The most important lesson from a year of experimenting with my life
It has been a year since I started to experiment with my life. There were too many significant lessons in the past year to fit into a single post so I will do a series instead. In this post I share my biggest takeaway of the past year :
Time creates the space to let life and ourselves unfold
The below is an attempt to visualize the difference of a typical time allocation of a week of 168 hours:
The demands of having a full-time job means apart from being at work, we have to spend more time on commute, and then decompressing. So if we are lucky to have enough time to sleep, socialize and eat, we may find ourselves with roughly 7 hours of free time left in a week. That’s less than 5% of the total. Yet if we have agency over our own time even with a moderate amount of work, we can have 25% out of 168 hours to be free. That isn’t too much to ask for is it, a quarter of our lives to live?
But even that is a one-dimensional way of looking at free time, what does free time actually translate to, and enable?
The colored dots above represent experiences, and the circle represents my typical scope when I had a traditional lifestyle. I was bound by the limits of time and space of my work-driven routine. After 8–12 hours of work a day I could hardly move, much less think. Weekends were precious for recharging. Having new experiences or meeting new people were the last things I wanted to do. I spent most of my waking hours at work, hung out with people from work (which were amazing, by the way if any of my ex-coworkers are reading this), I thought mostly about work, I rested because I was tired from work.
I had felt very compressed.
But for the last year, I didn’t have to work. For once I didn’t feel exhausted all the time. I:
- found energy to show up for people I love
- read the books I had always wanted to read
- prototyped some ideas that had been plaguing me for a long time
- attended a ton of events I would never have attended which expanded the way I see the world
- learned how to be a better friend and child
- met and befriended people from diverse walks of life (this means people who were not working in startups or tech, sad I know)
- built up my health
- collaborated on stuff that was out of my comfort zone
- went for a few nature walks, one of which was an 8-hour walk along the circumference of Singapore — previously you could have paid me and I still wouldn’t do so
- thought deeply about my priorities and how I wanted to live my life
- shared my stories in person at a few different events
- worked part-time at a government agency designing prototypes
- fell in love
Because I had a lot more time, I had more space to expand myself into. I started venturing into areas I never had the energy to, which the diagram below is attempting to represent: the time and space to have experiences way out of my typical scope, which in turn expands the scope itself, increasing the depth, richness and dimensions of my self.
With every new person I meet, I learn and experience something new. I get to peek into their dimensions, the things they care about, what makes them human. When I see other people, I see myself a little bit more.
The emotional rewards of having time
I am a lot less angry and antagonistic simply because I stopped feeling so constrained and pressured. My capacity to be generous and loving has grown considerably. I have more time to process events and emotions so I can have more rational responses rather than being constantly pushed to have a flight or fright reaction.
The space to experience love
Being with my partner has taught me wholeness, to accept the fear and vulnerability of being with someone who has power over me, the power to utterly destroy me and break me into pieces, and yet still make that choice to be generous with her instead. I had learned to explore other dimensions of myself — the sides she would bring out of me.
Just experiencing that sort of love alone has thoroughly transformed me as a person. But I wouldn’t have encountered it if I was living my old way of life. Even if I did encounter it, I may not have had the space to experience it wholly, because the workaholic I was would never contemplate freeing myself to love like this.
Using money to buy time
We can’t use money to buy time that has transpired, but we can use money to buy time in the present, to halt the demands of modern life, at least temporarily.
Being raised in a country that has built herself upon relentless productivity and materialism, it was difficult in the beginning to ignore both the internal and external judgment. We are taught to work hard to buy time at some point in the future. But we don’t think about confluence, that the intersection of factors to make certain choices may not come by in the future because variables will change.
Thus, I feel like this is the single best investment I could have made for myself — buying time to explore how I want to live.
Just the beginning
Most of the good and lessons in the past year came out of having time. I got to know more of who I am, not determined by previous conditions and variables. I could observe how I reacted in a more diverse set of scenarios rather than being solely defined by who I was at work and how good I was at my job.
I started out with the attempt to experiment with my life for a year, but it has taught me that I no longer wish to return to what life used to be for me. I now know what it feels to have a multi-dimensional life, and I can’t imagine myself voluntarily going back to being a one-dimensional individual.
I want to spend the rest of my life developing the capacity to embrace ambiguity and the audacity to experiment, to be pushing boundaries, whether within myself or my work. I feel like I am only at the very beginning of truly experiencing life.
How will I do it, especially when my financial runway ends? I have no idea. That is the whole point though. Perhaps you could stay tuned with me.
Endnote: Pondering the societal consequences of having not enough free time
Having been the beneficiary of this period of free time, I believe I would have been so much less of a person without this year. I cannot help but think: What we are missing out as a whole by compressing people into forty-hour work weeks?
