Chapter 1: Why is free time considered valuable?
It frustrates me that we call something so valuable free time. Because in my mind, when something is free, you give it away. It's worthless. And I think that for a lot of my young life, I treated my free time as disposable garbage. And I flooded my brain with information that didn't matter, with thoughts that weren't even mine.
And I preoccupied myself with people and relationships that drained my time that I will never get back. I want you to know that in this life, nothing is free. Nothing is free. And eventually you will pay the price.
Chapter 2: How can we recognize the cost of our decisions?
You will pay the price of your decisions. You will pay the price of what you decided to do, who you decided to hang around, what kind of mindset you decided to adopt. You will pay the price because nothing is free. You think. that it's worth it to stand in line for a free hoodie at your college because some brand is coming into town. And that line is two and a half hours.
You might tell your friend, yo, I got this hoodie for free, check it out. But in reality, you sacrificed two and a half of your hours that you will never get back. And the same thing is like, well, I'm just messing around with the sneaky link like it's not that deep, whatever. OK, maybe.
But when you spend six months messing around and it going nowhere and just kind of passing the time, you're going to look back and go, oh, why did I do that? How do we catch this before it happens?
How do we actually fill our life with things that matter and not with just background noise in order to distract ourselves from the fact that we don't know who we are, we don't know what we're doing, and we don't even know if we're going to survive the way that we want to? It's not what's going on right now, right? That's not the solution. Because right now we're torturing our free time.
We're just setting it ablaze. We're thinking, oh, it doesn't matter. I'm young. Like this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And listen, I think that there's also this hyper fixation on young people to have everything figured out. And there's almost like, don't fail. You need to lock in. You need to get the perfect job and perfect opportunity. And I think this is a detriment too. Wabi-sabi.
Alright? I'm sure you've heard the term wabi-sabi. You need an imperfect life. And an imperfect life has intention. It has intention. But it also has failure. It has risk. It has a part of you that is afraid to live it. Because you know you will be challenged. Because you know... I might change the person that I am by my experiences. But if nothing is free,
then maybe this is a valuable use of your time. Maybe taking on that hobby, trying something different, I don't know, even something small. You've been a picky eater your whole life. You go to a restaurant and they have creamed corn. You don't like corn, but you've never had creamed corn, so try it. Small things, it starts very, very small, is how you build your life intentionally.
And I think this is such an epidemic amongst young people where we feel like our time does not matter. And so we fill it with things that can distract us from the loneliness, from the sadness, from the fact that we have been pushed into just keeping a safe life. Because this world is so terrible and this world is so scary. And it is. It is a scary place.
It's not the most welcoming environment for some people. Absolutely. But that's not going to change unless you do. Unless you realize, okay, this is my reality. I need to live it with what I got. If I have the opportunity to go somewhere for school, I need to take it. If I have the opportunity to date somebody that I really, really like, I need to do it.
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Chapter 3: What does it mean to live intentionally?
Does not mean your life will be perfect. It does not mean that you will have this happy, happy, happy existence. No, you will have moments where you are in the trenches.
Chapter 4: How can we fill our lives with meaningful experiences?
That is the human experience. No, John Bellion, welcome. welcome. But what I can promise you is if you live your life with more intention and you make more decisions that are aligned with who you want to be or who you are, you will no longer just have free time. Your time will be more valuable. You as a person will feel more value. You will feel like you are doing something right.
And for a lot of us, that's all we want. We think that we're failures at age 21, 22, 23, even at age 18 because the comparison game has gone so strong and we feel like we're just squandering our youth. Well, look at the free time you have. I don't think you need to go uber grind set. I don't think you need to start taking cold showers as a 19 year old. All right. I tried that. And it's good.
You know, there's benefits to it. I definitely was awake, but that wasn't the thing that got me writing, that got me thinking about business ideas, that got me asking out my crush. It was an internal flip of my switch that made me go, this needs to happen now. Because if I don't do it now, if I don't have the urgency of just trying it, I will never know.
And I'd rather know that I got rejected or that it didn't work out than to leave the rest of my life in regret. And, well, could have happened, I guess. I don't know. And those kind of things, over time, they will sour. They will get worse. It's not like, you know, you're just going to forget about it.
If you have things and you have desires that you genuinely want to do and you have people that you genuinely want in your life and you decide, I'm not going to do it. I'm not good enough. It's not time. You will spend the rest of your life wondering. And your brain will create these fake stories about yourself. About how I was always a loser. Or I was always out of their league.
Or I could never have done it. And you will convince yourself lies. Because you didn't realize that nothing is free. Your attention is not free. It never has been. And I think now than ever, you are realizing that your attention is cooked. I know because mine is. But attention is an energy.
This is something that people don't really like to talk about because it's kind of like, well, so whatever, all of us are going to just like have cooked attention spans anywhere. But if you actively work to reduce how little your attention span is and you try to increase it, it will allow you to consume and experience the world in a way that not a lot of people are anymore.
And listen, if you want to do it, it's up to you. I'm not going to judge you either way because, hey, I like having some stuff melt my brain once in a while when I need to distract and I need to eat. But I also recognize that when I deliberately listen to an album on vinyl or I deliberately talk to somebody on the phone without having another app open...
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of wabi-sabi in our lives?
When I give my full attention to something, I am able to experience every part of it. I don't feel detached. And instead, it is more valuable.
Because what a lot of us do is we think, well, our friend calling, I can call him whenever. It's literally free. Who cares? But you don't know if your friend is going to be around forever. What?
You don't know. And I know that's a drastic way of thinking of it, right? But let's just calm it down a little bit. What if your friend is really in pain? And it's not something that they can tell you. It's something you have to pick up. What if your friend is days away from making a really bad decision and you could be the person to just talk them out of it?
Wouldn't you want something like that for yourself? Well, for me, I'm very grateful that I've had friends that were able to stop me from doing bad things. From thinking that the world was cooked and that my situation was terrible. And if they had not focused, if they had not just experienced that, Me. In full.
I don't know if I'd be standing here. And that's not to put pressure on you.
But it's more to tell you that there is so much to this life and this experience that we can't just consume by only hearing it, by only looking at it, by only feeling it. We need to have all of our senses involved in order to have the full picture. And people love to put things out of context. For example, let's say that you're hanging out in a friend group, right?
And your partner is not in the friend group, so they're hanging out with their girlies or their bros, you know, separately, right? And one of their friends just happens to be at the same movie theater that you guys are at. And he walks out beforehand and he catches you and somebody that you shouldn't be with walking out of the theater.
They're going to go and tell your partner that they saw you with somebody that should not be named. Obviously, in the whole context of things, you know, deep down that that wasn't the case. That wasn't the case at all. You guys were just hanging out. And I mean, I don't know. I don't know what happened, but like there was no malintention.
And this is where it's super, super easy to fall into drama without having context. In the same way, it's super, super easy to make assumptions when you don't have context in experiences. When you do not, you know... have something firsthand and you have all of your senses that interact with it. It's so much easier to be like, well, I should just like work harder.
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Chapter 6: How can we change our mindset for a better life?
And that is being intentional. Because friendships are not free. And friendships can be very, very beautiful. They can be very, very good. And sometimes it takes realizing, like nobody's going to come to me first. I need to initiate. I need to be the one that says, hey, what's up? How are you? I love your vibe. Maybe not that awkward, but you know.
These things will only happen, these realizations will only pop into your brain if you detach yourself from the things that are distracting you from your emotions. If you detach yourself from the people that are draining you of life and not in a good way. Okay, sorry, my bad. Let's keep moving. Those things are super important to understand.
And it all comes first, you know, full circle because the way that you treat your time, your time will treat you in that same way. If you want to squander it, if you want to spend it partying, that's cool. Just understand what you're getting yourself into. And I think you should party. I think you should have a good time and hang out and see your friends.
But I also think you shouldn't neglect things that you want to do just because you're seeking validation from other people. I think you need to be very, very cognizant of that. Because it can be very, very dangerous. I know people that spent a lot of their life just partying, hanging out, and now they've got health problems.
And the friends that they spent partying with, they got a girlfriend and got married and they no longer talk. They did things that were, in concept, in theory, free, because they had free time. But the intentionality behind it was lacking. That was the only thing they did. When in reality, celebration, partying, in my opinion, That should be an addition. It should be a supplement.
It shouldn't be the reason you go to a school. It should be something that you get as a reward for studying, for doing your thing, for feeling like you are in control of your circumstances. Go out and party. You got to fight for your right to party. You have to. But I also think that partying has become synonymous with like, that's what you're supposed to do.
So people just force themselves into just like doing something that they don't even like. And I'm not somebody that's like an anti-partier by any means too. I just think that you got to know where you stand. And you have to realize if that's not how you want to spend your free time, then you have to know that that's a time sink.
Like going out, doing things, being around people, that takes time and it takes energy. And if you're not about it, don't do it. You don't need to. In the same vein, you don't need to stay inside all the time because you don't have any friends. You can go out and make friends. It's not illegal to do that. I used to think that that was like a huge problem with me in college.
I was just like, well, I don't know anybody here and like going out and like talking to people, you know, at the dining hall is weird. But it's only weird if you make it weird because at the end of the day, everyone else is just kind of living the same experience.
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