212. A WASTE OF TIME? - How Ought We Spend Our Days?

During the recent Bank Holiday weekend, my wife looked up in horror from the Nintendo Switch she had been playing for several hours as I sat next to her, reading a fairly mid novel I had to read for a book club I’m in.

“I’ve reached that point of playing a game,” she said, “where I start to feel like the whole thing has been a waste of a day.”

Like I said, my book wasn’t feeling any better as a use of my time. I have so many other books I’d rather be reading. From novels sitting on my shelves, like the new Penn Jillette book, Felony Juggler, or the next book in John Boyne’s excellent elements series, or even the fantastic John Irving novel I had interrupted reading on my kindle to make sure I finished the book club read on time, to the non-fiction I wanted to get my teeth into: Kehinde Andrews new book about Malcolm X, Kate Manne’s Entitled, and a gift I have recently been given, Marika Rose’s Theology for the End of the World. There’s also some reading on aesthetics that I have to do for work. But here I was reading this bleak novel I was obliged to read and wasn’t especially enjoying.

My wife’s comment, however, was familiar to me. The Nintendo is mine, but despite being a person who has played video games since childhood and has always owned some sort of console into my adulthood, I find myself never completing anything I start playing for exactly the reasons my wife just articulated. What’s the point? I get deeply involved in the world of the game for a few hours, a few days, and then, as if waking from a dream, I suddenly look around and wonder what I am actually doing with my time?

Of course, my primary complaint about work under capitalism is that it is also such a waste of precious time. Hours of each working day spent in service of ends you have no actual interest in achieving but that you must achieve for bosses, so that they can please their bosses, and so on and so on. The sheer number of hours of one’s life spent at work therefore, if work is perceived as a significant waste of time, makes those fewer hours not at work all the more precious. The limited minutes in which we can do all the things day-to-day work life prevents us from doing.

Yet here we are wasting our time playing dumb video games and reading bad books when given the Bank Holiday gift of an extra day off.

One of my heroes, Henry Rollins, once wrote that there is “no such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time, all you got is life time.” The irony, of course, being that Rollins is a prolific writer. Mainly journals he writes during the down time he claims he doesn’t have. Journals about sitting listening to music and drinking coffee. He has turned his free time into a literary career. But his journals also depict his battles with depression and inability to enjoy life. Perhaps this comes from his decision to perceive there being no such thing as spare time and translate leisure into work or else call that time wasted?

I can often be accused of doing the same thing. Friends marvel at my own prolific output. Not only do I write this blog each week despite the constant demands of a life-consuming teaching job, but I also do other writing too. A monthly column about professional wrestling for Mass Movement magazine. A novel I am currently working on (I have written several over my lifetime, unpublished, but thousands of words and years of effort each). Other philosophical writing. And then there’s the music too. This year I have challenged myself to write and record a song a month, every month, for the whole year, using only an Arturia Keylab 49 synthesiser which I have had no formal training in how to play. It is a challenge I did once before, back in 2023. But I have always written and recorded music in my spare time, ever since my school days playing in punk rock bands.

My parents were both workaholics. Well, sort of. My mom actually was a workaholic, whereas my dad just pretended he was so that he could use ‘work’ as an excuse to cheat on my mom. But certainly, growing up, the idea that people spent most of their time when they weren’t formally at work, still working, was strong. So that idea from Rollins was a seed planted in my head long before I came across his writing. “No such thing as down time” when your mom’s a freelance journalist and everything could be a potential article. It always felt natural to spend my free time working on projects rather than simply relaxing.

And what are the things I like to do to relax? Reading, listening to music… Is it relaxing, or is it studying for my next project?

It has only been recently in adulthood that I have found things to do to truly relax rather than simply being means to fill me up for my next pursuit. Sports I enjoy watching but have no inclination, or ability, to play myself. Long walks outside in the world, being in the present moment and connecting to nature.

But at the same time, although ‘productive’, my creative projects never feel like work. They feel far more relaxing than any of the hours I spend in paid employment and they are the hours I most frequently reach what is known as a ‘flow’ state. I can work on a piece of music and literally lose five hours without noticing the clock. I have written whole days away, not even noticing my gnawing stomach telling me I missed lunch hours ago.

And, importantly, most of my creative endeavours are for no one but myself. Though obviously you are reading this blog right now, most people in the world aren’t. I get very little feedback from this blog to tell me people are enjoying - or hating - what they read. Most weeks it’s like throwing your ideas out into the ocean and watching them sink without trace. My music, too, is not really for anyone. Gone are the years when my actual bands had what could be called a ‘following’. These songs are written and recorded for me, and released into the world to be listened to maybe ten or twelve times in their entire lifetime. More bits of me thrown into the waves. And I already told you that the novels are unpublished. Sure, I have written books that were published, in philosophy, and my memoir, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher, but these works are hardly climbing up the literary charts. There remains only a handful of readers. My creative work is primarily work I produce to scratch an itch in myself, so while I can be called prolific, I can hardly be seen as using my time usefully if the ‘use’ of time is to be judged by metrics of what it gains you. I gain very little from all this creative output other than the intrinsic good of getting it out. Expressing myself. Screaming into a cushion may be just as gratifying and take up far fewer hours, but this is the way I have gotten used to doing it and sometimes a dog is too old to learn new tricks.

When I don’t do this creative stuff, when I do indulge in pure relaxation, reading those books I want to read, watching those sports, I often find my mind chattering away: couldn’t you be doing something more useful with your time? Even a lovely walk, upon my return home, comes with a wave of regret: is that the time? I’ve lost most of the day doing this!

I have more books in my house than I could read in a lifetime. Books I always said I would read when I get the time, and yet books, when the pandemic hit, and we were locked in our homes with nothing to do for months at a time, still sat on the shelves untouched. I have a list of TV shows and movies I always say I’ll get around to watching…and never do.

I think I have come to realise that Henry Rollins got it wrong, but not for the reasons I have already stated. It’s not his obsession with productive work that’s the problem when he says “no such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time, all you got is life time.” It’s the assumption that it is even possible to waste time.

The implication in Rollins’ words is that this “life time” is precious, and considering any second of it as “down time” is a mistake. But the older I get, the more I am coming to realise that everything we do could be perceived as both a potential waste of time, or as precisely what time is there for: to fill it. The assumption that there is an objective “ought” about what we should do with our days is the mistake. Some days paid work feels like a waste of time, but other days it feels like I am so lucky that this is my job and someone pays me to do what I am doing. Some days sitting and doing nothing but watching dumb TV or playing video games feels like a waste, but other days it feels essential as a means of decompressing from all the other stuff that happened in the week. My creative projects feel fulfilling and like a productive use of my time almost always…but only because I don’t force myself to be creative like that all the time. If I did, they would become drudgery and not particularly inspired. I know this because that’s why I used the almost word. There have been times when the creative stuff was being forced and it has felt like going through the motions instead of a good way to spend a day. This is why, I think, I’ve always indulged in lots of different creative outputs: writing, yes, but also music, sometimes art, sometimes theatre.

The point is that, in a world where there really is no objective demand that we must spend our hours doing anything, we really can do anything (so long as we keep all our other moral obligations). I don’t have to account for every hour of my life and prove that I wasn’t wasting my life. It doesn’t matter if I read this book or that book, watched that movie or this movie. If I play a video game for five hours or spend five hours gardening, all that really matters is that I, at the time, felt that what I was doing was worthwhile. Or that it served some purpose I could understand. This is not an endorsement of hedonism - sometimes we can spend our time doing things we must (chores, etc.) even if we don’t like them, and they are never a waste of time because we know why those things must be done and agree that they should be done.

I said this to my wife that Bank Holiday Monday.

“Have you enjoyed yourself though?” I asked. “It may feel now like you’ve lost the whole day staring at the screen, but while you were doing it did you get something out of it?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then it wasn’t a waste of time.” I said. “You can stop now if you want and do something else if you’re bored of it, but don’t regret doing the thing you were enjoying until you weren’t.”

And as I said it I thought about my middling read. The novel wasn’t my favourite, but it had its moments, and I still wanted to find out how it all ended. They can’t all be winners, but that doesn’t mean that a book that’s merely OK is a bad book, or a waste of your time. There’s always a value dipping into a writer’s thoughts about things so you can encounter ideas and viewpoints that are not your own.

My wife smiled. Unpaused the game. Returned to Hyrule. I went back to my book.

There was no such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time, all we had was life time, and this was a lovely way to spend it.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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