A hacker news post recently was talking about how, given free time (retirement, time between jobs, etc), we are not prone to pursue our goals or hobbies. Rather we give into boredom. One user described his experience (I’m paraphrasing): “We naturally fall into the kinds of activities we want to do, everything else isn’t really a priority to us, even if we want it to be”.
This line of thinking kind of bothers me. I think it’s because I’m in this thread and I don’t like it. I do this often. It’s a recurring theme for me to get off work, take the dog for a walk, putz around for a few minutes. Then I am much more likely to hop on xbox/netflix than to do something productive.
I think there are a few reasons for this. The first is that I’m often tired from work and don’t feel like more focused tasks. The problem with this is that once I start doing something like video games, it tends to take up the entire evening. Maybe if instead I napped or meditated for 45 minutes, I would be more mentally ready for something like drawing, or learning a new skill.
Another problem is fear of starting, or picking something to work on. I am aware that I want to practice or learn too many things: animation, art, web development, data structures, writing, building a business, UI, UX, illustration… the list goes on. I feel like if I start doing one of these things I’ll be picking the wrong thing. But is there a right “thing”?
I also feel like these tasks are boring, at least some of them. Or that I am not doing them correctly. In this sense I’m kind of admitting to the author’s point of that hacker news post. However I think that I should try exercising a little more discipline in this regard.
Perhaps a driving factor is the fear of failure, that whatever I pick, I’ll never make progress on. This is self defeating, but it feeds into the mindset that “I’ll just start later when I have more time”.
You are about to have a lot of time on your hands, so you should be prepared to test out some of these theories.
My initial reaction to this hacker news post’s line of thinking is that, if this is the only possibility, then what’s the point? There must be a way to drive oneself to a more productive outcome short of committing yourself to a company for 8 hours a day.
Maybe the problem lies in not having a clear cut goal: