17 quotes that permanently changed how I think about time
On burnout, dog years, and the audacity of the past.
I’ve had time on my mind a lot lately. Not in the abstract way, but in the very specific, pressing, slightly uncomfortable way that happens when several things converge at once and you can’t look away from any of them.
I’ve been experiencing that low-grade type of burnout lately, where you’re doing all the things and still somehow feel like you’re not doing enough. The kind of burnout that turns inward and becomes self-criticism before you even realize that’s what’s happening. It has a way of making time feel accusatory. I keep catching myself doing this mental audit of the day, tallying what got done against some invisible standard I never consciously set, and the math never comes out right. I don't know who decided I should be doing more than I'm doing, and I haven't figured out how to ask her to leave.
Spring is arriving, which means Summer is near, which means I turn another year older soon. The days are getting longer and there’s something about the seasonal shift that always makes me ponder this stuff whether I want to or not. I’m sitting at my desk right now, and when I look to my right I can see my backyard, and the pomegranate trees that looked completely dead for the last three months—bare and skeletal, but they are fully green and bushy again and it feels like it happened almost overnight. The hummingbirds are back, too. There’s something about watching that cycle happen right outside my window, again, that makes time feel very real and very fast simultaneously. It’s like the vertigo of watching the world move at a pace that has nothing to do with my schedule or my feelings about it.
My dog is getting older. I had to take her to the vet yesterday because she’s been having some joint issues. We did X-rays, got new medications, the whole thing. We’re actually the same age if you’re going by dog years, which is a strange thing to sit with. She’s been through so much with me… so many versions of my life. Different houses in various cities, we’ve traveled all around the country together. She’s been here for every bad idea and every better one, the business and the end of the business and whatever this thing is I'm building now. She was there for all of it. She's at my feet right now, asleep, the way she always is. I love listening to her little snores while her body does that twitch thing like she’s running in her dreams. Watching her move a little more carefully lately makes the finite shape of things very legible in a way I usually manage to avoid thinking about. It puts a kind of pressure on time that I don’t have a clean way to describe. I can just feel it.
And then there are the tattoos. Ugh, God, the tattoos. I started the removal process this month—on all of them, more than I'd like to say here. There's something particular about lying under that laser that invites a unique kind of reckoning with past selves. Who she was, what she thought she was doing, the absolute confidence it takes to make a permanent decision about a body you don't fully know yet. She wasn't wrong exactly, but she had no idea who was coming after her, and she didn't bother to ask. Now I'm the one dealing with it, which feels both unfair and completely fair, which is maybe the most honest thing I can say about the relationship between who we were and who we are. The fact that this process takes so much time to undo is another story. I won’t be tattoo-free for about 2 years, it’s costing me a small fortune, and it’s insanely painful. It feels like both a punishment and a reward. Like, the audacity of who I was at 18 or 24, using my under-developed pre-frontal cortex to make decisions I couldn’t understand the implications of! At least hindsight is 20/20? Sigh…
Anyway, all of this together has put me in quite a mood. If you’ve been reading with me for a while, you know I love Notion and have a database for just about everything, and that’s exactly what I reached for last night—my favorite quotes on time. I’ve been adding to it slowly, over the course of several years, and I like to return to them when I’m feeling the way I’m feeling now because they remind me that time happens to everyone, and that none of us are immune to what it brings. The human condition doesn’t make exceptions. Nobody gets a longer lease on the present moment, nobody gets to pause the trees or keep the dog young or undo the decisions of their past selves without some cost. And there’s real comfort in finding that someone else already said the things you can’t quite articulate yourself. Remembering that we’re not alone in these feelings… that we’re actually in really great company.
Here are 17 quotes that have done the most work on me personally when I’m in this place. They’re not meant to be motivational. They’re not telling you to optimize your mornings or make the most of every minute. They’re just honest about what time actually is, how it actually moves, and how human it is to spend your whole life in the middle of it without fully understanding it.
I hope you’ll read them slowly. The ones that make you uncomfortable are probably the ones doing the most work.
“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”
— The Garden of Forking Paths, Jorge Luis Borges
I came back to this one recently during a week where I felt like I wasn’t making any decisions. I was just letting things roll forward, days passing in a kind of forward drift, nothing chosen, nothing refused.
Borges wrote it as a story about a labyrinth, but what it actually describes is something much quieter and more mundane… the way not choosing is also a choice, just one you didn’t consciously make. Every fork taken by default is still a fork. The life that happens to you and the life you build diverge along the same timeline, in the same increments. You just don’t feel the second one moving.
This piece below was actually inspired by this quote:
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
This one I’ve had memorized for years. It’s the most honest description I know of how a life actually feels from the inside—not like a straight line going somewhere, but like phases that each have their own job. The year I quit weed was almost entirely a questioning year. I wasn’t building much, I was simply surviving and regulating and trying to figure out who I was without the thing I’d been using to manage myself for a decade. It felt like stagnation, but looking back, it was the year that made everything after it possible. Not every year is for answering. Some years are just for asking, and being in one doesn’t mean you’re falling behind. It means the work is likely happening somewhere you just can't see yet.
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
Henri Bergson
What I find useful about Bergson isn’t the quote itself, it’s the argument underneath it. He spent his career fighting the idea that time is something you can measure and divide and manage like a length of rope. Real lived time, he argued, is continuous and qualitative, and cutting it into units changes what it is. The quote itself is the part I keep losing and finding again: that maturity isn’t a destination, it’s a process of ongoing self-creation, and that process doesn’t complete. You don’t arrive. You just keep authoring yourself forward, which is either exhausting or liberating depending on the day.
I think about this when I catch myself trying to engineer my way through a period that’s fundamentally about becoming, reaching for the tracking system when what’s actually needed is to just stay inside the process. Complexity theory makes the same argument from a different angle, that sufficiently complex systems can’t be optimized from the outside, only allowed to develop. The scheduled version of time has real limits, and some things only happen in the continuous version.
A piece that was loosely inspired by this quote:
“If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.”
— The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
I build a lot of systems for looking at what’s actually true. I looove data, audits, documentation, entire infrastructures, etc. And I think that’s right. But Musil is pointing at the thing that pure empiricism misses, which is the present moment always contains more than what currently exists in it. The possibility sense is what lets you perceive what could be true without requiring evidence that it already is. I need both. The data tells me what the machine has been doing. The possibility sense is what tells me what to build next.
When I’m feeling burnt out like I have been these past few weeks, I try my best to lean into the possibility sense. Follow my curiosities, lean into the childlike wonder, seek out beauty and awe, because I’ve spent enough time in pure data mode to know what happens when the possibility sense goes quiet… you get very efficient at optimizing something you’ve stopped questioning.
“Every cigarette I smoked was accompanied by a solemn vow never to smoke again. I smoked my last cigarette hundreds of times.”
— Zeno’s Conscience, Italo Svevo
This is one of my all-time favorites, and almost embarrassingly specific to my own experience. I’ve had so many last times before the actual last time. What Svevo nailed is that the ritual of resolution—the vow, the ceremony of the final one, the emotional experience of deciding—can become its own satisfaction, completely detached from any actual change. I recognized this pattern in myself so clearly it was uncomfortable to read the first time I encountered it. What finally worked wasn’t stronger resolve, it was removing the conditions that made the choice available in the first place, and then documenting everything so I couldn’t quietly revise what had actually happened.
I built the entire Conscious Creation framework around this:
“Time moves in spirals, not in straight lines. We believe we have left something behind and find ourselves encountering it again, closer or further from the center, but always the same thing.”
Joseph Roth (paraphrased from his essays on time and memory)
The spiral model of time is more accurate than the linear one and I think most people intuitively know this but don’t have language for it. You don’t move away from things so much as orbit them at different distances. The same core questions keep appearing across different years, different relationships, different contexts. I keep encountering the same few in my own life: how much to show, how much to protect, what I’m building and whether it matters, who I am when nobody’s defining me. I used to think returning to the same territory meant I hadn’t moved or was evidence of being stuck, but now I think it means I’m getting closer to the center of something worth actually understanding.
