Living Life to the Fullest

Brian YS Wong September 04, 2024 21:58

I used to think I had lived life to the fullest.

I now think I’m beginning to see what that in fact entails.

I grew up in a culture that treasured hard work – industriousness was prized as a norm. To optimise for output was not only ideal, but necessary: time was a scarce resource, and it fell upon us to make the best of it. Carpe diem. Seize the day by working oneself non-stop. Much of this came to a head during my undergraduate and MPhil years, when I had prized academic excellence and debating achievements as the be-all-and-end-all of my time expenditure. Some would call it focus, others would call it obsession. I lived life to the fullest by pouring each and every waking minute into my studies and debating career.

Around five years ago, I came to the realisation that the life I had led and lived was – as exciting as it was – devoid of wider impact. There was so much more that I could have done and given, yet in chasing accolades and titles, I had entered into a state of effective solipsism. I learnt to forget that there existed a much bigger, wider world out there – with folks languishing in poverty, agony, war, violence, and polarisation. I was no savior, and certainly by no means a potent force for change – but I, too, saw that my life could have been so much more interesting, had I opted to see and hear the calls for change around me.

Political polarisation, youth disillusionment, and a fundamental disconnect between my home city and my country deeply worried me. In some ways, I developed cognisance of a new mission in my life, of which I wrote as I penned one of the most difficult pieces I ever did in my life – the application for a highly coveted scholarship. I wrote of the sense of alienation and frustration at not being understood, and the sense of alarm at the fragments of reality that I, in fact, did understand. To live life to the fullest, then, was about impact-fostering and legacy-building: to generate positive transformations and changes for the people we care for around us, so as to establish a legacy that can outlast our finite lives and existence on Earth.

Yet this “epiphany” came with its costs. It drove me to prioritise (even fetishise) getting things done – stuffing as much as I could – into the finite time I viewed myself as having. The mantra of ‘Time is scarce’ gave rise to a ubiquitous sense of urgency – breathless, staggering, and overwhelming. In retrospect I’d say this motto did more to undermine my quality of life than anything else – including COVID-19.

There is something inherently paradoxical about the zeitgeist of our times. On one hand we are told that “You only live once”, as if this truistic declaration would thus motivate and justify a cavalier and impetuously reckless outlook to life. On the other hand, neoliberal structures and late-stage capitalism have turned us into effective cogs in the machine, toiling and slaving away without questioning the root of our ennui. We are now busier than we have ever been in civilisational history.

Yet relatively few would feel more accomplished than their historical counterparts – if such comparisons were in fact possible. Sociologists and netizens in China have termed this phenomena “involution” – “neijuan”.

Around three years ago, I was struck by another episode of epiphany: I realised that I, too, had fallen into the cognitive trap of involution – to equate living life to the fullest with productivity, and to measure productivity with the most superficial (albeit visceral) metrics. I had forgotten to interrogate the ontological assumptions underpinning how and why we work and had instead opted to take certain claims as a given, as an unquestionable fact. In so doing, I had come to embody and live and breathe dogma – as opposed to the truth.

The living truth of life, as it turns out, is that living life maximally does not entail working 24/7. Nor does it require one to constantly stand on the cusp of the burnout – out of breath and out of time. The key rests with accountability. To live a good life, is to be able to account for every minute that one is spending awake. To account for something, however, certainly does not imply treating it as an opportunity to work. We are no robots – we all need breaks from work.

To destress and decompress is a most valid explanation and justification for our time usage; to think otherwise would be to incur the same mistake as I did, all those years ago. We should embrace our right to take breaks – where and when we can. We should endorse and accept the fact that we need (at least portions of) our weekends off, so as to give us the opportunity to recuperate. More fundamentally, we must resist the temptation to squeeze ourselves dry, for we are no ores or mines, but are in fact dynamic, dignified, and decent beings deserving of leading nourished lives.

To live our lives to the fullest, requires us to learn to be less productive… and to be more appreciative of the world around us – its pitfalls, defects, flaws, which could well be the sources of its tragic beauty.

Brian YS Wong

Assistant Professor, HKU