Why You Eventually Want to Have Too Little Time Instead of Too Much
By: Colton Tanner Casados-Medve
Tags: Self Improvement, Growth, Creativity, Productivity, Time Management

Doldrums. Doldrums. Eviler than the Devil. Boredom makes men to villains. — Thomas Wake, The Lighthouse (2019)

With as much complaining as human beings do about their jobs, it’s interesting to note that — based on research done by the Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi — most people are happier at work than they are elsewhere.

At first, I wondered how this could be so.

Critics of the current economic system and it’s associated work culture often point to the productivity, profit-obsessed order of things as a major reason that people are being worked to death.

The solution, from their point-of-view, is to relax the work environment through such measures as reducing hours, adding holiday time, more paid leave, etc.

But now we’ve run into a problem.

If people are happier at work, is the solution really for them to work less?

I think the issue here boils down to how much we truly feel in control of our time versus whether or not that time is spent at work or engaging in leisure activities.

The peculiar problem we find ourselves in, at present, is that we don’t like the jobs we have to go to every day and yet most leisure activities fail to provide us the same level of engagement, focus, or “flow” that challenging jobs offer.

If we wind the evolutionary clock back a bit, it makes sense that most human beings would seek to find joy through meeting complex challenges than from passive consumption of media.

Our ancestors had to constantly overcome challenges for thousands of years in order to survive, and so most of the joy they felt probably involved how well they could excel at mastering difficult skills.

For this reason, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not so much about how much time we spend working versus at leisure that determines our happiness, but rather whether or not we feel like we have chosen the particular challenges we wish to overcome.

Put another way, I think everyone wants to feel like they have “too little” time, not because their time is being siphoned away by an employer or other such contract, but because they have begun walking a path in life that involves the skills and challenges that they’ve personally selected and feel best suited for.

If we think about having an endless amount of time, we may, at first, think that this would be an optimal scenario.

Thinking about it a little longer, however, and we realize that eventually, the boredom would kill us — or turn us into “villains,” as the above film quote implies.

We would eventually seek to fill that endless time with a set of activities that challenge us to push our limits, to learn new things, and to become more creative.

And my goal here is not to rail against being bored by taking the reverse position — that we should all become workaholics.

The criticisms of our work culture have a lot of merits.

People are worked for far too long in jobs that they don’t experience a deep connection with. Giving everyone back some time in the day to rest, become bored, and then think about what they’d like to do in life would be a huge step in the right direction.

There is evidence that boredom is also essential for creativity — provided we know how to actually use it to our advantage.

At its core, boredom is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied,” Mann says. “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.” As demonstrated by the new study and plenty others before it, boredom can enable creativity and problem-solving by allowing the mind to wander and daydream. “There’s no other way of getting that stimulation, so you have to go into your head,” Mann says. You may be surprised by what you come up with when you do. — TIME Magazine

Here’s the kicker: when we finally do get that time back — as thankfully, my flexible work schedule as a rideshare driver has helped me do — it becomes almost impossible to not want to fill our time with activities that enrich us.

That’s why I started writing every day over a year ago.

I knew I wanted to do something that was both challenging and could potentially become a source of income in the future, so I stopped procrastinating and got started.

While I spend most of my free time reading and thinking about how I can improve my writing, I also think about what sort of activities I might want to pick up, or which skills I might want to learn if more of my time is ever liberated from my regular job as an Uber driver.

Make no mistake, however.

When I moved to San Diego in 2016 after graduating from university, I was totally burned out.

I lasted just two weeks in my grad school program before quitting.

A large part of the reason for that relates directly to how our jobs and education system are structured — they are constantly rushing people, demanding more and more while ignoring the realities of what the human organism can actually accomplish in a given day.

Shortly after leaving grad school, I retreated into living in the back of my truck for a few months until my girlfriend and I decided to get an apartment together.

I spent the next 2–3 years doing hardly anything that could be considered “productive” from an external perspective, working mostly on my frustration, depression, and personal outlook on life.

So once again, I feel the need to say that I’m not railing against rest and relaxation, or taking time off from thinking about “work” as we normally think about it so that we can get other domains of our life in order.

If I could snap my fingers, Thanos-style, and magically give everyone half a year off to rest and rethink their lives, I would (provided I could also magically prevent a total economic collapse simultaneously).

I’m not saying that every minute of our day should be filled with activities for the sake of having that time filled.

After all…

The overscheduled life is not worth living. — Naval Ravikant

What I’m really saying is, once we reach a certain point (which arrives after having enough time to get bored in the first place), we would rather spend our time doing something rather than nothing.

That’s just the way human beings are. We’re doers. Always have been, and likely always will be.

This is also what anyone interested in succeeding outside of the normal 9–5 work-life needs to become: a doer.

Because no one is going to force me to sit down at the computer and write a blog post every day, just like no one is going to force you to do it either.

No one cares if I succeed and escape the rat race — I have to be the one to care.

Once we reach the point at which we finally feel compelled to fill our time with activities relevant to our interests, we discover a really wonderful thing.

We discover that we don’t have to feel at war with ourselves over how we spend our time and that even if we spend the majority of our day “working” it won’t really feel like “work” as we’ve normally experienced it.

It feels more like, to quite the British philosopher Alan Watts, “play.”

“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” — Alan Watts

The challenge then becomes not getting away from “work” so as to have more leisure time, but to actually schedule leisure time because we know that we have limits and have to pull ourselves away from our work.

Csikszentmihalyi talks about creative people and the time they have on their hands — or rather don’t.

One thing such people don’t have too much of is time on their hands. It is difficult to imagine any of them being bored, or spending even a few minutes doing something they don’t believe is worthwhile. Eva Zeisel says: “When some people at my age ask me what to do, I say, ‘You must have an obsession.’ You must always have too little time instead of too much.” — Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: The Discovery of Psychology and Invention

So, is having more leisure time a good thing?

The answer, of course, is not a simple yes or no.

We need time to “do nothing” and give ourselves a rest from all the things we have been doing, but if we want to feel like we are growing, we need to be constantly engaged in learning skills and overcoming challenges.

So free time is good — up to a certain point.

If our only goal is to have time to do nothing, however, we’ll find that life offers very little satisfaction, and indeed even very little pleasure.

Leisure time absent any meaningful activities may even drive us a bit neurotic, as we wonder why life doesn’t seem to be all it was chalked up to be.

And so in every other way, whatever you do. You require a skill. And it’s enormously important, especially for American people to understand that there is absolutely no possibility of having any pleasure in life at all, without skill. — Alan Watts

It’s important, then, that we wrest control back of our time from external forces and go through the motions of feeling what it’s like to not have to do anything — for a while.

Once the boredom begins to become intolerable, however, the task is then to discover a healthy obsession, and let it carry us away.