It’s morning. I need to take my morning dump. I also want tea. It takes about 60 seconds for the water to boil. The tea needs to steep for around 4 minutes. The plan is simple: boil the water. While it’s boiling, prepare the cups. Add the teabags. The water finishes boiling. I pour it into the cups. Now the next timer starts. Four minutes to take a dump. Obviously, I end up doomscrolling Instagram for more than four minutes, but that’s beside the point.
My legs are asleep. My butthole is ready to prolapse. I shuffle back to the kitchen. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate this behavior. The choreography. The precision. Was I optimizing? Or just fooling myself into thinking I could control the chaos? Yes, it’s efficient, minus the doomscrolling. And there’s no real harm in it. But were there any benefits? To find out, I stopped being neurotic about planning my tea ceremony. Instead, I would boil the water and then poop. Or poop, then boil the water. Time was no longer in control of me. I was in control of time. As you could have guessed it was folly to think I could control time. The benefits were intangible. A false sense of control in an otherwise arbitrary chain of events that started billions of years ago. But the real end result is tea. And tea is always good.