This is something completely unrelated to the other stuff I've posted, but I, like most people, think better when writing stuff down. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I noticed I myself have some issues I battle with everyday. They're nothing super major. Others have problems way worse than I, but this and a few other posts will be fun for me, allowing me to objectively pick apart my own brain and see why perhaps I think the way I do and things of the sort. These are my own social problems. Stick around if you want, I'll post in the thread if I post anything relevant to the community anyway, but these are mainly for my sake and for those who wanna get to know me a little bit better.
Prefacing this is hard. There are many places to start with when trying to discuss this problem. If it seems like I'm rambling a lot, I apologize. I've gathered my thoughts on this but never wrote them down, so formulating a well written entry about this will be haphazard. Hope you guys can still get from it what it is I am trying to convey.
I don't dream at night. Or at least I have literally no memory of them. Practically every night I lie in bed, and within three or four minutes I wake up however many hours later I set my alarm for. This wasn't always the case, and I was excited the occasional time it would happen when I was younger. The immediate experience of going from awake to awake seamlessly was great, but as I've gotten older I have started to dread this feeling, and in turn sleeping.
The reason this has made me hate sleeping is for a few reasons, but the big one is simple: my life moves 33% quicker than everyone else's. Our time on earth is already limited, and knowing that 1/3 of my life is spent doing literally nothing bothers me. Everyone I've talked to remembers their dreams. Some remember every detail and sleeping is a wonderful place for them as it's like a whole new day, while others vividly remember them for a brief time. I don't get any of that. My week is 1/3 the length of everyone else's. My life feels 1/3 the length of everyone else's. I have absolutely no recollection of that 1/3 of my life, and then you throw on the five infantile years (~27% of my current life ATM), and you're left with a majority of my current life without any memories. This horrifies me.
My solution to this problem isn't one that is necessarily healthy for me either. I have consistently made a conscious effort to get less sleep so I can spend more time of my day awake and active than wasting it on something I will never remember. No one ever remembers their best day of sleep. It feels insignificant, and I have limited the sleep I get. I seldom get the recommended eight hours a night, and often settle for six or less. Fortunately, I'm highly functional with limited sleep, but it catches up to me eventually, and unfortunately.
However I try to make sure my hours spent awake aren't wasted. I have spent less time playing video games and more and more time hanging out with friends, practicing useful talents such as singing, guitar, a foreign language, and even picked up philosophy and reading of all things. I also make sure I am as busy as possible, to prevent me from wasting my days. Someone once told me; the easiest way to avoid bad vices in life is to avoid being bored, and I try to live this out to the fullest. My days are filled with friends, hobbies, clubs, etc. I make sure no hour is truly wasted, as that is one hour I will never get back.
This may seem like a good thing. Not dreaming at night empowers me to live an active life and make the most of my day. And to that I would say you're not wrong, but it doesn't make me feel any better about losing 1/3 of my life, and this is because I don't remember the additional things I do each day. No one does. I couldn't tell you my friends who I passed on my way to and from class today, but I can tell you some stupid shit I regret when I was 10. I couldn't tell some super funny thing my best friend told me before going off to college, I couldn't tell you why I almost cried laughing. I couldn't tell you because I have forgotten, and it's that added knowledge of forgetting and loss of that memory which makes me losing time sleeping hurt even more.
Combating that is easier. My New Year's Resolution this year was to write down all the good things that happen to me each day. It can be simple things from "I talked with X today and we caught up a bit" to as major as "Got a huge scholarship to college." It doesn't matter how big or small, if it made an impact on my day in a positive way I write it down. This helps commit it to memory, and it gives me a place to look back on if I need to refresh my memory. It truly does help. I remember the fun things I do with my friends more, I remember the things we say, and the things we hope to do. It works, but it's still not enough. I have to refresh my memory and go back through them. Maybe one day I'll go through the years worth and keep my favorites, the ones I want to remember most, but it's still just me throwing away memories of some distant past.
This problem is rooted in a deeper psychological issue all people suffer with. I hinted at it before, but it's our tendency to remember embarrassing, depressing, and darker moments in our lives over happier memories. I think this is due to those emotions being stronger. Anger and sadness can lead to very dangerous paths, while I've never seen someone OD on joy. For whatever reason we as people remember the bad more easily, and this is what I try to combat everyday.
I fear running out of time. It bothers me daily. We live in a time where we have seen drastic advances in technology, science, medicine, and all sorts of things within a single lifetime. It wasn't long ago that man thought going to the moon would never be possible, and now we're looking at other galaxies and learning the finer mechanics of our universe. We've curing diseases, we're exploring properties of matter that we didn't even know existed until the last decade, and all sorts of crazy shit. There is so much we can do in our lives, the potential to do something has never been more readily available, and I want to do so much. Time is my biggest enemy, and it's one I have to face every second, of every day.
Hopefully I'm not being morbidly depressing and bringing people down. I'm an incredibly happy-go-lucky person and very rare to see me upset or bothered by something. I promise my mental psyche is doing just fine, but this is something I am long wanted to explore more. I wanted to find out WHY I fear time so much, and why I hate sleeping. So if you're still with me thank you. You're the real MVP.
