IS

Free time

When I’m working on something for a deadline, my mind often wanders to the feeling of having free time and how great that’ll be when the work is finally over and I can do stuff I want to do. Whether it’s an assignment or exam in school or even just something related to work it often hits me that once this is over I’ll somehow start doing things I haven’t been doing before. I’ll get super motivated and want to shift things up in my life.

The things that come to mind when contemplating about what to do in my free time:

But the thing is that more often than not, when we finally get that free time, we don’t utilize it enough or even at all.

We somehow forget that we even had this conversation with ourselves that we’d like to be more productive in our free time. It’s like when we get a cold then we’ll miss the feeling of being able to breathe out of our nostrils but as soon as the cold has gone we forget it and take the fact that we can breathe out of our nostrils for granted.

The reason I’m writing this here in the first place is to both remind myself of my bad habits and also others to be aware of how we spend our time.

I tend to go on these social media binges (probably like everyone else) where I scroll through various social media websites (and sometimes spend 30 minutes running through the video feed which contains a bunch of instant gratification videos I’ll forget later). The sad thing is that this is built into my muscle memory, I just do this without any second thought, it just happens. I think that I’m not the only one who does this. Apps like TikTok are built around this concept of hooking people in. The best way to do that seems to be through short video clips and as soon as a video clip ends another one will start. So you’ll probably just be sitting there, staring at the screen and saying to yourself: “Just one more video”.

Before you know it you’ve spent an hour or more just watching random shit that you don’t care about. But why do we do this? What’s the point?

I believe it’s because we aren’t intentional in our actions. We somehow just flow through the day without really deeply thinking about what we are doing and why.

That hour you just wasted could’ve been spent doing something you actually like doing. Think about that the next time you open up that social media app that tends to hook you in for a wasteful binge session.