The Conveyor Belt (Chapter 1)
Time Space Warp #69
Hey—It’s Toffer.
Life moves at its own pace. One day you’re twenty-eight, eating dinner at 10 p.m. because you forgot you had a body… and somehow that becomes normal. Then someone asks, “when was your last check-up?” and suddenly you’re forty-three and the last time wasn’t recent enough.
Change is sneaky. It doesn’t announce itself. It just piles up. And before long, you’re not moving through time; time is dragging you along.
Welcome to the conveyor belt.
Estimate read time: 5 minutes
A lot of what we call “life” is just reacting to whatever pings first. Most days begin the moment your phone lights up. A Viber group you don’t remember joining. Thirty-four unread messages about something that doesn’t affect your life in any measurable way. But you scroll anyway.
Small things run the show. And they accumulate faster than you think.
The email reply from your accountant that she expected last week. The faucet that’s been dripping for two months. The charger you only remember to replace when it’s at 3%. The medicine you keep meaning to buy. The one sock that keeps disappearing.
Individually harmless. Collectively consuming.
It’s easy to confuse activity with intention. You spend an entire afternoon rearranging icons on your phone. Uninstalling apps you’ll reinstall by the weekend. Making a grocery list you’ll magically leave behind. Cleaning your inbox down to zero because you want to feel like a person who has things under control.
And since it feels productive, you don’t question it. Not right away.
If you don’t pay attention, the years stack up. Days blur into weeks. Weeks compress into months. A few seasons of reacting instead of choosing; and five years shrink into one long quarter.
And the smallest details surprise you with the truth: A random box you finally open with a receipt from two condos ago. A chat thread revealing your last reply was three Christmases before the pandemic.
You look back and it feels… unchosen. Like your weekends gently turned into errands. Like you stopped drawing. Or running. Or reading books without calculating ROI.
So you blame motivation. Or discipline. Because it’s easier.
But that’s not the issue.
What you lack is clarity. When everything looks important, nothing is.
Without clarity, every ping feels urgent, and urgency almost always wins. An unknown number. A task labeled “ASAP” by someone who doesn’t even know what that means. A request that should be one sentence but arrives as a six-paragraph ChatGPT novel.
And we say it’s the world’s fault. It isn’t.
It’s the mind. It switches all day.
A part of you wants to create. You get the urge to sketch something on a receipt. Write a half-idea on your Notes app at 2 a.m. Start a Google Doc called “Untitled,” which stays untitled for three years.
Another part wants order. Suddenly you’re reorganizing your entire Notion workspace at midnight. Rewriting pantry labels. Renaming folders from “Q4 2025” to “11-25” to “11-25-final” to “11-25-final-v3.”
Another part wants safety. You avoid replying to a message. You keep a tab open for weeks because closing it feels like deciding. You delay checking your credit card bill because you want one more day of pretending everything’s fine.
And sometimes, you just want silence. You sit in your car for thirteen minutes before entering the house. You walk slower in the mall because your brain needs a buffer. You stare at your extra rice and forget what you were thinking.
If you pay attention, you start to notice patterns. Maybe your best thoughts happen before breakfast. Maybe your anxiety climbs when the sun goes down. Maybe you only procrastinate on the work that actually matters.
If you don’t pay attention, your day is run by whichever impulse gets there first. And impulses don’t care about direction. Just comfort.
Awareness changes the experience. You notice your hand reaching for your phone before you decide. You catch yourself avoiding the important work. You hear yourself saying yes before your real opinion arrives.
Once you see that, there’s a small click inside.
From there, decisions become simpler. You stop negotiating with yourself. You stop mistaking small talk for real talk. You stop lying to yourself in polite, efficient ways.
But none of that happens without step one.
Notice where you are. That’s it. The first step isn’t systemizing or optimizing or automating. It’s seeing the conveyor belt you’ve been riding all along.
Once you see it, the whole story changes. The belt stays the same. You don’t.
Chapter 2 begins there.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer