Wasting Your Life Away is Not Normal

Awaken, ye who slumber, for ye shall someday die

Some of you may have noticed that my post frequency at Things to Read has recently plummeted.

There are several reasons for this—my starting a new job, being disappointed that no one else is smart enough to help me move forward with philosophy, the usual obligations from having so many kids, etc. But another reason is that, after a long period of both figuratively and literally carrying my family forward, I am no longer a strong person. My personality now looks like:

Granted, this may not seem like anything unusual. Plenty of people have personalities that are, well, this. But after a year or so of struggles, disappointments, and failures, there’s a very obvious change here which I’ve crudely highlighted below for readers who are tired of my beating around the bush:

I haven’t been completely passive in this regard; obviously some of you may have wondered why I was thinking so much about feeling in my last post, and the answer is that, well, I spend quite a lot of time in the somber, unimpressed, or bored lower-left quadrant of emotion-land.

But regardless of what I try, rather than finishing any of my posts about

• The Nature of God (for J.S. Kasimir who still believes in God)

• Trusting empirical findings rather than insisting on prior beliefs (for Doktor Zum who still thinks thinking is more important than checking)

Or even

• Writing a response to Tove’s interesting recent post (thus leaving criticism of her crazier ideas to complete jerks whom no sensible person would ever listen to, ever)

I have been doing… other things. Mind you, I do have posts written, of course. Dozens of them, all in a partially completed state. Unfortunately I’m beset by a nagging suspicion that none of them are worth posting, which is strange, given that, looking them over, they aren’t any different from the other things I’ve posted.

But instead of finishing them, I’ve taken up a series of elaborate self-care hobbies, including

• Video Games

• Netflix

• Martial Arts

• Reading Novels

• Watching YouTube

All of which are probably fine individually, except that by the end of every week my artistic, musical, literary, and whatever-you-call-this-blog output is near zero. And I suddenly realized—this isn’t really normal.

And yet, dear readers: Isn’t this normal?

Is Your Entire Life in an Elaberate Attempt to Cope?

I read that the average American spends 5 hours on their mobile device each day. But that’s not all; I find they also manage an additional 2.5 hours of conventional television as well. All of this is shocking to the point of being frankly barely believeable—even in the midst of my present funk, I’m spending scarcely a third of this amount of time being passively entertained.

But let’s say that the numbers are inflated. Let’s say most people spend only a total of three hours every day scrolling mindlessly through their news feed or browsing Netflix with a slack expression on their faces. Well, multiply that by the length of the avearge human life, and then multiply that by the number of people living in the developed world, and when you get a number like 336 billion hours, don’t you begin to wonder? Isn’t that a ridiculous sacrifice of human life?

None of us are going to live forever. We can measure our precious lives in terms of years, days, and seconds, numbers that dwindle with every heartbeat, with the drawing of each and every breath. And wasting three hours a day, not once or twice, but thousands of times, every single day—does a sacrifice on this scale make any sense at all?

As modern secularists we freed ourselves from the chains of religion, and how we like to laugh at all the time Christians spend in church, or Muslims spend in prayer. But who among the faithful spends anything approaching 21 hours a week in these religious pursuits? Are our lives so pointless that we can find nothing meaningful to do for three hours every day?

This waste becomes far more poignant when considering the way it ripens, ages, and mellows year after year into the melancholy inevitability of regret:

[P]eople's biggest regrets tend to involve things they have failed to do in their lives. This conflicts with research on counterfactual thinking that indicates that people regret unfortunate outcomes that stem from actions taken more than identical outcomes that result from actions foregone. These divergent findings were reconciled by demonstrating that people's regrets follow a systematic time course: Actions cause more pain in the short-term, but inactions are regretted more in the long run.¹

This finding was from 1994, with a replication from 1995:

It is interesting that only 10 of the 213 regrets involved outcomes caused by circumstances beyond the person's control. Thus, a sense of personal responsibility appears to be central to the experience of regret. People might bemoan or curse their bad fate, but they rarely regret it in the sense that the term is typically understood. As for the events people do regret, the results provided strong support for our hypothesis: Regrettable failures to act outnumbered regrettable actions by nearly a 2 to 1 margin (63% vs. 37%).²

These older studies were carried out before the replication crisis, of course, and a modern meta-analysis is generally preferable. Although I find no direct investigation of this subject in recent research, a more recent meta-analysis found the top five areas of regret were, in descending order:

1. Education (e.g., “If only I had studied harder in college”)

2. Career (e.g., “If only I were a dentist”)

3. Romance (e.g., “I wish I’d married Jake instead of Edward”)

4. Parenting (e.g., “If only I’d spent more time with my kids”)

5. Self (e.g., “If only I had more self-control.”)³

I will admit to being somewhat at a loss regarding exactly where being a dentist comes in. Still, I can at least point out with confidence that nowhere on this list were regrets pertaining to insufficient time spent sitting in front of a television, or scrolling through a Twitter feed.

Photo courtesy of John-Mark Smith. One can only speculate about whether this pic was taken as a casual snapshot of his wasted life, or a deliberate record of the daily sacrifice he makes unto the dark god Netflix

Can anyone really be doing this on purpose, after having carefully considered everything that might be experienced or accomplished? The idea beggars belief, and yet it seems that you all do, perpetually—and now, I’m one of you. We browse the local restaraunts, we scroll through lists of video games, we pause by the offerings at the local cinema, and all the while, what are we really seeking besides distraction?

Why does it seem as though no one rails against it? Why does no one snarl or gnash their teeth at this slow suicide we inflict upon ourselves? It’s as though everyone considers this wasting of our lives to be just a part of the human condition, as much an inevitability as the turning of the seasons or the way day follows night. But the sacred position of distraction in our lives is unquestionable; like Narcissistic nobles, or the decadent Pharaoh, diversion is for modern man⁴ an indispensible thing. Indeed, why question the ultimate victories for which our forefathers fought and struggled? Why dismiss the final culmination of the American Dream: A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and sand running through every hourglass like water?

And in the end when I look at this I find it very hard to believe that most people are sincere when they argue that life is worth living. Because a life in which cheap palliation takes center stage is a life devoted to coping, a life dedicated to distraction from existential pointlessness and misery. Think for a moment—can you even imagine life without cell phones, television, and pretty pictures on the Internet?

So the next time someone ends their life, rather than defaulting to the usual platitudes about how it was a terrible tragedy, or how it should have been avoided, or about how they must have been sick and needed help, remember those three hours you are killing every day.

I’m not even killing that, but I feel the loss. There was a time when I had more optimism, more energy, more hope even about my daily routines, and it grieves me to compare my diminished state to the way I used to be. But I know that there are some of you who never, even once

• Ate a spider,

• Made a sword,

• Wrecked a car,

• Drew yourself in a mirror,

• Learned a foreign language,

• Wrote a poem, or

• Had a child.

For those of who who never did, these were things I did. And because I did them once, I know, there is much more to life. Don’t let yourself languish in an endless circle of palliation forever! Spending three hours or more every day seeking distraction in front of a screen may be common, but it surely is not normal. You’ll never find anything better if you accept that opting out of living is all there is to life.

One way or another, you can find a way to reach a more meaningful existence. What that way is for you, I’m not sure. But I hope that talking to you through this essay, typos and all, is a way forward for me.

1. Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1994). The temporal pattern to the experience of regret. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 357–365.

2. Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of regret: what, when, and why. Psychological review, 102(2), 379.

3. Summerville, A., & Roese, N. J. (2011). What we regret most... and why. Personality and Social Psychology, 31(9), 1273-1285.

4. Or insert your own specific gender here—but be aware that if you do, I’m just going to ask whether your obsession with pronouns is merely another way of wasting your life away rather than doing something you think is genuinely meaningful.