Why You Should Neglect Things on Purpose

Choosing what to ignore is part of living well

In college, my friends used to play a game: If you could relive any year of your life, which would you pick? Everyone had an answer ready. Senior year of high school. The summer at the lake house. When it got to me, I said I wouldn’t relive any of them.

They thought I wasn’t thinking clearly, so they sweetened the deal — what if reliving a year meant you got an extra year of life at the end? I still didn’t hesitate. There was no year I would go back for, not even in exchange for more time. Growing up with mental health struggles, I spent most of my younger years trying to fast-forward. I never wanted to go back.

It wasn’t until I got sober that my answer changed. Now I would take my friends’ deal in a heartbeat — even for my first year sober, which I spent white-knuckling through meetings and crying in my car in the parking lot. Life hasn’t gotten easier. In some ways it’s gotten more difficult, and definitely more complicated (especially since having a child). But I’ve been awake for it, and thus able to witness the moments of joy and beauty.

Most of us live as though our time were infinite. Death is something that happens to other people. We put off the trip or delay the hard conversation because there is always supposed to be more time. The writer Oliver Burkeman did the math nobody wants to do. If you live to be 80 years old, you get about 4,000 weeks on earth. The number sounds like a typo (I have done the math to check because I didn’t believe it!). But it’s true. I’ve already spent more than a third of mine.

We think 4,000 weeks is small only because we’re comparing it with forever. But that was never a possibility. Burkeman’s point is that the real comparison is the alternative: never being born at all. Against that, 4,000 weeks is a staggering amount of time. What if the time limit isn’t the problem? It might be the thing that makes any of it count.

Biohacking and optimization content promises us that if we work hard enough, track our progress enough, get up at 5 a.m., do meal prep, build the perfect routine, we’ll finally have enough time to do everything we care about. The whole genre runs on the idea that the limit isn’t real, it’s just a problem you haven’t solved yet. So when you can’t fit it all in, it registers not as a fact about being human, but only as proof you haven’t tried hard enough.

So instead of trying to savor every moment, I want you to pick things you will not spend time on or worry about. I do not spend a lot of time getting dressed. I skip makeup and throw on workout clothes most days, and I do not worry about what my daughter wears to school. If she wants to wear a mismatched bathing suit over pants — as long as she’s dressed for the weather — go for it! I would rather put my energy towards making sure she learns how to swim.

Maybe for you it’s a spotless house or elaborate meals. You’re already neglecting plenty by accident, so instead of feeling guilty about that, use it as evidence of the unimportance of what you’re not paying attention to and make the choice to let it go. Otherwise, stuck in the impossible belief that you’ll one day have time for everything, you’ll spend a good chunk of your time beating yourself up for not getting there.

Time is finite. You have only so many weeks. You don’t need to live your life with a countdown over your head, but start picking things you definitely don’t care about so you can show up more fully for those that you do.