Our waking hours are a bridge between two periods of sleep. This bridge is a time when we serve the needs of the body by earning money, eating, procreating, socializing, and anything else that promotes our survival. We may think that our waking hours are very important, but actually, we just have a different kind of dream running whose sole aim is to help us acquire the resources necessary for the survival of the body. It is the sleeping hours that are important; a period of rest, dreaming, and unconsciousness.
Our daytime hours are so unimportant that we can do whatever we please with them. There is of course an obligatory need to service the continued existence of the body, but beyond that, we can just play in this unimportant dream we share with everyone else. So, what do you want to do today? Different parts of you will demand different things. Laying on the couch and eating donuts probably isn’t going to satisfy your body or mind, although it may provide emotional comfort. Or you may decide to start writing the next War and Peace; either way, it really doesn’t matter. If you think your waking hours must be exploited to the full then you are living under a great misconception. Our daytime consciousness has evolved to help us survive - and nothing else. Provided we achieve this our waking consciousness has served its function and is not really capable of a great deal more. It certainly cannot reveal some universal truths, the ability to see reality has been overridden by the need to see the world in terms of survival.
Ambition is a core mechanism used by our survival consciousness, and it is certainly needed to compete and acquire the resources we need, but beyond that function, ambition is just folly. What exactly are we going to achieve with our lofty ambitions? In the main the answer is nothing. We are not capable of realizing anything more than our survival consciousness can reveal. So, once basic needs have been met we can play. The last thing we should do is take our survival consciousness seriously, and so our play should be careless play, just as it is with children. Forget weighty questions such as life’s purpose, why there is existence, why there is suffering, and so on. You are not equipped to answer them, and what is more, they will weigh you down.
Your waking dream will include relationships, plans and goals, interests, pleasure and pain, and a sense of being someone. Play the game but play it with levity. We don’t control anything and we don’t know anything of substance, so let go.