MTS

Leisure is a Drug

Cover Image for Leisure is a Drug
Nicholas
Nicholas

Do you know what feels really bad? Waking up the day after doing absolutely NOTHING. Imagine a lazy Saturday. You wake up around 10:30, make some coffee, sit around for a few hours with your partner, and enjoy the morning. You plan on doing something fun. Maybe not. Maybe you just see where the day takes you. Then, who knows. You go out to a coffee shop, expecting to do some work, or you go to a new cafe for lunch. You end up hanging out there for a bit, talking about the other patrons, and discussing plans for later that evening. Then Saturday night rolls around. Dinner plans with friends. Visiting the family. Going to the movies. Staying up late playing video games. A night out to see some live music. Playing some board games with your partner. Whatever your rascally weekend activities include. Sunday morning rolls around, and you look back on yesterday, and while it was fun, you now suffer the consequences.

These are leisure activities. Things that you do on the weekends. After work is over. Before you start work, maybe you read a little bit of the paper with your coffee. Small bits of leisure. Watching a television show after work. Playing a game of League of Legends. Going for a walk in the park! Some of these things, I might argue, are objectively "better" for us than others, but to each their own. Do whatever makes you feel happy. But to me, it sometimes feels unbalanced.

Personally, after a Saturday of doing NOTHING, or even a whole week of doing nothing, I feel almost abysmal (this could just be a me thing). I just returned from a seven-day trip to the Outer Banks in NC. It was a blast. Super fun. But returning??? I have a leisure hangover. I feel like I accomplished nothing; I didn't "do" much at all. I journaled, sat on the beach, went to the pool, went out for dinner, went shopping, and played some Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my phone. I actually even did some work in the mornings, maybe two hours. It was absolutely fantastic. But I cannot lie and say that by day seven, I wasn't itching to do something productive.

I think that leisure is a drug, like everything else. People get addicted to activities. For some, it's sex. For others, it's playing video games. Watching porn. I had a friend in college who was studying psychology, and he told me that people who smoke don't really get that addicted to the nicotine in cigarettes. They get addicted to the ACTIVITY of smoking. Going outside every few hours for a breath of fresh air. It's not necessarily a physical addiction. It's the brain saying, "I enjoy DOING this thing because it makes me happy."

And, much like alcohol, I feel that there's a "hangover" that I associate with these wasteful days. I have to recover a bit after too much leisure. It feels bad to me, waking up on a Sunday and saying, "Oh lord, I left ALL of the cleaning and chores for today. Now my Sunday is ruined. I feel bad."

Now, I know what you are thinking. "Nick, how the fuck do you expect anyone to listen to your word spew if you condemn their FAVORITE fucking things?!" It's important for me to note that these things are IMPORTANT. I'm not saying don't do anything fun ever. I'm not saying be a machine that just does productive things all the time. I'm not saying people should give up the things they enjoy. Leisure is good. Leisure is absolutely important, and let's be honest, it's fucking great. It's super good for the body and brain to just... sit. Enjoy things sometimes. It's good to visit the family. It's good to form those connections with people. It's really GOOD to go for a walk in the park.

Take this post as you will, but the important thing is that we're metacognitive of the things that we spend time doing. Is it better to spend six hours straight on a Saturday sitting inside binge-watching "The Boys" on television? Or is it just that much better to maybe spend two hours doing that, and spend the other four hours doing something else??? Or maybe split the six hours up into 2-hour blocks, and clean the kitchen in between episodes? Who knows. Leisure is a captivating thing, and it's very easy to get locked into a leisurely activity. I say, treat leisure like a drug, and use leisure in moderation - always understanding WHY we're doing the things that we do.