The Finite, Irreplaceable Hours of Your Life

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. The finite, irreplaceable hours of your life. I try to live my life on a simple premise. There are a finite number of irreplaceable hours in a human life, and it makes sense to fill those limited hours with as much remarkable experience as possible. For me, this means things like going skydiving despite the risk of death.

It means foregoing the pleasure of sleeping in and the false comfort of inactivity to go to CrossFit at 8:30 4 times a week. It also means I have a low tolerance for mediocrity of media. I have no concept of time investment. If something is bad, it's bad. If it was good at first then became bad, it's still bad.

Turn it off. Put the book down. Leave the theater. Ignore sunk costs. Many friends of mine watched the entirety of Lost.

I watched the 1st season, which was mostly excellent, then stopped watching when it became clear that the writers had not planned ahead. I was no longer entertained, so I stopped watching. My friends who stuck with the show until the end seem to regard this as a badge of honor. They say things like, well, I've watched it for so long. I might as well finish.

This makes no sense to me. There's no such thing as good for a TV show. It's either good, it gives you pleasure and enjoyment to watch, or it doesn't. The highest praise you can give a piece of media is to say that it changed the way you viewed the world, or it enriched your life. The Wire and Band of Brothers are examples of television shows that did this for me.

They aren't good because of or in spite of being TV shows. They're just good. End of story. The same metric can and should be applied to all your activities. Is the experience worth the irreplaceable hours of your life?

Not just consuming media, but hobbies, travel, acts of creation, and destruction, quiet moments with the people you love. Living this way is difficult and requires a lot of courage. It's exhausting and sometimes depressing. I feel like I'm not doing everything I should be or could be. I feel a nagging, gnawing desire to create something meaningful that will outlast my finite life.

Sometimes this prevents me from relaxing or enjoying leisure time or experiencing pleasures other people take for granted. The thing is, worthwhile activities are always difficult. Just because something's difficult doesn't make it worthwhile, but a hallmark of many of the most amazing, fulfilling, life enriching experiences I've had is that they require diligence, persistence, and great personal sacrifice. The thing is, worthwhile activities are always difficult. Sometimes in the middle of a workout, I can imagine nothing more painful than continuing.

Sometimes my hands bleed from doing pull ups. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to throw up. But those feelings are temporary. I never ever regret going to the gym to work out. No matter how hard it was to get out of bed or how uncomfortable it is to stretch, I'm always happy I did it.

As game developers, we should strive to make games as good as a Mozart aria, a Scorsese film, or a Duchamp's painting. The reason we don't like to think in these terms is because we don't know how to make comparable experiences. We shouldn't feel too bad about this, though. Our medium is new. This doesn't let us off the hook.

It just means we have to keep iterating, keep holding ourselves to a higher standard than the ones our players have come to accept. We should feel excited. We have a frontier. We are Explorers. We don't like to quit in the middle of things, which is good.

I think that's genuinely a good thing to not quit in the middle of things. But that's typically a good thing for things that you have to do or things that you should be doing. You can't just quit in the middle of an obligation. You can't just quit when you're doing something you should be doing and it just gets hard. You can't just quit working out because it's hard.

What about these things that we don't have commitments to and that we're no longer enjoying? Like he says, reading a bad book or watching a bad movie. And there's a difference between watching a bad movie that you really, really love and watching a movie that's just bad. I love a lot of bad movies. Movies that most people would say are bad, I actually find quite enjoyable.

So that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the situation where you're watching a movie. You think this is bad and stupid, and I hate it, and you still sit in the theater instead of walking out and asking for your money back, which, by the way, they're generally very happy to give you your money back if you just ask nicely. If you just go up and say, hey. I'm really sorry, but that movie is not good.

I guarantee you, they probably know the movie is not good. We don't stop movies halfway through or stop watching TV after 1 episode or close books in the middle because we have this this guilt almost that we have to finish. Well, we started. We have to finish. No.

You don't. You don't have to finish. And I feel so weird saying that because finishing typically is a good thing. These days, I'm all about trying to finish things. It's easy to start things, and it's hard to finish things.

But, again, we're talking about leisure or entertainment or things that you don't have to be doing, situations where you haven't made commitments to other people, where people aren't relying on you, or it's just you and your book and you decide this book is terrible, I'm not gonna finish it. Because these are the finite, irreplaceable hours of our lives. We only have so much time, and we don't know how much time that is, really. Do you wanna be wasting that time? Because I certainly don't.

A useful little brain hack that I've found when I'm basically just killing time, you know, endlessly surfing through Twitter again, is I ask myself not, is this what I wanna be doing? Because it's easy to answer the question, is this what I wanna be doing with, yeah. Yeah. It's fine. Yeah.

This is what I wanna be doing. But instead, I ask the question, is this what I wanna be doing with my life? And then it puts it in much more perspective. Is this what I wanna be doing with my life? No.

I don't wanna be surfing Twitter again. I'm gonna put this down and go on a walk. I'm gonna put this down and read a book. I'm gonna put this down and work on something. Because when you phrase the question, is this what I wanna be doing with my life, it's hard to give a cop out answer of, yeah.

Sure. Because the question is so much bigger than, is this what I wanna be doing right now? And, generally, the answer comes back, no. This is not what I wanna be doing with my life. I wanna spend the finite, irreplaceable hours of my life doing something more than surfing through Twitter.

And, of course, I'm not advocating for never getting on Twitter or never watching TV or never going to the movies. What I am advocating for is doing it all mindfully. Doing it all with the understanding that these are the irreplaceable hours of your life. Now the question becomes, what is a waste of time, and what is not a waste of time? And I can't answer that for you at all.

Sitting in a coffee shop reading a book all day doesn't sound like a waste of time to me. Sounds like a pretty great day. Watching the news every night does sound like a waste of time to me, but that's just me. Some people really derive a lot of personal happiness out of that, either the fact that they're getting all this knowledge or they feel informed or whatever it is. And that's great.

That's that's up to them. You're gonna have to decide that for yourself. And in these situations where you have complete control over what it is you're going to do, remind yourself that these hours are precious. They're finite, and they're irreplaceable. And ask yourself, is this really what I wanna be doing with my life?

The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode. 26, unmarried, and childless. I'm aware that my biological clock is ticking. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for The Music makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm.

And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.