This Halloween season, I didn't get scared, I didn't go to a haunted house, I didn't go to any costume parties, and I didn't do a horror movie marathon, but I did get reminded of things that I get scared of doing: useless activities. Due to previous bad experiences, I am constantly afraid of wasting my time on useless endeavors. Since we have only a limited amount of time on Earth, and only so much time available during the day that we try to squeeze as much value as possible, it's so vital to avoid useless things like the plague. Part ofmy phobia also rubs off on MJ and my sister, who have to listen to me warning them about wasting time, even though I'm just projecting my own fears onto them.
It's hard to define what exactly is useless, since almost everything I do has a purpose, such as sleeping (not productive, but have to do it to recharge), taking a walk (not productive work-wise but useful health-wise as part of exercise), but I'd say wasting time looking at Tik-tok videos or checking fantasy football stats every 3 minutes count as useless activities. Nowadays, I count watching 2-hour non-famous movies as useless activities since I can get the plot and shorten the experience by watching a summary video or synoposis somewhere on the Internet (I've become a bit neurotic).
I suspect this phobia took root after high school, when I realized all of the homework I'd done for so many AP and "honors" classes had been tedious and boring but also not useful......college and the real world didn't work like that. Especially the long essays we wrote for English class that I spent hours on that I suspect my teachers didn't really read particularly carefully, or group projects presenting to other classmates about a research topic, those were really done to prepare students for the future, but did it really require all the busywork and extra effort? Also, sitting through hours and hours of orchestra practice: as grateful as I was to play at the actual concert, those hours sitting through rehearsal on Monday nights, especially when I had gone through a long day of school already, was not a productive use of time.
Much more recently and looking at it more philsophically, I often wonder if all those games of dodgeball mattered in the long run, or spending time at work earning every last cent (another day, another dollar) was a productive use of time or not. Yes, it was important to be gainfully employed and work to sustain life's other activities, and it's important to have fun once in a while and do things that we enjoy, but often I look back and wonder if I could have used those hours, days, weeks, even years in a more productive way to enjoy a more fruitful or meaningful life. But then as I'm pondering these difficult-to-answer questions, I realize the pondering itself is not that useful neither since I can't change the past and am delaying working on the future, so I stop and do something else. Quite the paradox.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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