Rarely do I ever look at time and not "eww" in my head.

My cousin had a dog named Leo, a good boy (may he rest in peace), a Great Dane. Every morning, Leo’s family— my aunt, uncle, and cousin— would leave for work or school, leaving him alone in the house. No one would be home except Leo. The moment my aunt returned home, Leo would rush to her, eager for her attention. I often wondered, what did Leo do during those empty hours? Did he understand how long he waited, or did time blur for him until the sound of keys rattled in the door? Is this time constant over days? Can he add two intervals and equate it to a third? I liked to think no, and I hate to say it but I would get jealous of this ability of Leo's. Similar to how I would get jealous when someone else is already asleep, effortlessly stepping into the next day, while I'm lying awake, struggling to make time move forward during a sleepless night. When insomniac, I don't crave sleep, I crave the time-skip that comes with it, I crave progress.

If you take away all forms of time instruments from me (enclose me in a windowless room without a watch), I won't be able to tell how long is an hour. Before the invention of watches, we couldn't perceive time so finely. Following article (and many more) talk much more precisely about it than I can: Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.

Clocks are (mostly) evil

Fine-grained time realization is anti human, it's unnatural, we haven't evolved for it yet. (No worries, I also have a fondness for the unnatural. I have another essay on why we should wage war on nature and fight against its tyranny. My beliefs are full of paradoxical— something I’ve explored in another essay as well.) Desires are the root of all suffering? I say— being aware of time is the root of many sufferings. Almost never in my life have I looked a clock while being happy and it has not resulted in some dent to my happiness. I like to be happy and if I am happy, I don't like the passage of time— "What? It's Sunday 8 PM already? My weekend is coming to an end." And if I am sad, I am looking at time and wondering why hasn't it passed yet— "What? It has been whole 6 months and I am still not completely over my break up?"

"This too shall pass"... more like "Why tf is this passing or hasn't passed yet". Yeah the glass is half empty for me.

Thus I conclude, I dislike perceiving time. A good day for me is one where time becomes unnoticeable— where I experience moments I call "time-skips." A highly correlated metric for the goodness of a day for me would be the inverse of the number of times I catch myself asking "what time/day is it"?

Flow states vs time-skips

I realize my concept of "time-skip" sounds very similar to "flow state" as described by people ranging from religious spiritualists to modern capitalist. It's not, let me defend myself and differentiate from them. There are many rationalist and spiritual takes on flow state, let me pick one of each, the ones I am most aware of:

Rationalists

The concept of time-skips is similar, but distinct, from the idea of a "flow state." In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is defined as a mental state characterized by complete immersion in an activity, a sense of purpose, and a distorted sense of time. Flow is a goal-oriented state, one driven by productivity and clear feedback mechanisms. It’s efficient and effective, but fundamentally, it is purpose-driven. My time-skips are not purpose driven, they have no goal other than losing time. They remain selfish, so much so that in my concept of time-skips, scrolling through Instagram reels is no less valid than losing track of time while researching a cure for cancer— at least for as long as the moment persists. It is only the later of doom of time-full-ness that makes scrolling Instagram worse than the latter (more on this later).

Spiritualists

Spiritualists love the flow state. Taoism describes a "flow with the Tao," an effortless existence aligned with the natural rhythms of the universe. The Taoist perspective values acceptance— seeing oneself as an integral part of the world, and achieving happiness through a kind of spiritual emptiness. My idea of time-skips shares some of this tranquility but it still caters to my desires. My time-skips aren’t about emptiness or grand ideas of selflessness, I am too young for that, they are about being so ingrained in desire that you forget time exists. Selflessness in selfishness.

In short: Mihaly's flow is driven by productivity, Taoism's flow is driven by a desire to be free from desires, and my time-skips are desire-driven, but with no goal other than immersion. It’s not about removing myself from the world, but about embracing an experience so fully that time fades away.

Time-skip Activities

I love activities that skip time for me, that keep me so engaged that I forget about the tyrannical passage of time, that make me forget how dreadfully small— one sixtieth part— a minute is as compared to an hour. I despise that stupid second arm of a clock, so menacing in its tininess, such ephemeral ugliness, movement reduced to nothing but a drop in a vast, unstoppable graveyard of past. Disgusting.

If I had the choice, I'd want to be born, skip through time, and then die. That, to me, would be the ideal life. It might sound a lot like saying, "I wish I'd never been born or experienced anything at all— that nothing is better than something." But a life fully lived in the present, no matter how long, feels the same. Fifty years lived entirely in the present are no different from ten years lived that way, and zero by extension. In a life focused on time-skips and flow states, the actual duration becomes insignificant.

Enough of abstractions— if I keep going, I'll just end up repeating what Buddhists have been saying for centuries, only with worse words. Let's move on to specifics: what exactly are these time-skip moments, and are they always good for me?

Here are some general and specific moments in my life that create these time-skips:

Each one of the time-skip activities is equally captivating in its own right. The only difference lies in the aftermath— how I feel when the time-skip ends. In those pure moments of immersion, I might argue that scrolling Instagram is no different from reading poetry; what matters is the timelessness itself.

The problem arises because these states are not Markovian (future evolution is not independent of its history). If I drink beer with friends every day or scroll Instagram for too long, their magic fades. Some experiences depreciate faster than others. For me, Instagram loses its allure quickly and, when it does, leaves me in a state where time is painfully perceptible— a dark deep abyss where I "lost" my hours. ADHD partakes cripples me from intoxicating myself with future time-skips, they are not sustainable. Therefore, choosing timeskips is important. It's about recognizing the moments that hold true value (maximizing more time-skips in future) and avoiding overindulgence in those that don’t.

So what can I conclude? What's my takeaway?

  1. Identify activities that are time-skips.
  2. Identify each activity's aftermath (how doomed am I with the haunting realization of how much time I skipped at the end of it and how much does it enable me to time-skip again in future).
  3. Identify a schedule to order these activities and continuously improve upon it.

Meta

This essay is like a tattoo for me— something I know I’ll eventually grow out of, a marker of who I am now but not who I will always be. I have evolved for decades to realize what I am writing right now and I know I will evolve further, so far that this form will be alien to me. One day, in another timeless moment, I’ll look back at this and realize how incomplete my understanding was. I will grow out of my theory of "skip-time-indulged-in-desires" as a way of life.

But where am I headed? I think I know, I cheated and have already read where I am growing into, it's not unique, it's not special, it's the classical wisdom of not just losing the sense of time but losing the sense of self.

All the teachings— Buddhist, Hindu, or from any spiritual tradition— ultimately speak the same truth. And if the goal of our lives is to seek truth, then how could it be anything but universal? I believe I've sort of glimpsed this truth, though I haven't yet fully experienced it. And that’s okay— it’s a journey, not a race, it should take time, I have to come to terms with it. The path forward requires not more learning, but more unlearning, and that takes time. I’m content to let it unfold.

However, I find myself uneasy with this sense of certainty about knowing the truth and where I'm headed. If I label something as "the truth" and commit myself to it, am I truly searching for it? I wish I could arrive at "losing the sense of self" independently but now that I have read it, I am afraid I might gravitate towards it and not independently seek truth (which might or might not be it).

So, I take back what I said before (the italics above), about knowing what I am growing into. I will say, I am growing into something— what exactly, I can’t fully articulate. I have some notion of what it could be, but I want to witness this transformation with as few preconceived biases as possible, letting it unfold in my own uniquely weird but the most natural way.

Everyday I shall aim to grow closer to Buddha
Or
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him?

idk, urghh

I wrote this because I was craving a time-skip