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Ask HN: Why does free time become another thing you have to use correctly?

2•nullifypreset•10h ago
Picture this, it’s evening and you are casually relaxing on the couch, but then a striking thought crosses your mind… You aren’t productive, you are not working towards your goals, the rest feels undeserved and such… What happens is that in the time meant for you to wind down, to let the machinery cool down, you are still thinking of it as something that it is NOT meant to be. We know everyone needs rest. It’s something literally necessary and something you can’t skip under any circumstances if you want to be properly functioning individual.

But then why are you feeling so frustrated at the very moment your energy has to replenish? It almost, if not directly, makes you experience guilt for doing so.

In my opinion, not only from observing people in my surroundings, but from personal viewpoint, it has to do with one of the three things:

—You have to do something really big really quick, because of some perceived sense of danger if you fail to accomplish it. Think about, and I know it’s gonna sound bad, but this actually perfectly illustrates what I am trying to say, you took money from someone without their knowledge, there is a high chance they got to know quite soon and you are worried about facing terrible consequences and now you have to do shit tones of work to restore the missing money in time.

—You’ve formed an identity of a person who is always busy with something that usually feels like a burden to other people. Most of the time, we are talking about workaholic lads, but that’s not necessarily the only expression of this variant. If you let go of that, you lose your identity, you lose yourself and you no longer know who you are. You are sustaining a model that requires unhealthy amount of labour to stay intact.

—You are jealous that somebody has more than you, more money, more real estate, better physique and so on… Therefore, you feel distress at any given moment where you are not catching up to them.

All of these scenarios have something in common. One bigger and more influential emotion conquers another and the former pushes you to act in a certain direction.

—Fear of being exposed conquers tiredness —Fear of being judged or misaligned with yourself conquers tiredness —Fear of being socially marginalised, losing social capital, not being thought highly of by others conquers tiredness.

In all or those cases emotion x prevails over the desire to rest. But do you know what else is universal for all of those cases? The irrationality behind the choice of the method to get you where you want to be. Think about this, if can’t function optimally, would it matter how much labour and work you put in given endeavour? No, because not only the quality will drop faster than you can say your name, your health will be subjected to a serious strain. In other word, you’d die much sooner than you’d otherwise want….

Those might seem obvious, but the trick is to think of those at the very moment you are most inclined to act in a way you’d regret later. In this tread, I’m not saying anything new, I just hope that my articulation of the problem gives rise to powerful enough associations and clears the rumination landscape, so that you stop being a victim of processes that you only vaguely understand.

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