I have been thinking a great deal lately about how I should spend my time on Earth. In fact, time has been the subject of my earliest preoccupation; as one of the first memories I can recall is begging my mother not to die at age three in the stairwell of my childhood home. I can still remember the gray paint on the stairway that had been applied a few weeks earlier and the perplexed and reassuring statements from my mother as I pleaded my case that she should live rather than die.
Now in my 40s with a fair bit of asphalt under the tires of life so far, I wonder, and yes still worry to some extent about how I should be spending my time on the planet. As I crest into those formidable 40s and my bones and muscles bare the markings of tools whose use has been plenty and my mind reduces in its sharpness to some extent my focus has been on the economy of experience: how to maximize meaning and minimize wasted time.
Maximal meaning to me represents living life pursuing knowledge of topics that enhance my understanding of the world, others, and myself. This is why as an undergraduate I studied psychology as my major and took an interest in philosophy courses. In fact, as I proceeded I realized that the majority of undergraduate psychology courses offered very little to me in the way of deeper knowledge, and so I somewhat casually completed them and instead studied for my elective courses like metaphysics more thoroughly than for my major.