I love wasting time.
It’s so fun to do things that are a waste of time.
And I think something that held me back for a long time is this feeling that I would have to convince myself that something was bad.
Then I can replace it with something else.
I would have to show that this is not good, OK, then your typical self-development pattern: stop doing bad things and start doing more good things.
So to put something in the bad column and stop doing it, I’d have to tell myself and convince myself, yes, this is a bad thing.
But so many of the things that are wasting time, filling in time: they are not necessarily bad.
They can be good things.
There’s nothing wrong with them.
There’s nothing bad about these things.
They have a lot of good qualities.
Especially looking through all kinds of art and entertainment: there are just so many good TV shows.
There are good books.
There are good games.
And these things can take up entire lifetimes just to experience them.
But if I have to tell myself, I have to make myself believe, no, this is bad, in order to avoid it, then that’s a lot of work trying to make a case that this is absolutely a bad thing.
It’s hard to do.
A lot of this entertainment and art and pastimes, I mean, they’re fine.
So one thing that helped me was to kind of decide and realize that I don’t need to convince myself.
I don’t need to prove that these things are bad.
I only need to be clear with myself that this is not the best use of my time, that I want something better.
I have to want something better than all these great things So somebody asks me, “Have you seen this great new TV show?” and I don’t have to think, oh, you know, what’s wrong with it? What is my reason? Justify yourself.
You know, why am I not watching this new TV show that’s a great show? I don’t need to establish that it’s not a great show.
It could be a great show.
Just that it takes up time that I want to spend doing better things.
Making my life the best it can be: that means cutting out a lot of great things that are simply- there’s no room to fit everything in.
No, I have not read “A Song of Ice and Fire”, 5,000 pages of a yet to be completed epic fantasy series.
I have not read Harry Potter.
I have not played the greatest new games video.
I cannot say that these things are bad.
They may be wonderful, great things, and they may add to my life.
But because there’s simply not enough room to do all these great things, it’s OK to say that this absolutely may be a wonderful, great thing, and yet, at the same time, I am not going to have anything to do with it in my life.
Yeah, it’s a simple thing once again, but this I found very helpful.
Because it’s not like, you know- it really used to seem like announcing that I’m not participating in a certain show or book or game, it felt like I had to justify it.
But really now, I think, it’s OK.
It’s OK to be selective and to say no to good things.
Because these are all fine, but I want something better.
I want to have a great life.
And it’s not like those things stop you from having a great life, just that they take up time, and I want to spend my time doing other things that I feel will more directly lead to a better life.
So in a way, it’s like a sacrifice.
You don’t sacrifice bad things.
You sacrifice good things.
That’s what makes it a sacrifice.
It has to be something good that you give up in order to trade it for something better.
Now, I had this thought come to me yesterday when I was doing my digital decluttering and going through all the accounts that I had accumulated over the years, and found one for an old game that I used to love playing.
And I started reading through the updates to this game that had been made in the last couple years, the new changes, started to see what it looks like.
I remembered how fun it is to just immerse myself in the game.
It’s one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
You really feel like being in this world, and it’s very relaxing, it’s very satisfying in its own way, and I could happily jump in there for days and just enjoy this imaginary world.
And I kind of knew, this part of me that’s kind of like, you know, wait a minute, that would actually not be the best use of my time.
Because I actually want to do useful things in the real world, and I don’t want to just take a week out of my year and put that into this imaginary world.
And that’s when I had to come to that realization that I don’t need to convince myself that it’s bad.
It’s wonderful.
It’s just not good enough for what I want.
And the funny thing is that the name of this game is “The Unreal World”.
And it’s right there in the name that this is a wonderful immersive experience in an imaginary world, and what I want is the real world.
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