One of the insights that drives my thinking-work is that our society has been blessed with far, far more free time than any other society in history (except perhaps for small groups of aristocrats here and there).
This might seem intuitively wrong to many people. Without thinking about it, one might assume that people have never been busier than we are today. One might say, “You think people aren’t busier than ever? Try telling that to the working mother who has to get her kids to soccer and dance classes while earning an MBA part time.”
Ok, I will tell her. The fact is, you have a choice: you’re free to do something else or nothing at all — or even more, if you like. Your busy-ness is of your own creation — a dramatic performance, a fantasy.
Compare our modern busy-ness with the busy-ness of a century or two ago (or less), when the activities that occupied most people for most hours of the day were literally do-or-die.
You won’t die if you don’t pad your résumé with more credentials, not getting a promotion won’t kill you. You won’t die if you don’t do yoga or play softball. Your kids won’t die if they don’t take piano lessons. You sure-as-shit won’t die if you miss Monday Night Football or Dancing With the Stars.
Sure, you might be relatively better off by doing what you do, but how do you know you couldn’t be doing even better by working and living more effectively?
That’s the question I began asking myself in earnest seven or eight years ago. I began wondering how much time I wasted on television and other useless pursuits. (The answer: far, far more than most people, I’ll admit — which is perhaps why I compensated towards the other extreme).
And almost overnight I quit cold turkey: no more time spent watching TV or playing video games. I didn’t even have to try. It just turned me off. I just wasn’t interested in that stuff anymore because I would rather have been discovering or creating something instead.
I started re-taking up the activities I loved as a kid (like drawing and designing) but had neglected. I also made a concerted effort to read more and become a better writer, and committed myself to mastering the guitar (rather than just pseudo-playing the bass by picking out notes by ear). I also made attempts to learn new languages and improve my math skills…
Keep in mind I was in my early 20’s and already had an undergraduate degree. A few people expressed concern that my time would have been better spent doing things that would more practically serve my career.
But the time I used for reading and playing guitar didn’t come out of my career building time, it came out of my hockey watching, PS2 playing, and beer drinking time — which sometimes wasn’t more than a few hours per week, but it adds up. (Even if you only watch one or two shows routinely, think of what that means for a whole year.)
I’ve already written about the value of investing personal time, and as I wrote then (and here), although you may lose a lot of social currency by not following sports and reality TV and sitcoms and 10 pm dramas and whatever you and your friends are into, I don’t see any reason why the same kind of relevance can’t develop through more generative past-times.
(For example, spend more time reading the business section than the sports section, and take a moment to think about the possible implications of a political event on the other side of the world rather than going straight to the picture of a car accident that only affects a handful of people…)
It may not be easy at first, but it’s like any kind of exercise or investment: the payoff comes later.
Before I quit watching TV (for the most part) I had trouble reading any magazine article longer than one page. I kept challenging myself, developing my interest and ability by reading what I could handle — no more, no less.
Now I’m able to write every day (in my after-work spare time), without much strain and with a lot of enjoyment, something I wasn’t mentally capable of even reading eight years ago, and something I would never have been able to read if I hadn’t chosen to challenge myself to take all the little steps, starting by stepping away from the television set.
By doing so, the “fantasy” of our lives doesn’t necessarily become pure reality, but we are at least able to understand and control it more effectively, enabling us to step towards new challenges and opportunities, rather than retreating away from them.
In other words, by making choices wisely, we give ourselves opportunities to choose even more wisely again.
Note: when I began writing this a few hours ago, the main purpose was to point out this great talk by Clay Shirky at Edge.org, which I can’t recommend highly enough: “Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus“:
“Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way… that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus…” [edge]
