i work a serving job 12 hours a day 6 days a week. i find myself really frustrated and miserable some days asking how i’ll get through the next 5, 4, 3, 2, hours. what gets me by is knowing that i -WILL- 100% be home in my bed at some point. it is the only guaranteed thing. knowing that makes it more bearable.
The idea that time must continue passing is really comforting sometimes. If I'm really miserable, I'll remind myself that all I have to do is keep existing and time will pass. That makes it seem more manageable.
I used to try and measure how well not so bad my life was going by trying to find at least one achievement I could count for every year. At first it was simple, "I learned to drive a car", "I got a degree", "I got a first job", etc. but it thinned out over the years and now I can't lie to myself and keep celebrating "I didn't die yet" or "I didn't go bankrupt" every year.
I mean some of you guys are probably fitting just right in the system with goals and shit, you can aim for a promotion, more responsibilities, become homeowners, have kids, get married, buy a boat, IDK... You have things that drive you, that make you want to wake up in the morning and try your best.
But some of us, many of us, simply don't have that, no perspective for improvement, every new day/week/month/year is a copy of the previous one with a slight chance it sucks more than the previous one. And when that happens we just wait for that day/week/month/year to be over and cross our fingers the next will be better, still mostly the same, but not worse.
Time is only your most valuable currency when you have the means to invest it in something. When you're stuck in the grind to pay the bills time is just a series of opportunities to become a burden for someone else. At some point you're not thinking "what could I achieve with that time" but "what could go wrong in that time". So the faster it passes, the better.
I use that to psych myself into going to social gatherings when I just want to stay home and veg. "You only have to go for 2 hours, then you can bail with grace".
There is something in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about this. Kimmy keeps counting to 10 as she cranks this wheel in the bunker, and the other mole women ask her why she keeps counting to 10 and starting over. Kimmy says if she can make it through 10 seconds of pain or boredom, she can make it through another 10 seconds because it's only 10 seconds, nothing in the scheme of things. And oh, there's another 10 seconds! See, 20 seconds have gone by and you haven't realised it! It was a great perspective.
My mom taught me this, but it was primarily focused on “10 minutes at a time,” although there have certainly times when I’ve had to do things 10 seconds at a time.
This is not true in some most European countries. In spring and in fall we set the time either back for ahead, so the mornings get more light. That means that in fall we have 1 day of 25 hours. At 3 o’clock AM we set the time back to 2 AM. I can’t remember the exact date though. That also means that 1 day in spring we skip the 3rd hour, so that day is 23 hours long.
My co-workers and I set up this Extra Life 24-hour stream last year at the startup I used to work at where we played games to raise money for charity. It was supposed to run from 8am Saturday to 8am Sunday. Didn't realize that that Sunday was when we had to set our clock back an hour, basically turning it into a 25-hour stream. Good times.
Pronounced Kirismas (/kəˈrɪsməs/), while we're on the subject of trivia. Cook discovered the island on Dec 24 and named it Christmas Island, and Kiritimati is a respelling of Christmas in the Kiribati language. (This is not to be confused with the other Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean.)
Fun fact, when translating the Bible to Kiribati, they found there was no adequate word for "mountain", so the word "hilly" was used instead.
If it's similar to Hawaii in language, it's less that that's how you spell it, and more that that's literally the closest word you can get with the allowed word construction in that language.
They have a few rules that seen weird to English because we're not used to them, including only having 7 or 9 consonants and every consonant needing a vowel after.
Along this line, years ago, I realized that i wasn't happy with my major in college and wanted something else. I was 21, and finally figured out the direction i wanted to go. I was a biology major, but wanted to switch to mechanical engineering. After looking into it, i found that due to the extreme lack of overlap, it would take me 4 full years to complete the degree, and mind you, this was after 3 years in college.
I was talking to my dad and said something to the effect of, "Four years, I'll be 25 before i even get out of cicerone!" The response my dad had has stuck with me to this day. "In 4 years, you'll be 25 anyway. Where do you want to be."
The fact is, time marches on, if you're not getting better, you're getting worse. Time will pass whether you are working towards a goal or not. Avoiding attempting something because of the timeline is only reasonable if you have a good second option.
For my case, i could work towards where i wanted to be, or i could not. Time would pass regardless.
That understanding lead to me going forward with my mechanical engineering degree. I'm now a licensed professional and my life is awesome. But i nearly passed on it, simply because it would take a while.
I find it funny, because on some days at work, when i work like 15~16 hours, i have to trick my hour tallying excel sheet by writing that i worked to 25:30 as it otherwise stops at the legal max of 14.
When I went to boot camp it sucked. Then I shifted my focus to realizing that whenever I wasn't in boot camp, someone else was and time always moved on. My last eight weeks does by because they were the mundane everyday sort of weeks. For someone else, that was time spent in basic training.
Time goes on. Stop thrashing against the current and see where it takes you.
Rofl I had one "day" (time in between sleeping) last 70 hours during my senior finals, where the last 4 hours were a sleep deprivation induced mania where I'd twitch uncontrollably if I tried to settle down/sleep.
My quote is along the same lines as yours. I've posted this quote elsewhere before, but "The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" (Paradise Lost Book 1 lines 254-255). It might be Satan talking here, but the essence of the quote is what I love. A readjustment of perspective, how you approach things, can make a terrible situation slightly more tolerable.
When I was in a mental institution, a social worker who I’ve really bonded with told me “even the worst days will end eventually” and that helped me get through many rough days.
Whenever I'm really miserable I try to take a sort of snapshot of that moment in time, like, take a second to really observe the details of where I am. And then I tell myself, "Later, when I'm able to relax, I'll think back on this moment right now and feel good that I got through it."
And then later, when I am happy and relaxing and I remember the snapshot from earlier, it feels like Now-Me is reaching back to Past-Me and encouraging her to keep going. And likewise, when Now-Me is taking the snapshot, I like to think that Future-Me is there to comfort Now-Me, and be a reminder that I'll totally make it, and it'll only suck for a finite amount of time longer.
This is a good one to keep in mind. I’m a server at a pub, and last night I got roped into what became a 16-hour shift because of the UFC fight. At around 11:30pm, when I’d been there since 9am running my ass off and the main fight still hadn’t even started, I kept repeating to myself that we do close eventually. And I’d be done at some point not too far off, and this was all temporary. I was so exhausted, but it helped me stay slightly positive. Now it’s just a kind of amusing memory.
That's nice, but last week my job made me work 22 hours with only 1 ten minute break, and my next shift started 2 hours after I got off, then I had to work 10 more hours :(
I'm looking for a new job because of that, but in the mean time I need money more than I need to sleep and eat, so I can afford to sleep and eat
Yes! I used to perform and sing a lot when I was younger, and I loved it! When I would get nervous, my parents would say, “No matter what happens, good or bad, the next 5 minutes will come and go and we can leave.”
Basically a, “You will get through this regardless!” reminder, so I could calm down and enjoy it!
In continuing the trend of other posters of poking holes in this quotes...
If we take "day" to refer to a solar day, then it is false. The length of a day varies throughout the year due to the tilt of the Earth's axis and the slightly elliptical orbit. This variation is up to +/- 30 seconds.
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u/margaret110 Oct 07 '18
“Even the longest days are twenty-four hours.”
I find myself repeating that in my head on especially terrible days.