How To Think

Most of life is governed by the 80–20 rule or the Pareto principle. Or how I like to put it; what happens in the 20% is all we’ve got to hold on to, and the other 80% is what we’ve got to put up with. You know what I mean, you got your job, school, friends, not-so-friends, social conflicts, the 78 year old aunt you loved that just passed away, your fucking bills, the number of likes you got on a Medium post, and all that jazz™. That’s the 80% you put up with.

We all intrinsically come to acknowledge this truth. And, we all live for the 20%. We all know, deep down inside, that all we’ve got is the 20%: The occasional chat you with that friend you don’t get to see that often. The social butterfly you become after the 3rd beer on a Friday night. That weird 10 minute conversation you had with your companies CEO at the new years party, that was actually pretty cool. The Sunday breakfast you had with the person you casually had sex with the previous night. That time you smoked weed and had deep philosophical brain-pickings with some random hitchhikers. That time you planned a holiday with your girl/boyfriend that you’ve only known for a month and you hoped to some god that your relationship would last for another 2 months. These are, the-twenty-percent we cherish and talk about to our friends and family.

But, then again, most of life is buried deep in the miserable 19 hours and 12 minutes you suffer through your day-in and day-out. Trying to get to work, trying to sleep at 4am. Waking up from a nightmare at 6AM. Watching sitcoms that have clever product placement that you couldn’t care less about, and fucking YouTube channels sponsored by audible.com™, because hey, Audiobooks. But, every now and then we get 4 hours and 48 minutes of fun.

4 hours and 48 minutes of play.

Play is what makes us wake up in the morning all cheerful and happy. Play makes us brush our teeth to that Rihanna song that constantly repeats the word work. We feel play the first 20 seconds we can laugh at Kanye’s tweets while fiddling with our phones on the way to work.

The only problem with play & fun is that we get used to them, dear reader, we often get overwhelmed by the 80% and forget. We, as the fortunate 1/600000, with clean water and a decent internet connection capable of transferring Medium’s 1.9MB gzip-compressed webpage™ in a tolerable amount of time, have to remind ourselves how to think in this reality. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we can choose to work with the hand we’ve been dealt, with the simple math of 80/20. And we need to remind ourselves that in time we will not give a fuck about the 19 hours and 12 minutes.

And maybe, with some effort, we may make 12 minutes of our miserable days, into 12 minutes of play.

Or as Jack Torrance put it,

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

If you liked this go check out This Is Water if you’ve haven’t already. Or Recommend this post so I feel nice and fuzzy inside!