Reassess time spent enjoying luxury
Every time my wife is away for business travel, I take the opportunity to do things I don't have time for when we're together: video games, movies and TV shows my wife won't watch, that sort of thing. Inevitably I wind up spending too much time with these luxuries. Just last night (Monday), when I had all day to play with a vacation day, I didn't go to sleep until 12:50 AM.
I recently saw this post by Steve and found it kinda relatable.
Every once in a while, I get to have the house for myself too, and the options for me are similar. While hobbies like books, manga or certain games I can do at any time—even during my commute to work—or when others are present. Some activities are simply more enjoyable when there’s nobody around that may require my attention, or that may send me to clean up my bedroom instead. Living with parents has its perks, but it’s a double-edged sword.
Even if staying up late is not ideal when I have to wake up early to work, I personally have no issues with my sleep schedule. I wake up on the first beep of my alarm and continue the morning like nothing happened. I am not sure this power will last forever, but I’ll take advantage of it when I can. Obviously, this is not a daily thing, but a few times a year aren’t too bad.
Because of this, my reassessment is not because I stay up late or watch too much anime at once. It comes from the number one reason I end up actually wasting my time: YouTube, YouTube Shorts.
I find value in videogames, anime, movies or other media, I enjoy my time with them. However, every once in a while, I’ll just do nothing but watch random stuff from the YouTube algorithm. I know I just said a few posts ago that I don’t have an issue with algorithms, and that is the case most of the time, but when I literally have nothing else to do, and I can choose between a gaming session, bingewatching a show or a movie marathon, for some reason, my brain will default to sitting on my laptop (I don’t use the YouTube app at least) and scrolling through random videos.
All that time to be spent on things that I can only do at moments like this, like solving some dungeon on CrossCode or defeating a boss on Silksong, you know? finish a book or at least try a new anime. But no, endless scrolling.
Like, it could be great. It has been great before, I have managed to accomplish a lot of stuff some times after all.
Like that time I binged all the 70+ episodes of Hajime No Ippo, or when I watched almost all of the Alien movies, or played through The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy for the first time. All of that was rather awesome, stuff that I can’t afford to do at such a pace on a regular basis.
I think I just need to set my priorities properly, I am consciously making the wrong choice, which means I can consciously not do it. Right?
I really envy the people who can actually get things done using time-blocking or to-do lists, calendars and all that mumbo jumbo sometimes, I mostly go by feel, and unfortunately I feel like being lazy and consuming “content” way more often than putting some effort on enjoying the creative output of artists who pour so much passion into their work.
One of the details that struck me when I read the original post, was the choice for the word “luxury”. Sometimes I don’t appreciate it that much, and take things for granted, but yeah, a couple of evenings after work just to relax by yourself and not worry until tomorrow’s workday comes is a luxury, so I shouldn’t let it go to waste.
And of course, it’s at moment like this when I not only get to digest all of that media, I also get to work on my own stuff!
From writing longer blog posts (I always write my reviews at home where I can quickly access screenshots and the like), to spending time on a different project (like the Rockbox theme for the Innioasis Y1 which I just published).
However, those things are something I can do when others are around the house, I just gotta work on my desk. So I’m going off-topic.
In the end, the main thing is that I get to use the big TV in the living room for whatever I want.
Freedom!
So, how do you spend time when you get to be by yourself for a bit?
