Infinite Time

It’s weird, I imagine the first question people ask their doctor when getting a medical diagnosis is how much time they have left. For me it was actually the second, after “It’s that bad huh?”. It’s also the first question I get asked when I tell people about it (“So are you like, good now?”). We constantly fixate on this idea of the remaining time. I know I have for this past year. You do it at work (“How long does this project have left in the roadmap?”), at home (“If I go to sleep now I can still get 5 hours”), pretty much everywhere (“Are we there yet?”).

I am fortunate, my prognosis if all things go right is a normal lifespan. Artificial heart valves typically don’t wear out*. Despite being told that face to face by incredible people far smarter than me, it still feels unbelievable. It’s hard to when your heart ticks like a broken washing machine. I ask about it in most appointments with my surgeon. It’s on the top of my list of questions for an appointment I have with them next week. You can’t escape it.

If you’ve spoken to me in the last couple of months, you’ve probably heard me say the phrase “infinite time”. It’s a versatile couple of words, and a bit stupid.

My favourite part of University was being part of a community. Having people around you who are into the same things as you, who you see regularly, and get to have this shared experience with. While you’re in that bubble, it feels like it won’t end. You are focused on fewer, lower-stakes, day to day things. So you could say yes or no to whatever you want. Once you’ve left University and entered the real world we unfortunately inhabit with a job and mortgage, that fades away really easily.

For a long time, this didn’t bother me. I was focused on my job, myself, my partner, my hobbies. I didn’t speak to anyone back from where I grew up. The odd message on Facebook. And while I was pretty into the Smash Bros scene in the UK for a few years, I didn’t make much effort to meet people. I was fine with keeping people at arm’s length. It felt a bit easier this way.

There’s this book by Danny Wallace called “Yes Man”. It came out in the mid 2000’s, and got turned into a mid Jim Carrey movie a couple of years later. I read it around that time in anticipation of midness. It’s a nice little comedic memoir of a year of his life where he says yes to anything that gets asked of him. At the age of 30, having had an exploded heart, I think I’m now ready to start saying yes to more things. I won’t be saying yes to things like credit card offers or scams like he does. But I feel like if I have infinite time for “things” and people, for life, then I should start saying yes to things more. This requires some course correction.

Making friends as an adult sucks. It’s way harder than it ever was when you were a wee’un in school, where everyone was just honest, and also had free time. Now, just finding time for each other is difficult. You might not see people you have known for years until you meet at a wedding you’re both at, or end up back where you grew up for a day or two. But sometimes it requires one person to make the effort, and if I have infinite time for things, I am going to be the one making the moves. I feel sorry for anyone who knows me (I do anyway, I am annoying as fuck), because I have messaged like a dozen people to organise seeing them over the next couple of months. Most things rot when people no longer have the time or energy to try. That is probably the most true for relationships.

This has also bled over into work. My job isn’t particularly interesting. I’m not important. The code I do will get written by somebody anyway. But because I have infinite time, I want the people I work with to have an easy and as enjoyable time as you can have whilst working, and hopefully find some meaning in it. If my job’s meaning can be to help everyone else at my work have an easier life, then I think it’s all been worthwhile. I’ve put a lot of effort into this recently. I don’t think I could work if I wasn’t invested in it somehow.

For me that is a radically different position than I had like a year or two ago, where I was kind of like “Man fuck all the additional stuff at work, I just want to write code and leave”. I think I’m a lot more approachable at work now. I still don’t trust figures of authority though, why would you?

In the first couple of weeks of my current job, I had a friend near me who had an anxiety attack one weekday evening. They messaged me, and I went over and stayed with them until 2-3am. I was late for work the next day, having just slept through my alarm. I didn’t and don’t regret that for even a second, being there for someone is more important than work. But it did still feel bad at the time to have let work down. I know now that I would travel to the ends of the world to be there for someone because giving my time to someone is more meaningful than anything else I could do.

This blog post is unnecessary. But I write many posts like this and don’t publish them. I felt like I would publish this one because it’s easier to not be honest with people, to not have time. If I decide I don’t have infinite time anymore, then I can look back at this and wonder what happened. Or maybe I end up actively making the world worse by saying yes. That would be pretty funny.

I don’t know why the phrase “infinite time” in particular. I know that I don’t have infinite time. It is so completely meaningless, to an absurd level. But I like the phrase because it highlights how easily I have let things get in the way of people, relationships and anything in the past. Our time is so ridiculously finite, and it can end at a moments notice. But we should live like we have an infinite amount of it.

In reality, it probably has to do with this silly “would you rather” question:

Would you rather have unlimited bacon but no more games. Or games, unlimited games, and no games?

It’s just nonsense. Funny nonsense, admittedly. I've also wanted to roll a joke about that Justin Timberlake movie "In Time" into this somehow. I am not good enough at writing for that.

*don’t Google that, the word “typically” is doing some heavy lifting. Google was perhaps the worst thing ever invented for people who are ill. You Google some shit and it's like "yeah you're either having a bit of acid reflux, or your heart is going to explode". And then you're actually the one fucking person whose heart DID explode, and you think "Oh fuck, what if Google has been right this whole time". I am so looking forward for my legs to drop off, testicles to explode, and brain to haemorrhage all because I Googled "rib pain after surgery".