What's Worth Your Time?
Something Must Be
Welcome to the paid edition of YouTopian Journey, a Substack featured publication. Each week I will be sharing unique wisdom that can help you in the daily battles that we must all fight in the game of life. This week we discuss why you must find something in life that is worth your most precious resource, your time.
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THE PRICE
“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.”-Friedrich Nietzsche
Life is full of many choices. These choices all have an opportunity cost. Engaging in one activity prevents you from taking part in another. Purchasing one good will remove your funds, preventing the purchase of another. Ultimately, we need to have the resources available to make these choices, for each has a price.
And the most important choice? The one that is the costliest.
To make our dreams a reality. To transmute the vision in our mind’s eye into something we can hold within our hands, this is the most rewarding choice one can make. The most rewarding and the most difficult to achieve.
Yet this shouldn’t stop us from making the attempt!
We all have dreams. It is that simple. Our species is built on these dreams, on looking toward the future and acting in the present moment to make that future a reality. Each dream is different for each person. Some dream of power and others dream of riches. Some dream of love and some dream of adventure. What matters is not the dreams but the action we do to achieve them and make them a reality. This is extremely difficult because it puts a great strain on our lives and few are capable of bearing such a burden. Furthermore, there is a heavy price we must all pay, one that cannot be mitigated, discounted, or ignored.
“I’ve had great ambitions and boundless dreams, but so has the delivery boy or the seamstress, because everyone has dreams. What distinguishes certain of us is our capacity for fulfilling them, or our destiny that they be fulfilled.”-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
As I stated earlier, dreams have a price. For everything we do, every endeavor we undertake, every goal that we go after, we must pose the question, the uncomfortable asks that many seem to avoid.
Will this be worth it?
Will it be worth the pain?
The suffering?
The opportunity cost?
The resources spent?
Above all, will it be worth your time?
Time is the ultimate equalizer. It ignores wealth, health, careers, and every other metric we use to justify our lives. None of it matters in the face of time, the overwhelming force of the universe that is constant.