Falling down the rabbit hole

I love the internet.  You can research so many different things.  Read the news.  Binge watch old TV shows.  Skype or Hangout with family and friends.  Reconnect and stay connected with social media.  But you can also waste an amazing amount of time watching videos of puppies and kittens and baby goats.

One of my current challenges is figuring out how to not fall down the rabbit hole of Pinterest, or YouTube or any of the other endless mindless time-eating activities that allow me to not make the progress on my novels that I want to be making.

It seems like the Internet offers more ways to waste time than any other invention of modern man.  And that got me to thinking, are we better at wasting time because we have the internet, or did we just waste time in different ways before?  Does 21st century man have a greater capacity for wasting time than 20th or 19th century man?  What is wasted time anyway?

I have my own set of bizarre rules about what constitutes wasting time.  Watching TV?  Yes, you can waste time watching TV.  Walking?  Never a waste of time.  Hanging out with friends?  Never a waste of time.  Clicking mindlessly on every Facebook post?  Yes, you can waste time this way.  Reading a book?  Never a waste of time.

Some of my differentiations on time wasting make sense.  Any time you are creating or enriching something, it is not a waste of time.  Any time you are attending to necessary things, like cleaning, or cooking or shopping, not wasted time.

Then I get to the crazy part of the list.  Watching a Saints game?  Never a waste of time.  Watching every football game all weekend in the fall?  Wasted time in there.

I've been overthinking this.  (I also classify overthinking as a waste of time.)  And I think I have figured out my definition of wasting time.  Any time that is not spent creating something, even if that something is a memory is a waste of time.

When at the end of the day, someone asks you what you did, if you can't answer, because nothing you did was important enough to remember, that is wasted time.  And time is all we have, so I don't want to waste it.

I'm still wondering how people wasted time in the past.  It seems like the proliferation of media has created much greater opportunity to waste time.

So then the question becomes, what are we not doing that we used to do in that time?

Well, living is easier.  Cooking and cleaning take less time than they used to.  I don't have to make clothes, I can buy them.  Washing clothes is much easier.  So some of the time we have available to waste was used for taking care of the business of life in the past.

But even accounting for that time, it is important to recognize what you are sacrificing to waste whatever time you are wasting.

Are you not taking care of the business of life?  Are you not making memories with the people you care about?  Are you not accomplishing your goals?

As long as you are not unhappy with your choices as to how you spend your time, it is all good.  That takes me back to where I started, with being unhappy with myself for mindlessly letting time slip away from me as I fall down the rabbit hole of internet click bait.

I keep trying to devise methods to impose discipline on myself, so that I don't end up at the end of the day unhappy with the time I have wasted.  I suppose I will eventually find the magic formula.

Until then, the puppies, and kittens and baby goat videos will continue to derail my plans for the day.

But if they turn into a happy memory, the time wasn't wasted at all.