that simply but silently, surreptitiously gnaw at our time. Those things are not bold enough and open enough to just come and declare, “Yes, we are going to take away two hours of your daily schedule.” They will not declare that, because if they declare that, they will be caught. You will say “Oh! It’s so bad. Two hours a day spend gossiping, chatting, or scrolling reels. No, no, no, that is just too bad.”
So, what we will do? We will act to ourselves; we will pretend to ourselves as if that time does not exist at all. So, those two objective hours will simply be marked as zero within. “No, that didn’t happen. Yes, I went to bed at eleven, because you know I am student. I have to reach the college at 8 am; so, I am supposed to wake up at 5:30 am so that I can leave the home by 6:15 am and be here in time.”
And how was I feeling in the commute? Drowsy, energy-less, all sapped out, ready to fall over. The neighbor was trying to be extra careful, “Anytime something can tumble over me.” Why was all that happening? Because did you really sleep at 11 pm? No! 11 pm is when you declare to yourself that you have gone to bed, till 1 am in the night, it was Instagram. Is that not so? And I am not saying that offhand. The usage statistics of social media among the youth very clearly bring out this aspect.
Young people are most active on social media two hours before and two hours after midnight. 10 pm to 2 am, that’s when young people are running about on social media. Why don’t you talk about that traffic? There is a lot of traffic there, why don’t we talk about the traffic there?
You know what happened? You would have been in your school at that time, and you wouldn’t have had a phone available to you. When data first started becoming available—I am talking of situation ten years back or something–these companies they came up with plans. Not the data started becoming available in 2012, that was twenty years back, but I am talking of the plans specifically. They came up with plans that made data cheaper between 9pm and 3am, and it worked for them.
They also reduced the calling rates. So, now data is cheaper, and calls are cheaper. And what are all the young people doing? And I do not really suppose that all that data is being consumed in self-development and gaining internal illumination. How do I say that? When I look at the pages, the profiles, the channels, all these things, the handles on social media and I see which ones have the maximum followers, likes, retweets, comments, what do I find? The worst quality ones have the maximum traffic. Pages, and profiles, and channels that ought too have been starved of any viewership are the ones frolicking in attention.
They are literally inundated with viewership. And all that is happening between 10 pm and 2 am, that’s where the youth of India is spending its time. First of all, your time is not going into something you would want it to be devoted to; secondly, you are empowering—I am not taking about you please, I am talking about the youth of this country in general—secondly, you are empowering all kinds of worthless and very mediocre people; and they are turning into your role models, your celebrities.
It’s a double jeopardy. That which deserves to command your attention is being starved of attention. And even viewership is a market, if you do not look at it, if you do not look at something, that thing in due course of time will cease to exist. You know how the social media engines operate? If something is not receiving viewer attention, it will no more come up in the search results, or in the notifications, or in the various other things. On the other hand, if something is getting popular, it will get more popular, it will shown to more people.
Figure out where your time is really going. There are things you can do nothing about—you or I cannot change the traffic situation in Mumbai, right? But there are things we can do something about, lets rather talk of them; otherwise, talking of immovables becomes a clever internal ploy to not move even the movable. Talking about the unchangeable becomes an excuse to not change even the changeable.
Figure out where time is going, and if commuting takes so much time, use that constructively. I do not know whether the train, or bus, or the personal thing you are using affords you that kind of convenience; but if you can read, read. If you cannot read, use earphones, or headphone, use audio files, that’s the best use of time.
There have been people who have educated themselves in the course of their journeys, there have been people who have written beautiful books in the course of their hospitalization. So, try to make the best use of whatever situation you are in. Even in jail, some of the greatest literature from the freedom struggle movement—the Indian freedom struggle movement—came from the period when our revolutionaries were jailed.
And you know what they said? They said, “This is really the only time when we are free to write, so thank you. Now that we are incarcerated here, there is nothing else to do, so we will write.” And they wrote prolific volumes. So, try to make best use.
