I don’t have my laptop with me at the moment, but I found some paper and a pen with a graphic of a cat on it. I am currently at an event, but I still have a few hours to spare. I’ve generally been good at avoiding social media, but it’s gotten worse lately because I followed a bunch of musicians lately, and now the algorithm is feeding me very captivating clips from their concerts. To avoid staring at my phone for the next few hours, I decided to write.

In my head, it’s already off to a tragic start. I pride myself in using precise language with a broad vocabulary, but I feel like I’ve already been redundant and suboptimal in my word choice. I earned a higher education degree in the early 2010s, so I’m not new to handwriting. It’s just that I generally don’t have the first draft of a handwritten note scanned and uploaded online for the public to see, like I plan on doing with this. And yes, I actually write like this, and this is actually really my normal handwriting style. Don’t worry, it will gradually get sloppier and more human soon once my hand starts cramping in a few pages.

People often come to me for advice. My self perception of my own wisdom seems to be significantly less than how others see me. When people ask me questions, my most frequent responses are “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” and “I’m not the best person to ask this.” However, over time, I realized that my willingness to disclose my gaps in knowledge is having the opposite of the intended effect, and is making people come to me even more. When I decline to comment on a matter because I feel too unqualified to do so, many people follow up by asking if I can give some general advice instead. More specifically, they ask for advice about how a young person can get to where I am today.

The advice I usually give in that situation is, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” No matter how much time you spend researching, studying, and preparing for something, you cannot prepare for something that you don’t even know you have to prepare for because you don’t know that it even exists. Unknown variables like this exist everywhere, and it is important that your confidence never turns into blindness or arrogance. This is still advice I regularly give, especially to younger people who seem to have gotten their initial taste of success already and may be prone to risk-taking.

However, as I slowly get older, one additional piece of advice has stuck in my head due to my increasing age. I am turning 35 years old in under 4 months, which graduates me from the 25-34 “early career” category and puts me in the 35-44 “established career” category. According to the demographic information provided to me by social media platforms, over half my followers fall within the 25-34 age group. This means that I am older than most of the people who interact with me online. If that does indeed apply to you, then my advice for you is:

You are richer than me.

I don’t envy people with money; I envy people with time. I don’t admire people with money; I admire people who extracted maximum value from their time. Time is the most valuable currency and life’s most important resource. I am almost never regretful of anything, but when I do end up regretting something, it involves wasting or misusing my time. I remember reading somewhere that the average life expectancy of a Korean man is 80 years, 70 of which is lived healthy and without disability or illness. It is quite jarring to me that I am about half dead already.

An increasing number of things in the world are fighting for your time and attention. Guard it like your life depends on it, because it does. Before giving your time to someone or something, think about whether it’s worth it. Ask yourself if it will bring you closer to the goals you want to achieve with your life. This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have fun. Taking time off to have fun is an important part of boosting morale and productivity. But, think deeply—is what you’re doing actually fun, or are you just going through the motions of having fun without actually having fun?

I get worried about people who live a majority of their lives online. The internet is a huge time sink. Algorithms are designed to make you forget how valuable your time is and trick you into wasting it on things that don’t matter.  Online content portrays itself as fun—and it sometimes is—but it is often just a disguise. Having fun is supposed to recharge you and put you in the right mindset to continue pursuing your goals. But, a lot of people feel exhausted or stressed after consuming social media content. Think carefully about whether it is truly deserving of your most important resource.

Watch out, because time leaks. You can’t pause it in between tasks, or when you get distracted for just a few minutes at a time while you check your phone several times a day. People who take control over these leaks and consolidate it into meaningful usage can launch much further ahead towards their goals. It usually takes a couple thousand hours to reach professional competency at something. Someone who recaptures two hours of misdirected time can accumulate it daily for under three years and have it be enough to be qualified to do an entire new job.

A lot of people are surprised when they find out how much I pack into a single day’s worth of time, and they get even more surprised when I say I look at more successful people and feel like I’m still not doing enough with my time. But the older I get, the more urgent it feels that I not only spend my remaining time wisely, but also continue refining my life goals so that my time can be put towards something more important in general.

People like to say that there’s plenty of time, either to decide what to do or to get back on track. I know being anxious or stressed about wasting time can be counterproductive, because then some people just fixate on and panic about all the time being wasted. However, I think at least a little bit of pressure is healthy for most people. So, I’ll be that guy and say it: time is running out.