Say ‘No’ (and don’t lie about why)
The Daily Scramble #4: Notes on taking your time back
For the majority of my twenties (and beyond the big 3–0 for some), I would rationalize all partying and invitations to socialize using a variety of FOMO-based ‘What If’s’, the biggest of which for me was, “What if I ‘meet someone’ there?”
But the older we grow, the more we get to appreciate how truly valuable our time is, and how important it can be to learn to filter out what we genuinely want to spend time on (and who we want to spend it with) from what we feel we may want to spend time on, but deep down don’t.
Over the years I’ve learned to recognize that, at times, we receive invitations to birthdays or other celebrations not because the person extending the invitation genuinely wants us there (if we aren’t close friends), but because, arguably, they’re more interested in bumping up attendance numbers than in what you’ve been up to over the last few months.
Dig deep for a minute.
Have you ever been invited to something by someone and wondered why you’re being invited at all?
On the other end of the spectrum, in cities as active and fast-paced as Hong Kong where I currently live, we often feel compelled to be making plans almost every weekend or to say yes to plans when we have none, often just for the sake of feeling like our lives are full and “not as boring as that of others” — an argument I’ve heard in the past.
Yet, once again, it’s so crucial to be taking a step back and look at how much of our time is spent on things/with people we genuinely want to spend parts of our days with, and how much of it is spent on often-misaligned ‘What Ifs.’
Life is too short to be in places we don’t really, deeply want to be in, with people we truly care about.
