life help: Do you think life is essentially killing time? - Help.com

I think time kills life.

Life is about killin’ Commies.

Life is a game without rules, paths or clues Lys - you get out what you put in. If you don’t seek a passion, or find a purpose, one is rarely granted to you out of the blue. You spend your time existing, and by avoiding anything that would give your life meaning, essentially life would simply be killing time.

If you want more than that, you have to put more than killing time into it.

what time would there be without life? who would care?

killing time is not really “living”

It’s not so much ‘killing’ time as ’spending’ time. Whatever time passes, you don’t get it back again.

LOL!!!!

As a greybeard, I know of a great poet from a wrinkly generation who plugged it a lot better than that, Lys;

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

School - in itself - is not living, anymore than your eventual job will be living; they’re absolutely equivalent. And trust me - unless you’re EXTREMELY elite, the paycheck will not buy you anything remotely life-like.

It’s what you do and experience at and after school, at and after work that will transform you. And those things will be determined by the decisions you make for yourself.

You need to expose yourself to purpose to find purpose. What do you believe in? What are you willing to surrender some life to? What in life is important to you?
That’s your compass.

I hate how life is just about killing time. I’m so SICK of killing time. I want to DO something… I want to save the world. Tomorrow. But instead, I just keep going to school and killing time until I can get a job which might maybe work.
But we’re all so scared to lose our time that we waste what we have doing nothing.

When I was young there was never enough time. Now that I am a greybeard too I find myself killing time… it is like I have done everything and been everywhere and now it is just boring. I wish it could be new again.

Nutmeg wrote:
I hate how life is just about killing time. I’m so SICK of killing time. I want to DO something… I want to save the world. Tomorrow. But instead, I just keep going to school and killing time until I can get a job which might maybe work.
But we’re all so scared to lose our time that we waste what we have doing nothing.

Pursue immortality. It is the only solution to your problem.

Nutmeg wrote:
I want to DO something… I want to save the world. Tomorrow.

If you could hear the subconscious mind, this would probably be a worldwide shout so loud that it would level mountains. It’s pathos, on a universal level.

A Career is JUST a plan. Just like school, it’s a place you go in the morning, leave at night, and in the middle you work hard to achieve, work middling to survive, or work lightly to fail. The most boring, sad people you’ll ever meet are people who mistake their jobs for life - because their job is all they have, or want. Imagine going to a party and some feller there is honking away about the finer points of a balance sheet in multinational conglomerates, especially as they are dealt with through the laws of Alsatian Banking. That guy is living his job… but he’s missed out on life.

Look for your happy outside of your toil.

Lys wrote:
Just out of curiosity, do you think you have lived? I’m still young and hoping to not waste my life worrying about things. Any words of advice on how to “live” and not to kill time would be greatly appreciated. I guess besides burying yourself in work.
By the way, I wish you the best of luck with your friend Eleanor. I don’t have much experience dealing with that, so unfortunately, I’m not of much help. You’re a great person for taking care of her.

Thank you for reading that - and, strangely, it dovetails into the answer to your question perfectly.

I have spent well over 900 hours in the past seven years JUST driving through the darkness, trying to track her down before she killed herself or someone else. I have spent easily 20 hours in the hospital, waiting for them to release her after she had passed out in some bar or parking lot. The number of hours I have spent counciling her, dissuading her, consoling her or searching her purse and my apartment for booze after she’s staggered over and passed out on the couch are countless.

I started out a stranger - an intruder - in her family, and now they’ve come to really like and respect me. Her son treats me like an elder a teacher, a priest and an equal.

All of this could have been avoided if I had just walked away the day I met her. Or just walked away at any time. None of this is MY life. But I decided that someone had to do something, and so I did.

And I Found life in it. And I feel I have lived well. I have defined myself, I’ve learned how firmly I believe in what I believe in, how much I am willing to give to my beliefs. I have been tested, and I have walked out the other side. For ME, I know what life is about now. And even if I could have - and as much as my worried friends would wish I could have - I would Never do it any other way.

Oh - and my job is - was - a columnist and features writer. There is no job I could have felt more passionate about, but it Does Not Compare to Life.

If I may say so, Lys, perhaps it’s something else.

OK - putting more out there than I should, perhaps - back when I was a kid, I was a geek. BIG Trekkie, and when ‘Star Wars’ came out I wore my Karate Gi around for a whole summer. ~LOL~ I wish that wasn’t true, but it was.

I Really, Really wanted to be somebody who could make the big difference, be the hero, Do Something that Meant Something, instead of being some geek in suburbia.

I grew up, and went through college and went through a series of jobs, and let that dream sleep. Nobody was going to beam me up and let me fight intergalactic evil. Silly kid stuff that you never tell anyone. Ever.

Even on Help.com.

I fell in love a couple of times, and it was good. But even while I was head over heels, I knew it was just… hiding. a comfortable place to be, that I liked. But it meant nothing.

When that day arrived, the small kindness I gave Eleanor felt right. I never thought it would be more than that at the time, but…

I have found her dead unconscious under a tree in a field at 1130 at night in late november, cold and unresponsive. Don’t ask HOW, unless you want to talk theology. I’ve found her on the wrong side of a 10-foot fence, hemmed in by half a mile of thicket… in short, I slowly started to understand that I WAS now what I always wanted to be - just on a much, much less grand scale. But the scale didn’t make the Right-ness of it any less right. I was proving to myself that I was that guy who was Doing Something that Meant Something. It didn’t matter that it was waiting outside an AA meeting instead of blasting up aliens. I fulfilled my deepest wish, just not in a way I could have ever imagined.

Do you have a dream, Lys? Is there something you feel you were born to do? If not specifically, generally? Nutmeg, way up there, said she wanted to save the world. Tomorrow. Sooo many tomorrows go by. What would you like to do - tomorrow?

My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that we are often paralyzed by scope.

You want to cure cancer; Nutmeg wants to save the world; I wanted to save the universe.

Eventually, I became a columnist and wrote highflown humanitarian appeals and philosophical musings, hoping simply to strike a tone in a reader or two.

But, in the end, what I WAS able to do is throw all I had into one single human being in trouble. And even then, I have very little chance of succeeding. I’ve poured an incredible amount of time, energy and emotion into it, and odds are it’s all for naught.

BUT

In Doing it, I’m not killing time Waiting to do it.

Everyone wants some form of immortality - to be remembered. But how do you feel about doing something that makes a small ripple in someone else’s life that you won’t be remembered or rewarded for? Something that would not be, without your intervention? You might not be remembered for it, but it is your secret garden; seeds you plant that your legacy exists in quietly.

There Are things you can do, if you’re not stuck on the awards portion of it. Because - and Trust me on this - the physical rewards are hard to come by. The world is a wreckage. Too many people are in trouble, and too few people are willing to take time out of their TV schedule to lift a finger to help.

Some try to buy themselves out of responsibility - five bucks in the collection basket buys them righteousness, twenty bucks to a charity buys them humanitarian status.

“Having a purpose” is giving yourself to something you personally consider greater than yourself. It’s like signing yourself up as a soldier in some abstract war. You’re willing to miss a crapload of television and otherwise inconvenienced at times - you surrender the right to ‘kill time’ - at least some times - in defense of whatever your goal is. In exchange, that cause becomes part of you.

Putting it more concretely:

Your next door neighbor needs a barn. You’re sitting around watching ‘American Idol.’ You can let your neighbor worry about his barn, or you can help him out. If you help him out, you’re loosing some of that killing time. You’re also likely to get splinters, and hammer your thumb a couple of times. But, after a while, His barn becomes Your barn too, and you don’t really give a **** about ‘American Idol’ anymore. Eventually, that barn is up, and every time you look out the window and see it. And whenever you see it, you know some of your blood, sweat and tears are part of the structure. And suddenly, you’re really going to want to find another barn to build, instead of sitting on your butt watching ‘American Idol.’

It’s strange and masochistic, but it’s absolutely true.

life is whatever the heck you want it to be

to many life is like a count down til death ….whether you live it or not is up to you.if one believes that they are wasting their life… then change it…live your life the way you want and it won’t feel wasted…killing time is not living life just the same as life is not killing time …i always believed in living in the moment

Lys wrote:
Well, I figured you’re either living, or you’re killing time. How do you see it?
I like to think I’m living, but other times, I’m think I’m just killing time. Right now, I’m just killing time til tomorrow comes. Then the next day. Then the next til I find myself with some sort of purpose.
I mean, school isn’t really living is it? It’s just killing time til you’re old/smart enough to get a job. Then when you’re working, you’re killing time til you get a paycheck. Then you use that paycheck to somehow “live.”
Opinions anyone?

I would say live BEFORE you get a job, because it’s pretty likely that after that you’ll be a slave, and that ain’t living. Either that or don’t GET a job. Start your own business. But anyway, “living” can happen even while you’re waiting. Theoretically.

orrrrrr, get a job you love to do

Anonymous wrote:
For the last 15 years i feel i have been filling in time until i die.

You’ve gotta do something BOLD. Quick! Life is very very very short.