your free time is for you :~)
You have to learn when a hobby or interest is truly detrimental or if it has just been demonized by the productivity cult. Sometimes people lament that all day they spend time on things they enjoy, but somehow it’s… bad?
I understand that you have to rip yourself away from some enjoyable things for other responsibilities (work, studying, household…), and that some things you crave can leave you feeling worse off and as if it was a waste of time after (…scrolling feeds?), but otherwise: Yes, getting continually sucked into your hobbies and interests is life. Why wouldn’t you, if you really like them? It’s normal. It’s good for you even!
Some of the complaining sounds like “Oh no, I’m such an undisciplined feral beast for enjoying my interests for hours!”
What else is life for if not that? So much comfort, all kinds of media and hobbies to choose from, so many tutorials on how to learn them, and you want to be a robot who is not beholden to the enjoyment of it all, unfazed by the flow state, but will check off an acceptable time allotment of it each day, and not a minute more. It’s like you dispense it like a medicine, in a carefully calibrated dose, just enough to keep you going mentally, but not enough so as to seem lazy or too invested in things deemed silly or unproductive.
Why is it admirable to binge a fiction book series but not a TV show? Give yourself some grace. If you don’t get to rest and enjoy the fruits of your labor, life will pass you by.
None of us will be on the deathbed going “I wish I had played Stardew Valley for a little less.” But we might regret that we spent so much time on the serious and competitive, and streamlining life so much that it doesn’t allow for random pockets of joy, or becoming really good at something that decidedly isn’t our career.
The hours outside of work were not given freely, but were won through historical struggle by unions and others. Make some use of it!
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