Was I Here Today?

A question worth asking at the end of any workday. Not whether you were productive. Not whether you cleared the list. Whether you were actually present for any of it.

Chen Li, in the Words of Taoism podcast episode “Reclaiming Your Life in an Age of Frenzy”, makes a distinction that stuck with me. There is a difference between chosen speed and endured speed. Moving fast because you decided to is entirely different from being carried by a current you never noticed. Both look identical from the outside.

The people who work with technology all day are not immune to this. If anything, the opposite is true.

The episode describes how feverishness does not arrive all at once. It settles in gradually, technology by technology, habit by habit, until it starts to feel like the natural state of things. The hand reaching for the phone before your eyes are fully open. The discomfort that appears the moment there is nothing to do for thirty seconds.

Chen Li is not suggesting you slow everything down. That is the misunderstanding the episode addresses directly. The goal is not a slower life. It is a more conscious one. Knowing which moments deserve your full presence and protecting those, while letting the rest move at whatever speed it needs to.

The question at the end of the day is not an accusation. It is an orientation. A small act of noticing. And noticing, it turns out, is where everything starts.