Something that has been on my mind a great deal lately is the topic of free time and boredom. Many people have a dream of saving up enough money to eventually retire and have the rest of their life as free time. I'm under the impression that someone having unlimited amounts of free time will be challenged to make good use of all of it. One reason for this belief is how the people I know as well as myself currently spend our free time.
Many people in college use the website, facebook. This is a website for social interaction, even though it is through a computer. Although it does serve some purpose socially in meeting new people and attending social gatherings, the majority of its participants are using it to procrastinate on homework or to waste time. I used to use facebook more and I could sit there for hours looking through the 1000's of clubs just to see what there was. I didn't feel happy about how I spent my time afterwards. I knew I had wasted it, but it was addictive.
What can you do in your free time continually without getting bored? Watching television for more than 30 minutes gets boring. The longer I watch it the worse it gets. In fact watching it for more than 60 minutes leaves me with a feeling of having my energy drained. I've noticed a diminishing return for most activities people do to take up their free time. Watching TV is fun and entertaining for the first 30 minutes, but for each additional program that is watched the amount of enjoyment gathered from watching TV is less than before.
Another thing I notice people doing is overindulging in activities that are necessary. It is necessary to eat to survive. But, many times, people will eat not because they are hungry but because they are bored. Having a clean living space is necessary, but sometimes people will go about doing menial tasks like cleaning an already clean house. These things are not what human life was made for. Our bodies and minds are so extraordinary and that is easy to forget. We must not forget how much we can achieve, and we must take precautions to not let our energy get sapped by routine.
One of the few events that doesn't seem to leave me with a feeling of wasted time or boredom is learning. This can be divided into two categories: learning information (semantic memory) or learning skills and abilities (procedural memory). Practicing something all the time, such as playing a guitar, does not leave one feeling like they wasted their time. On the contrary, most people find learning to play musical instruments fulfilling and a very useful way to spend their time. This feeling of accomplishment and increasing skill level is not confined to musical instruments either. Learning how to build or repair a car would have this same effect. Martial arts would fall into this category. I think there is something genetically inherent in humans which causes us to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment we achieve from hard work and improving ability.
The other category of learning would be learning information or semantic memory. This category would include such things as reading books, reading the newspaper, learning current stock prices or sports scores, and reading textbooks. This category does not appear to be quite as rewarding as the previous category of learning skills. It does depend on what you are working towards though. If your interest lies in science, than learning about science may be more rewarding for you than following stock information.
There are some learning processes that overlap into both the semantic memory category and the procedural memory category. One example of this would be learning a new language. Part of learning a new language is memorizing a plethora of vocabulary words along with all the grammatical rules. Once you get a little better at speaking the language though it begins to become a skill instead of a bunch of memorized words and rules. Yet another example of an overlapping learning process would be working on a motorcycle. I have no experience working on cars or motorcycles but I plan on learning soon. When I first start it will consist of me reading a motorcycle manual, and then looking for the part that the manual is referring to and following the next step. Because there is so much reliance on the manual in the beginning, it is a very semantic process. After I have been working on motorcycles for a year, I will develop a certain skill level with it and it will become more procedural.
After watching "A Beautiful Mind" I was really inspired. Here is a guy who spends all his time, including his free time, to coming up with new theories about economics or math. Granted, the Hollywood movie showed him at a bar, and I'm sure he spent some of his time not working on math, but when I compare it to how I spend my time I'm amazed. How can he spend most of his life working on equations? This sense of astonishment is the same for people like Stephen Hawking or Einstein. Stephen Hawking wrote a few books about the origins of the universe and the nature of time and physics. He wrote these so that someone who is not an astrophysicist could understand them. They explain about their respective subjects quite well, but they also paint a picture of how much time he spent just dedicated to science. Hawking tried to learn as much as he could and tried to come up with new ideas or theories for the subject.
Creating is essential to life. Procreating is how we survive. Creating is how we have developed technology, art, and science. Anything we use, any kitchen utensil, any toy, any electronic device, any vehicle, anything we can study all exist because of creation. Creation and learning go hand in hand to make up how I believe people were made to live their lives. If you have ever sat down and drawn a picture, wrote a story, built something, made a hemp necklace, painted a picture, or created music then you know how fulfilling it is to create something. The level of satisfaction you get from creating something is equivalent to how much effort you put into it. And how much effort you put into a project is not necessarily dependent on how much time you put into it. Sometimes assignments from school make us forget how fun creation can be. If you are being forced to create something that you don't want to, it is not as satisfying and it is harder to put in effort. But, even after working on an APA (American Psychiatric Association) formatted research paper that you may not have wanted to do, you still feel good when it is finished. I said earlier that creation and learning go hand in hand. This is because you can start to learn about a subject. Then you can create something, whether it be a process, a material, or an idea, in that field. From creating something in that field you then learn more about it by seeing how you creation worked. After spending more time learning about the field you can then create something even more complicated. This is how people like Einstein and Stephen Hawking work. They just keep learning and creating until they are in unexplored territory.
It seems so many times instead of using our free time in productive ways we merely find distractions or ways to "kill time." Is time so valueless that we should be trying to kill it? It is a finite resource, at least for any living being.