This episode explores why modern life feels rushed and how perceptions of time passing quickly are influenced by societal and psychological factors. We delve into data on time use, the impact of technology, and practical strategies to slow down and find more meaning in everyday life.

Key Topics

• Perception of time passing quickly in modern life
• Data on time use and feelings of being rushed from 1975 to 1998
• Impact of technology and AI on productivity and time management
• Gender differences in perceived busyness and free time
• Strategies to create pauses and reduce stress in daily routines

Sound Bites

• "Going faster actually makes you slower."
• "Feeling rushed is a psychological illusion."
• "Creating pauses can reduce stress and improve decision-making."

Chapters
Chapters
00:00
Introduction to the feeling of modern life's rush
01:56
The math of time and how we calculate minutes saved
04:04
Personal stories of speeding tickets and perceptions of busyness
05:56
Data on time use and feelings of being rushed from 1975 to 1998
08:49
The impact of societal changes and gender roles on perceived busyness
11:52
The illusion of increased speed and societal perceptions
14:59
The role of technology and AI in productivity and stress
17:54
Strategies to slow down and create meaningful pauses
22:10
Practical tips for managing digital communication and digital overload
27:51
The importance of intentional life planning and prioritization
32:02
Accepting the human condition and normalizing feelings of rush
34:04
Conclusion: Reframing our perception of time and stress

TRANSCRIPT
Mike Steger 00:04
Welcome. You're listening to this could be it, a podcast in which we do our best to freak you out about how ridiculous modern life is, and then talk you back down again. So we cover many different topics that we personally find puzzling about the modern world, this life that's so complicated and comes with zero decent owner manuals, rule books, or how-to guides. So this is our effort to fill in those gaps. And today you're listening to a quickie, which is a little bit more focused, a little a little less in depth, and we do seek to actually address and resolve one of the perplexities of modern life,

Jodi Wellman 00:46
you think there's going to be a resolution to this topic, Mike?

Mike Steger 00:49
Yes.

Jodi Wellman 00:50
Okay, you're crazy. Can we just?

Mike Steger 00:53
I've cracked the code first. You've

Jodi Wellman 00:55
done it. All right. Well, I'm going to sit back and light a smoke and see what you have to say. Yeah. And I just have to point out, it's intentional. We didn't even do this on purpose, but let's pretend that we're smart enough that we planned to have the quickie topic be about how time feels like it's passing so fast and scarce. Doesn't that seem appropriate?

Mike Steger 01:16
Yeah, yeah. We feel like we're rushing all the time, right? Don't you? I do.

Jodi Wellman 01:21
I do too. Is there ever a time when you have not felt rushed, like you just went on a road trip? Did you feel like you weren't rushing?

Mike Steger 01:28
I still feel like I was rushing, right? Because you do the calculations. If you're if you're driving 75 miles an hour and go up to 76 on a 15 hour drive, that stays 15 miles. 15 miles at 75 miles an hour is something like 12 minutes. You are like, well, if I just like nudge a little bit up, I say 12 minutes on this 15 hour drive. You are like, what can I do for 12 minutes?

Jodi Wellman 01:51
Did you do that calculus, that math?

Mike Steger 01:55
Yeah, it's not calculus.

Jodi Wellman 01:57
Okay, wait, what kind of said that? And I like, wait, is it? It's not algebra. Barely

Mike Steger 02:02
algebra. What is it? What?

Jodi Wellman 02:06
Yeah, but you did that though. You actually calculated if I did a mile faster. Here is what you mean.

Mike Steger 02:10
Yeah, because then every mile you go up, the likelihood that some, and I love this demographic, of course, but with some stick in the butt. Nebraska State Trooper is going to pull you over for going 81 instead of 75, and then that loses you time as well as money. And this did happen. And they do not listen to excuses, even though I wasn't even lying. The one I got three speeding tickets when I was 16, and then one more when I was 24, on literally the loneliest road in America, U.S. Highway 50 through the middle of nowhere, Nevada, Elko, and stuff like that. It has road signs that say "Loneliest Road in America. I managed to pull off a speeding ticket there. Other than that, it was just this one Nebraska guy during COVID, coming back from an extremely gruesome and and disturbing trip, very first time we'd gone back to Midwest to see our parents and family. We're like January sitting outside, freezing our asses off. And on the way back, it was a new car, new to us car, and I had set the cruise control at 80, thinking that's fine. We're out near Sydney, Nebraska, which there's nothing. The exits are like 25 miles apart. There's nothing, and this guy catches us and says we're going 84. I was like, we still had the little paper tags on the back. I was like, I honestly set it at 80. I know that that's not great, but we weren't going 84 in any way I could tell is you can see this is a new car maybe the cruise was off

Jodi Wellman 03:44
yeah

Mike Steger 03:45
he's like why were you going why did you want to go 80

Jodi Wellman 03:48
yeah

Mike Steger 03:48
it's like it's a long drive like it just gets tiring after a while I was like oh are you saying that you're impaired that you're sleep impaired I'm like fuck you and your mustache but I love that demographic of of people who just need their quotas and will do whatever they can, but yeah, law like

Jodi Wellman 04:05
wow,

Mike Steger 04:06
law enforcement is highly necessary. That's not what I'm arguing. Yeah, I'm saying is like I do have a penchant for hurrying now.

Jodi Wellman 04:13
Well, first of all, you're clearly a bad person. Second of all, for all this feeding, these feeding improprieties, I'm just happy I

Mike Steger 04:20
didn't get probed somehow.

Jodi Wellman 04:21
Well, happy is maybe one interpretation, and I often think when I am speeding of that cheesy phrase, "speeding only slows you down, because it is true. So that that

Mike Steger 04:32
came into because it is true. If you go faster, you go slower. I wanted you to be proud of me that I didn't take the bait on what reaction you thought people should have actually to not being probed. No, we didn't. So I had to like undo all the goodwill I built up by not addressing that. Yeah. Well, okay. I mean, number of times when when I had nothing but time on my hands because I'm Gen X, right, and we. We were alone with literally nothing to do other than watch like reruns of the Munsters for most of our lives. I lived in the middle of a, as we all know, the butthole of Minnesota, where there's nothing but alfalfa to play with. So yeah, and like

Jodi Wellman 05:15
the toys, wow,

Mike Steger 05:16
very smelly rivers to to you know with like leeches in them to to flop around in those are my and and like you know that was it bows and arrows. So did you turn

Jodi Wellman 05:26
out as sort of normal as you did? This is the this is the miracle here, kids. Yeah, and

Mike Steger 05:32
being great. But

Jodi Wellman 05:33
you were born as a kid, and so was I. And it was upon retrospect, like I look back at him so jealous of that time of like I want to savor boredom, but I'm afraid of boredom because any opportunity that I might have to be bored, it's like I'm constructing my life in many ways to be busy. But I guess that's a different topic. So why do you think time feels like it's so freaking fast?

Mike Steger 05:58
Well, we're going to dive into this. I've been looking into this a little bit, and this is why I think I can solve it. So let me ask you really quickly: Do you think life is? Do you feel like life is speeding up? That there are more and more people who feel like they're rushed and don't have free time, and all these sorts of things. I

Jodi Wellman 06:15
don't feel like it's speeding up any more than it was since I started working. So I'm sorry if I'm going to burst your hypothesis, but for me, it's just been like fast pace since you know getting out of school, and even in school. But why? What do the people say? The

Mike Steger 06:32
people seem to feel like life is speeding up. Like there's this sensation that the pace of change is ever quickening, right? Like we didn't have email. Then we didn't have the internet. Now we've got like robot Olympics, which if you want to both freak out and laugh, you need to watch the like robot Olympics in China. They are terrifying and hilarious all at once. Like

Speaker 1 06:58
yeah.

Mike Steger 06:58
Anyways, there's robots that can run faster. They beat Usain Bolt's time this year.

Jodi Wellman 07:04
I don't find that to be an interesting accomplishment. Like, of course it did. It's a machine. But anyways, but you're yeah.

Mike Steger 07:10
Listen, listen. Let me have the robots at least, okay? So, but there's this impression people are saying like, oh my god, I've never been busier pivoting all the time since COVID. I think that's been one influence: the collapse of a typical corporate job career, where you work 40 years and you get a watch and a pension. You know, people come transitioning a lot more. It feels like right, and the rules keep changing. We have you know political unrest, people storming capitals or whatever, whatever that supposedly was, and according to pardons and things like that, like we have all these these things happening all the time, and so people tell me, anyways, they feel like life is really speeding up. But Jodi, you accidentally might be right. So a wise man will soon have once said, "That's me, by the way. That every generation reinvents the same problems of the previous generation. Do you like that?

Jodi Wellman 08:17
So these are your words that we're now immortalizing.

Mike Steger 08:20
Yes.

Jodi Wellman 08:22
All right. It's brilliant. It's so brilliant.

Mike Steger 08:24
It's so brilliant. It goes on the T-shirt with "Stop Harsh and My Nards. Jodi's Jodi promised me she's going to get that in our merch shop, which doesn't exist, right? So, okay. So, what's interesting is they have actually been studying this sort of stuff going all the way back to 1975. You remember that? That's when we both started working. Actually, closer to true than like everyone from our generation felt like had a job when they're a child. Like it was like

Jodi Wellman 08:51
1212.

Mike Steger 08:54
Look at you. I literally had my first painting job when I was eight. But still, I

Jodi Wellman 08:57
was in the alfalfa field. That doesn't count.

Mike Steger 09:00
Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. So here's the deal. They have these time use studies. They'll like go get a selection of folks from the U.S. In this case, this is where it really started. And so what they'll ask is like, how do you spend your time, and how do you feel about that? Right. So they actually were asking in 1975, how often are you feeling rushed? Always, sometimes, or never, right? And you can see that for men, it did go up. The always category went up a little bit from 1975 to 1998, from 26 percent to 30.8 percent. For women, it went up from 29 percent to 39% right? So, like, it was a larger rise. Most of what they found in the reduction of free time also, like men had the same amount of free time in 1998 as they had in 1975, about 5.2 hours per day of doing nothing. Women went from 5.4 hours down. 4.7 hours of free time. At the same time, I'll just point out that joint market work hours, like this, is if you're a married couple, the number of hours between the two of you you worked went from 53 hours per week to 63 hours per week between 1970 1997. That was almost all women's participation in labor force. So what happened is women started working more, men worked about the same amount, and women seemingly had to absorb all the usual stuff that they used to be doing as well. Gen X parents and Boomer parents all thought that they were that the dads were enlightened and spending great time dividing the burden-it didn't seem to actually happen.

Jodi Wellman 10:45
Right, right. That's interesting. For some reason, when you were describing that, it reminded me of my mom. We remember when the first TV dinners came out, Swanson TV dinners, and that was supposed to save. I remember my mom saying, "This is going to be great. It's going to save time. And then I remember her putting it in the oven. I don't think we even had a microwave yet. Big day at our house when the microwave came and was also rite of passage. But that putting the TV dinner in, I remember her distinctly saying, with like scratching her head, that it didn't save her time because then I remember her sweeping the kitchen floor, and she's like, well, I guess I wouldn't have swept the floor if I'd had the time to. But it was like we're just replacing stuff. So anyway,

Mike Steger 11:27
yeah, absolutely tripped down memory

Jodi Wellman 11:29
lane.

Mike Steger 11:29
Yeah, we're replacing things. That's what AI is doing, right? Like some places that incorporate AI into the workplace, there a small minority of them are trying to replace human work, but mostly they're using it to get more work out of each human that they

Jodi Wellman 11:44
have. Yeah, good point.

Mike Steger 11:45
Yeah, yeah. We don't get productivity gains. We're not going to be sitting around like Elon Musk is trying to trick us into thinking, you know, just doing artistic endeavors or his favorite thing, which is overthrowing democracies and impregnating them, and you know, like we're not going to be doing those fun jobs, you know. And actually, what we start to see is that this idea that life is speeding up,

Jodi Wellman 12:09
that

Mike Steger 12:09
we're doing more, it just isn't showing up in the data. It's not showing

Jodi Wellman 12:13
data

Mike Steger 12:14
in the U.S. It's not showing data in the U.K. Right? The only place where it is showing up is for women over a long trend from the 70s into the 90s and even a little bit beyond.

Jodi Wellman 12:27
So much of this then is your perception of being busy. So there is a reality where you know back in the day when people were milling the field and coming in and you know woof so busy and I guess ostensibly they were whatever their roles were-baking bread. I don't know, hitching the horse. Like I feel so busy, but they didn't have to maybe finish after dinner and write a report. They were playing the fiddle. I don't know, but they felt busy, and they and for them that meant they were busy. Someone now today feels busy. I guess where are we stacking it up against actual tasks? Because perception really-it's kind of reality, no matter where you are, right?

Mike Steger 13:05
Yeah, yeah. They try to tackle this in a few ways. Like one is feeling rushed, for example. They'll measure that with these giant time use studies. They have people basically recreate their days for a stretch of time, or they'll ask people how many, how much free time did you have? Right, we talked about those types of things with that first 1975 to 1998 study. A different study they looked at from 2000 to 2015. Like we're starting to get a little recent, and they tried to break it down in terms of the average number of events we stuff into a day.

Jodi Wellman 13:38
Okay,

Mike Steger 13:38
like this isn't tasks per hour or multitasking or anything like that, but it's it's kind of like how many times are we transitioning from one thing to the next thing, family to commute to work to fitness to going to the bathroom, whatever it is, right? I don't know if they might should go into the bathroom. They should. That's a big event around these parts. But yeah, so that what they find is that basically not much has changed?

Jodi Wellman 14:02
So we've always felt rushed. We've always got stuff stuffed into our days.

Mike Steger 14:08
Yeah, and I think we've always felt that our generation is uniquely rushed.

Jodi Wellman 14:15
Totally

Mike Steger 14:16
compared to simpler times when people were doing nothing.

Jodi Wellman 14:19
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There is that bias, right? Like, just like how the world is getting worse now, like the end of history illusion, right?

Mike Steger 14:27
Yeah, yeah. Now, so, so I do think we can. One takeaway then is that we solved the feeling rush thing because you and I solved it because it's not actually happening. So, boom, that's excitement number one.

Jodi Wellman 14:43
Rewire your your interpretation of that. Yeah, you're just

Mike Steger 14:46
wrong. Your feelings are wrong. That's the most important thing I learned in as a therapist was always tell your your clients that their feelings are wrong. Number two, we solved it for men. Many busier over the last 40-something years of these data, they are doing about the same amount.

Jodi Wellman 15:04
Okay, all right, that's good.

Mike Steger 15:06
And women,

Jodi Wellman 15:08
sorry about your luck. Good

Mike Steger 15:09
luck. So now the problem is, of course, that when we do feel rushed, it's not great for us. So there's a couple little little threads here. We feel sadder.

Jodi Wellman 15:21
Yeah, we

Mike Steger 15:22
feel more stressed, and then they have these like paradigms. Well, they'll they'll pressure people to do things quicker and quicker and quicker and quicker, right? And they'll say like, "This is time urgent. This is time sensitive. Act now, right? That that sort of like, "Oh my god, I got to do something right now.

Jodi Wellman 15:38
Yeah,

Mike Steger 15:39
I love this study because it's from Heather Ury, first initial H, last name U R Y, which spells Hurry. She did a. She also did an amazing paper with Carol Riff on like the biology of eudaimonic well being. It was very cool. And now she's got this where she's like telling people to hurry, hurry the fuck up, right? And in these studies, these are online studies, so the urgency messages are going to be coming from texts and sounds, maybe. So what happened is that they said they saw an increase in information processing efficiency.

Jodi Wellman 16:16
Efficiency, okay.

Mike Steger 16:17
So they processed more information. Their accuracy was lower, though. Oh,

Jodi Wellman 16:23
okay, cool. Their

Mike Steger 16:25
disgust was higher. So we, when we're feeling rest, we do take more on board, right? Yeah. That emergency mode where, like, all of our senses are awake, and we're like, we pull it in. But then, what we do with it tends to be less efficient, and it leads to lower accuracy.

Jodi Wellman 16:43
Okay, so we do more quantity but less quality.

Mike Steger 16:47
More quantity but less quality. Also, there's another set of studies that they looked at the transition times between tasks. Shorter that time gets, like the less time we get to transition from one kind of task or one intense bout of work to the next

Jodi Wellman 17:06
one, the

Mike Steger 17:07
more we feel upset. Like that is actually also creating stress and negative affects. So giving ourselves a breather between tasks probably is pretty important, right? So we want to try to get away. Like you said, going fast is actually slower, or something like that, right?

Jodi Wellman 17:24
Speed slows you down, Mike.

Mike Steger 17:26
Yeah, speed slows you down. Feeling like you have to go fast probably does slow you down on information processing tasks because you're not going to be doing it very accurately or efficiently. Efficiently, so you have to go back, right? And all along the lines, if you're not giving yourself time to decompress, pushing out a task, you'll feel more stress and negative affect. And we know that stress and negative affect also make us more cognitively rigid, and we don't see all of the different possibilities

Jodi Wellman 17:55
for

Mike Steger 17:56
solving problems that we're facing.

Jodi Wellman 17:58
Yeah, I want to be cognitively squishy, not rigid. So practical advice,

Mike Steger 18:04
like I have a wet brain, is what you're saying. Is that a thing? It

Jodi Wellman 18:09
sounds gross, but maybe definitely jello. So the moment right here, which is okay, in reality, we've got people listening, and myself, where it's like emails are mounting. There's a proposal that's due. There's this kind of PowerPoint they got to work on. There's this. So oh yeah, and then there's dinner. But okay, we'll worry about that later. So if we're supposed to maximize for our well-being and happiness, and like try to decrease all this, ah, the tactical thing now would be to what?

Mike Steger 18:38
So one, let's not catastrophize.

Jodi Wellman 18:42
Okay.

Mike Steger 18:43
Whatever we're perceiving that makes us feel we live in a uniquely rushed era,

Jodi Wellman 18:48
yeah,

Mike Steger 18:49
may not be true. I mean, are we going to be murdered by robots as soon as Elon Musk can figure out how to do that? Yes.

Jodi Wellman 18:56
Okay. Mild worry there. Okay.

Mike Steger 18:58
But are we going to be you know without food because global warming and the climate crisis creates drought and famine everywhere. Yes, but we don't have to hurry. We don't have to hurry around because we're not actually seeming to live in an era where we're adding so much more. There's a little bit of the George Costanza syndrome, right? Like you know this. I know you're a big Seinfeld fan. Maybe not of the person or of the rampant sexism and homophobia of that show, but maybe you are. I'm not going to speak for you, Jodi, but you know George Costanza somehow gets a job working for the New York Yankees, and he's like very upset about some random thing in his office, and his boss sees him like super frustrated and stressed out, and makes the assumption that he's working hard. So he gets credit. Like we're all busting around. We say, "How you doing today? Like, ah, like it's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing milk bone underwear. Okay, that's actually Norm from Tears, but you know, like. Those sorts of things, right? So, I think we have adopted a culture of complaining, which I love to explain. But I think that we indulge ourselves in thinking that we are uniquely screwed as a generation, as every generation before us, other than the boomers who really did ruin everything. No, I'm kidding, right? But like most generations, feel like something was better before, and now we're just mixing up the world by running around like chickens with our head cut off. So let's let that go. We're living living in it feels rushed and hurrying because people kind of always have felt that way, right? Like once moved into service economies and you know dealing with people in multiple time zones, which they've been doing since the railroads, right? So like once happened, we just start felt busy. So let's let go the fact that it feels like let's let go the impression that feels like we're uniquely suffering.

Jodi Wellman 20:57
Yeah,

Mike Steger 20:58
yeah. Part two.

Jodi Wellman 21:00
Yeah,

Mike Steger 21:00
we need to recognize again, as we always try to, the increased burden on women, right in society, at least in shared households, that they are the ones who have less free time now than they used to. They are the ones who are taking on feeling more rushed and increasing the number of tasks they're tackling in a typical day, so that's where our attention should be. I I do imagine we have a lot of female listeners. So then, how do we help with those folks? One, we want to increase pauses between tasks, right? Switching, cramming a protein bar down your mouth, or they have protein. What is it? The protein Honey Nut Cheerios. Now, you know, like if you're just cramming that stuff down your throat,

Jodi Wellman 21:49
protein Doritos.

Mike Steger 21:50
Protein Doritos must. That's a must do. You know, so like instead of jumping so fast,

Jodi Wellman 21:58
yeah,

Mike Steger 21:58
that just makes it worse, right? That makes sense. What's that?

Jodi Wellman 22:02
How long

Mike Steger 22:05
is a pause? Like pretty good length. Let's okay, because

Jodi Wellman 22:07
this is where right now I will prepare for a backlash of like, oh yeah, like where am I going to get that 45 minutes? Oh, if you were going to say 45,

Mike Steger 22:17
I was going to say 10, maybe.

Jodi Wellman 22:19
Oh, that okay. Well, this is good. We can do a quick stretch. Okay. A

Mike Steger 22:22
couple sets of push-ups.

Jodi Wellman 22:24
Okay, like a long pee break.

Mike Steger 22:26
Yeah, jumping jacks, doodle. I know you like to doodle.

Jodi Wellman 22:31
Okay. Do some whittling,

Mike Steger 22:33
whatever it is. Like try to take, try to respect your breaks. You know, don't use, don't try to maximize the productivity in your breaks.

Jodi Wellman 22:40
Okay.

Mike Steger 22:40
And above all, most of the things that we do don't really make us feel miserable. However, work-based electronic communications of any sort make us feel the worst,

Jodi Wellman 22:55
don't they? Do you agree with that?

Mike Steger 22:57
Whatever the hell Teams is trying to do all the time, email notifications that have anything to do with like pinging into our lives, saying work, work. That's the stuff that gets us right. Like that's the stuff that seems to really ramp up our perceptions of feeling hurried, feeling time scarce, and just complaining about how it just keeps building all it just keeps building all the time. So that's those are my takeaways from this area. Well, the

Jodi Wellman 23:28
idea of being aware that technology is going to mess with our happiness is noted. And then, what would a takeaway be there to do something? Because if the team is knocking on our door on Teams, and we've got all these messages. It's like, how do you stay employed, and you know, still still be respected by the people on the committee, or still have friends if we're not responding? I guess that's the question: is can we slow it down? Do you come up with an agreement with your team or with your friends to say, let's talk about a reasonable response rate. Like, what are the ways that we can actually live in a world that is that is loving being fast paced?

Mike Steger 24:07
Yeah, I think people need to A/B test this themselves, right? Like, in in some professions, you might be able to wait out. Let's let's let all the the chatter die down of people throwing out ridiculous ideas, or instantly saying, "Let's just send it over to AI, and then someone realizing why that's a bad idea, or whatever it is, you might be able to just let that die down and tackle the Slack the Slack channel every hour, or use. I know I'm not advocating for AI to everything, but maybe AI can summarize what are the the to dos the last hour of of the back and forth and

Jodi Wellman 24:46
the making

Mike Steger 24:47
sure you're seen to have pointless comments on these sorts of platforms? Right. Some people might be able to do the sort of email, you know, get some get four hours of work done in the morning and then check your email and see what you should. Do with your afternoon, right? Some people can do that, but some people do have different paces that are expected of them. It's going to be unhealthy, probably, if you do working in those situations. But you know, on Tuesday and Thursday, try to see if you can create a gap between when these notifications pop in and when you can reply, and then see how that works. Are you getting in trouble? And then Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you do what you normally do.

Jodi Wellman 25:26
Okay.

Mike Steger 25:26
So that could be one. That could be one sort of approach too. And just what is the tolerance in the system actually, rather than what does it seem to be?

Jodi Wellman 25:35
Yeah, I love this. It there's subtle things, but I think a lot of it is mindset that I'm catching from this conversation, it's like acknowledging we're not alone, so that's normalizing it. Our ancestors felt this, and our future will. Okay, so it's the human condition. Okay, and then can I just be thoughtful about building breaks, not being so frenetic about being the push and pull, and pacing myself when I'm inundated with tech? I feel like that's solved. Yeah, right.

Mike Steger 26:03
I promised we'd solve this, so you know. Oh

Jodi Wellman 26:06
well, the other idea about if there is a reality where I can free up more time for us, or any other productivity hack or whatever, and we have time, or even if we're not freeing up time craftily, but we happen to have X number of hours of discretionary time in our day. This is where I love to think about how the idea of being thoughtful about it, rather than just letting it happen to us, because time and tasks expand to fill the container, right? So if we know we happen to have three hours off, which is if you go to bed at what? When do most people go to bed? You think I go to bed ridiculously early? I don't know what humans do. When do people go to bed?

Mike Steger 26:48
They go to bed between 930 and 230.

Jodi Wellman 26:53
Jeez, animals! All right, let's say you. I'm guessing

Mike Steger 26:56
that captures a lot of people. Probably I don't know nine midnight. Like we're all supposed to get 100 hours of sleep every night,

Jodi Wellman 27:02
yeah.

Mike Steger 27:02
Which that's another thing. Like we have to get into some time. Is like all the things we're supposed to do that if we don't do them right are going to murder us or cause our brains to get causes to get wet brain, which is okay.

Jodi Wellman 27:14
Well, for some reason, so dirty. But I want to. We're going to parking lot that because I want that supposed to conversation. That's next, but like let's just say people go to bed at 10. You you night owls. Most of us maybe have at least a few few hours. Are we being thoughtful about how we want to spend that time? And maybe not seven days a week, but rather than letting the routine take over and doing the mindless stuff, which may be very beneficial to just zone out. I mean, I've zoned out professionally in front of the TV. I love it, but is there also room for planning? Like, all right, Wednesday, I'm gonna let's go for that late night walk. Let's go and intentional. Let's go to that ice cream place where they make the best banana splits. Let's do that one evening, or like being really strategic about making life happen, so that we're not always feeling like I'm rushed, and then all I can do is just barely recover, and then I have to wake up tomorrow to the grind.

Mike Steger 28:10
Perfect, right? I think that's a great way to pair it with pair the two types of scarcity: the time scarcity we feel when we're being rushed, and the life scarcity we feel when we realize we're gonna die someday. We can build in time. What's that?

Jodi Wellman 28:27
I said you said it for a change.

Mike Steger 28:29
I know. I was. I was gonna. I was gonna say 4000 Mondays. But yeah, you know. So so we we do feel. I think this is another topic, but like, what happens when you feel like you are your work? That's a whole other thing, right? Like, I write. I've got a book, my first real authored book coming out pretty soon. You've got your second one in the works. We have we give talks. Like, we feel like there's a lot of stuff in our lives we can't delegate because it has to come straight from the heart or straight from the wet brain, and you know, like this is this is another conundrum that we we should tackle some other time. Like, what happens when you are your work and you started off loving? You would have done this stuff for free at one point, but now you have to do it for pay. Then what do you What do you fill your extra moments with? Okay, that one.

Jodi Wellman 29:25
Oh my god, I'm way too excited to do that one next. Jeez, yeah, yeah. Well, one thing just to echo the point about you generously mentioning that we're all going to die, and so time is scarce in the grandest sense possible. I have to say that I sometimes find myself stepping in it, or I have to be careful about how I word it because this is this whole like carpe diem. We have 4000 Mondays. Basically, don't fuck it up and don't waste your time. And I have a line like living a squander-free life, where there's a presumption that we're squandering it unless we're doing, and all that. Even the way I'm talking faster and getting more excited, ah. It's like this urgency, and so how do we discern between? Okay, all right, thanks for pointing out. I have 1690 Mondays left, which is true for me, maybe, and ah, like that ratchets up this intensity. But I don't want to add to the problem. I want to make it urgency, but without the anxiety, you know, of like, and so at the end of the day, it's just got to come down to prioritizing. We'll never get to all the things that if you take the time to do a bucket list, like good luck traveling to all those countries, or going to all those restaurants, or having all those burgers, or whatever. Until I'm hungry. How do we prioritize and not get panicked about how there's no possible way to fit stuff in because time's scarce and I'm so rushed. I'm now I'm rushed not only to try and answer my Slack messages but also to try to fit in this life that I'm supposed to be creating. That's going to be amazing.

Mike Steger 30:55
Yeah, I think it's really interesting that Buddhism, for example, and the Be here now movement started around the same time that those first time use studies were coming out. People were feeling rushed, right? Those questions were being asked. So again, I think people look for solutions to try to feel more calm in the moment. I'll just say one solution is if you-I don't remember the episode number, but we did an episode on death where we did try to help people find a rubric. We talk about drawing and quartering quite a lot in in that episode. If if you if you're not listening to these in order, you can go back and find that one. And we we kind of create a little bit of a system for not filling every moment with a different kind of rat race

Jodi Wellman 31:38
to

Mike Steger 31:38
live the best possible life according to maximizing the productivity existentially or otherwise of every moment, but making sure that the things that are most important are going to happen. That should take some of the pressure off. That should be our vibe as often as we can get

Jodi Wellman 31:54
it. I love that. Yeah, and if we can't reconstruct our days that may feel rushed inherently, especially if we're not retired. Which, by the way, I'll even just comment like the perception. Like my dad, I mention him a lot. Guest starring cameo again by Bob, 89. Like he knows his day isn't busy, but when he's got breakfast, lunch, and dinner to go down to the dining room, that fills his mind so much. About is it 1147 yet? Am I going to go down yet? Like we're still going to swell everything no matter what. So basically, we're just fucked till the day we die with believing that we're busy and rushed. Honestly, I

Mike Steger 32:30
think I had ended on a I had gotten us to a better point than that. Let's try to let's try to talk Jodi down real quickly so that we can wrap up this mega sized quickly,

Jodi Wellman 32:42
yeah. Recalibrate, go for it.

Mike Steger 32:44
You do babe, wife. You're fantastic, babe. So humor is a good coping mechanism, but right, like we're gonna take care of the things that are important to

Jodi Wellman 32:58
us. Yeah,

Mike Steger 32:59
rushing doesn't make that any easier because it just makes us take on things that are probably we're less we're exercising worse judgment when we're rushing rushing like we take on things we don't need to take on and we skip over things that would be soul filling and we replace them with soul murdering stuff and so if we just build in more pauses,

Jodi Wellman 33:20
go

Mike Steger 33:21
listen to our earlier episode on death and other quandaries that we understand. At least you know we take some time to figure out what are the things that are going to make my life feel squander free.

Jodi Wellman 33:31
Squander free,

Mike Steger 33:32
and we just build that in, and we make sure that we create the time intentionally, just like you suggested. I think you are on the completely right track,

Jodi Wellman 33:41
except for the Bob part. And now I'm wondering what belief has to be in place for us to think that we have to rush. Like, what belief has to be in place that if we think if I stop rushing, X will happen? You're really going to get fired if you stop rushing.

Mike Steger 33:56
I think we will discuss things like feelings of inadequacy in a lot of episodes. It might be there for plastic surgery. It might be there for being stuck in toxic relationships. It's certainly there for rushing and feeling like it comes to proving your worth. But we can't get into it today because Jodi, I must insist this could be it for rushing.

Jodi Wellman 34:27
Cheers to you! We got to get the fuck out of here.