The Waste of Free Time

I am a curious person with a lot of questions, about things around me and things beyond me. I usually try to answer them with my own theories or read what other people have to say. This time I plan to share my thoughts and questions with a few in hopes to spark conversations that lead to greater good. Lets be clear on the goal here, by no means I am trying to be prescriptive and by no means I’m qualified to do so — its all about sparking some thoughts and triggering some questions.

Here we go..

What is leisure time ? Its time which you spend outside of doing things (like work) that you are forced to do. In other words, time spend on things you want to do and enjoy doing. But in today’s material world, are we really doing things we want to do ? Or are we falling prey of the capitalism that decides for us the things we should do ?

Generally people long to leave work and get home, to their so called free time — all too often they have no idea what that entails. Becuase they don’t have a plan to spend their precious time, it ends up being not worthwhile. When asked what was the most fun time people can remember, almost always they mention the time with friends, time working on hobbies and time during an adventure, among other experiences — almost never, that free time sitting on the couch. What could be the reason, is it because free time without a structure is hard to enjoy ? Are people more comfortable when they have a structure in the task at hand ? Even if the task is spending time, doing nothing ? One explanation is that the leisure time that is aimless and has no feedback loop, is difficult to assess in terms of enjoyment. So, your brain is not able to register any happiness or contentment, at least not for long term. Some might argue that doing nothing is something they enjoy. However, my question is: looking back how many of those ‘couch times’ do you actually remember and really remember experiencing happiness when doing nothing ?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi precisely sums up that hobbies that demand skill, habits that set goals and inner discipline help to make leisure what it is supposed to — a chance for re-creation. However, lack of understanding and peoples’ relationship to leisure play a critical role in how they see leisure, their hard earned down-time. The fact is, down time doesn’t necessarily have to be aimless, it can be down from one activity over to the another. The other activity could be creating a free mind that is actively thinking or is experiencing calm so You are in control. But if the other activity is where someone else is in control then one cannot help but be dissatisfied in the end becuase the time you spent was not completely based on your decision.

Lets peel this further..

Social media and our hand held devices (that are now a limb for many, me included) are designed to provide us with enjoyable experiences. The ciritical difference there is that most of the times we don’t choose that experience, instead it is fed to our brain in a sneaky way. How much of hours (a month) you spend on your phone and watching TV do you actually remember ? We keep stuffing our brains with the “experience” these devices provide but how much so we actually find value in ? Why do you think we don’t remember most of it ? Its like your mind is a glass of water with dirt swirling around and these devices do an incredible job of continuous stirring — the dirt never settles and mind never gets clear.

Instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience deep happiness, most of us spend many hours each week, watching celebrities doing something they love to do. Binge watching that incredible TV series with its very gripping story and awesome actors — how much of it actually teaches us things that help us grow ? Instead of possibly doing something that we enjoy deeply or that can help us grow as a individual, we watch those actors perform, enjoy, grow (mentally, financially). We watch the professional athletes on tv do something they are passionate about, while they grow and enjoy life. And when the match is over, we head back to our worlds taking nothing but a few pointers to talk about while grabbing coffee with someone the next day. In that situation, who owns the time we spent looking at those professionals, we or them ? Was it our time or theirs ?

We scroll through hours and hours of social media, looking at things that we don’t care about but we think we are liking what we see. Lets take an examle: An incredible number of people follow Kylie Jenner; either want to be like her or see all the hot stunts she pulls off — an exorbitant 250MM followers across platforms. They watch her every move. Imagine all the collective energy being directed towards her with nothing in return each day. One can argue that she is a motivation to a lot of people but do you really think every post on her profile is a new source of motivation ? Or is it the greed to be like her and to lead a luxurious life that’s making people spend their valuable time being a spectator ? All that energy people handed over to her, energy that they could’ve put into building themselves was valued at $650 MM for 51% of her company recently. Was it the price for the company or product, or the price for collective attention ?

Disclaimer: I am not a Kylie Jenner hater; I actually admire and respect her for her accomplishments :)

The mass media absorbs so much of our energy without providing anything in return. We are left exhausted, more disheartened than we were when we thought of ‘filling our free time with enjoyment’. All that passive “entertainment” does, is take over our brain temporarily so we cannot focus energy on anything else and most of us use this technique to avoid the feeling of emptiness, the feeling of longing for something meaningful — remember the glass full of dirt ? Is the feeling of longing for something fulfilling just around the corner, and we just don’t have the time to pull our heads out of the rectangle that constantly feeds us glamour ?

Our participation in artificial experiences is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time but it is a very pale substitute of attention invested in real challenges. Think about it, everything we humans do is to make sure we are in control. We work, we make money, we influence other people, we try to argue with people, we try to be strong, we buy&sell — all to be in control. In a way being in control gives us contentment. How much are we in control when we passively watch TV or scroll through our phone ? So, should we even expect these activities to provide us happiness, to begin with ?

As promised, I’m not going leave with a conclusion. Take a pause ask yourself some of the question I’ve asked myself..

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