This came up in conversation at work today. I mentioned that I had to, unwillingly really, go and cheer up my neighbour who is in hospital. She lives alone , has no family nearby, has been receiving psychiatric care for years and is, due to immediate events, in a very fragile state.
Someone commented that I didn’t **have ** to look after her and I just joked that, “Yes, apart from my potentially Nobel Prize winning research into the mating habits of cockroaches, there are any number of TV shows, that I will be unable to recall in 2 days, I could watch rather than visit her.”
This then became a discussion about how much time do you spend doing things that, if push came to shove, you could ditch in favour of more useful activity.
Unfortunately most of us became cowed by the amount of time we waste each week doing, essentially, nothing…and mind you I count the SDMB as productive time.
I figured that if I stopped watching crap on TV, researching pointless ephemera on the web and aimlessly listening to music I could spend about 10 to 20 hours a week doing useful stuff.
Too damn much. I find myself too often saying, “Well, that’s XXX amount of time I’ll never get back in my life.” I’m afraid if I counted it up, I’d be suicidal (just kidding!), but it is too much time.
It depends entirely how you define “nothing to show for it”. If I spend an hour playing with my daughter, I have nothing to show, but I consider it time well spent nonetheless.
Does the SDMB count as “pissing away,” or is it 100% constructive? Either way.
That said, activities are only as pointless as you want them too. Some people may talk about how they went skydiving all weekend, but I don’t think your weekend was a waste if you stayed in the whole time, as long as you enjoyed it.
I used to read almost the whole newspaper when I got done with school. I didn’t have a TV and never read much fiction. I couldn’t recall much of it the next day. So I would read for like 2 hours and probably remember 20 minutes of material.
I do a lot of things that leave me nothing to show, but that doesn’t mean it was time pissed away. I spend my time pretty much doing what I choose - work, going to the gym, reading, cooking, eating, sleeping…
Well, there are 168 hours in a week. I spend 40 at work. So, I waste 128 hours per week.
I don’t know if I’d really call it a waste of time though. I spend the time from 7:30AM when I get home from work, until 5:00PM when my sister gets home from work, either dozing on the couch, watching TV (not so much anymore), reading, playing with my computer, and contemplating my navel. Oh, and I spend about 3 hours per day watching my nephews and nieces.
All in all, it’s a quiet existence but I like it. I have no boyfriend and honestly, after 8 years in one relationship, I’m kinda enjoying the simple no hassle life.
However, I will be working overtime as much as possible, starting this weekend. I don’t mind the 10 hours or so of wasted time each day during the work week but the 48 hours over the weekend are killing me. I can’t handle that much boredom.
Not that much, anymore. I never just hang around on the couch watching sitcom episodes I’ve seen a dozen times before and I spend a lot less time aimlessly surfing the net. I work out, I read books I want to read, I watch movies I want to watch, I write and edit my writing. All in all, I get quite a bit of useful stuff done.
There is obviously a scale of usefulness on which any activity can be placed. I think things like watching TV don’t necesarily have to be placed at the bottom of that scale. I happen to believe (or like to believe) that by watching TV or playing computer games or something like that is stimulating your brain.
Reading books seeems to have a higher brain-stimulation usefulness value. Even though you are taking in a lot less information (Words as opposed to pictures) you are doing a LOT more imagining. I think this gives reading it’s value.
Well, other than work and occassionally going to the gym, I spend most of my leisure time drinking with my friends, eating in restuarants with my girlfriend, watching TV or DVDs, playing videogames, surfing the web, listening to music or just wandering around the city checking stuff out.
The trick is you need to have at least one scheduled structured activity, with people, that occupies at least several of your time - a game of flag football, paintball, dinner and/or drinks with some friends, concert, skiiing, trip to the beach, whatever. The the rest of your weekend - personel errands, reading, etc, just sort of falls into place around it.
The problem that I found when I had long periods of free time (weekends with on one around specially during long holidays, summer break before I found a job, periods of unemployment) is that I didn’t have anything to look forward to or any structure to my day. I would just wake up, screw around for several hours, wander out and get some food occassionally, stay up until 4am playing videogames or watching movies. Basically just doing fuck-all while the rest of the world was working. Your day becomes a spiritually unfullfilling quest to kill time until you are tired enough to go to sleep. And it gets worse if, like me, you go out drinking with your friends a lot. You start staying up even later and spend the next day all lethargic and hung over so your whole internal clock gets messed up. You’re like eating breakfast at 6am and lunch at 4 in the afternoon. It becomes a very weird and directionless existance. Kind of like Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club.
When I finished business school, I quit my job in Boston because I had a new one lined up in NYC. Problem is they pushed my start date back a few months so I had the entire summer off with nothing to do. So I started signing up for all kinds of crazy shit, just to have stuff to do other than get drunk and nurse hangovers every day.
