We all work too much and don't know what else to do with ourselves. It's something that happens, for varying reasons, but after awhile it just becomes endemic. I don't know if that's the word for it but it sounded right. What I am trying to say is that when you are busy as shit for like 2-3 years, thats just the new normal and you have to adjust. Then, say, you have an afternoon to yourself, you are at a loss for how to fill that time. I have experienced this and it is a disconcerting feeling. After all, I have never been one to not know what to do with myself. For years it was skateboarding. I filled my free time with skateboarding. I grew up listening to music in my bedroom. I could just "be." I watched minimal TV. I watched skate videos and read some here and there. Anyway, swaying off topic...
I don't want stuff, I want time.
Here is a recent article, book review, from The New Yorker that really is worth reading; a distillation of the books best precepts and points. Read it here.
One of the many things that stuck with me and keeps me thinking about the value and quality of life and our time (abridged, a bit):
"In the nineteen-seventies, the British, the French, and the Germans—though notably not the Italians—put in just as many hours at work as Americans. But then the Europeans began trading income for leisure. The average employed American now works roughly a hundred and forty hours more per year than the average Englishman and three hundred hours more than the average Frenchman. (Current French law mandates that workers get thirty paid vacation days per year, British law twenty-eight; the corresponding figure in the U.S. is zero.) Stiglitz predicts that Europeans will further reduce their working hours and become even more skilled at taking time off, while Americans, having become such masterful consumers, will continue to work long hours and to buy more stuff. TVs, he notes, “can be put in every room and in both the front and the back of automobiles.”
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