How to Waste Your Life in Five Easy Steps
By: Sean Kernan
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Humor, Sean Kernan, Life

How to Waste Your Life in Five Easy Steps

The despair of wasted time is achieved through unawareness.

Source: pic via Andrea Piacquadio

I was a competitive swimmer in college. Our training began in the wee hours. It was grueling, in ways that I can only partially convey here.

Sprinting was my specialty. Training mandated high-intensity repetitions at short distances. It taxed every muscle in my body. The coach limited our breathing to improve lung capacity. Waves of fire would shoot through my chest and throat as I surged towards the wall for a chance to breathe.

There would often be 15–20 seconds of rest between each repetition. With every cell in my body screaming, I’d stare at the clock between rounds, willing the big hand to slow down and give me more time to replenish. I’d pray for just five more seconds of rest, only for the excellence-inducing torture to resume.

It’s amazing how my perception of mere seconds changed in those moments of need. If only we treated time with the urgency a drowning person treats a breath of air.

Most of us will go out into our lives and allow seconds and days to blur lazily into each other. We’ll march blindly into old age and face the despair of knowing we’ve squandered everything.

Life, time, and air are all interchangeable, equitably wasted, without us knowing it.

So why not stare it right in the eyes? Sometimes the only way to see fire is to walk right into it.

Pick a bunch of fights you can’t win

I’m in this Facebook group that is supposed to be about funny history memes.

You could categorize the posts into three different groups. The first posts are fun, innocent history memes, as they are supposed to be. The second, are political memes, cutting at one side or the other. They are vaguely historical but not relevant to the group. They consistently turn into threads with hundreds of comments.

The third type of posts are reactions to the second: rage quits. They consist of huge rants on why the group supports nazis, liberals, or whatever. These rants typically come after some big debate in the comment section.

It’s a familiar pattern I’ve seen elsewhere. Political writer friends, who often engage with comments, frequently write fuming posts in our writer groups about their run-ins. Even those with the most fortified psyche’s eventually found foes who poke holes in their armor.

Most of you already know that internet arguments are but another aimless road to discontent. Yet, they’re also emblematic of so many futile struggles.

An argument often isn’t even about the argument itself. It’s about an emotion, a relationship, a feeling, an impulse. The internet, for example, is often a form of theater. It’s a venue for people to speak with a sort of bravado they could never muster in real life. It’s far from the grounds for civil discourse. And yet is many of us dive in.

On a more practical level, a loved one flipping out over a trivial matter is often actually about being heard, being loved. And yet we still engage in those futile struggles, rather than drawing full perspective of the threat in front of us: a ruined friendship, a crumbling marriage.

There are ample fights in this world to be had. Many of them you’ll find are unworthy of your time. But if you wish to waste this life in hopes of a redo, carry onward.

Don’t keep track when it counts

My greatest flaw and weakness are both tied into one another, like a two-headed snake with competing agendas. I have an obsessive personality. I can’t just get into a new hobby at half-speed. If it’s playing guitar, I’ll be in my room playing for eight hours a day. If its candy crush, you’ll hear those game blings from my bathroom stall. I never tried World of Warcraft for the same reason I never tried cocaine.

This is a common problem with many of the men I’ve known. We are prone to hopeless, senseless quests for glory. We act as though our time is infinite. Our youth flies by as we track all sorts of metrics that we definitely won’t appreciate on our deathbed.

Charles Darwin once said, “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” He said this as he witnessed life’s cruelest iterations in the wild. And yet he’d still be mortified with how many of us use our time.

In my case, I’ve had to practice restraint and disallow myself from having certain binge-prone hobbies. I don’t game anymore. I instead funnel that energy into things like reading and writing. My rule is that hobbies need to be semi-productive, or non-addictive.

You would be in awe of what a little self-parenting can do for your life. Take away a few simple vices. Watch awesome avenues and new talents reveal themselves.

Or keep trying to beat that last score, if you are content to run out the clock.

Take a job and keep it just because

Right now many of you live along some spectrum between fear and boredom. You are bored and unchallenged but afraid of leaving your job because of what might happen. You are afraid of being fired so you work harder and stay later, despite being miserable. You never step outside of that fear and look for a new job, or find something more challenging.

My former coworker Paul, who is smart and capable, has confined himself to working at the same paygrade for nearly 20 years. When I asked him why he never searched for something else, given his tech background, he said, “At least I know what I’m getting with this job.”

He was channeling the old adage, “The devil you know, is better than the devil you don’t.”

Yet the fear of meeting other devils seeds the complacency that squanders so many lives. Maybe the devil wrote the original quote to trick us. The idea of staying in a bad situation, because we are afraid of another lousy situation, reeks of bad logic.

As a kid, I’d often be down on myself when I was seeded last in my heat before a swim race. My dad used to say, “The only place you can go is up from there.”

Steal that thought. Live your life with a chip on your shoulder to move up. Unless you like finishing last. In that case, stay in lane eight.

Don’t lock yourself in on anything

I told people I wanted to get an MBA for a solid five years straight. Over and over again, I’d say, “Yes, I’m going to get my MBA soon.” Eventually, I got tired of hearing myself say it. I was reminding myself of flaky people I’d encountered through the years. I sounded like a wannabe.

Deep inside, I’d made up too many excuses. I was too busy to go to school while working. I couldn’t manage the workload.

It was all nonsense. I started by locking myself in on an expensive, non-refundable test. Then I took it to step by step after that. Three years later, I’d graduated from a top program. I’d found a way to manage my time and effort. Sure, there were a few tough bottlenecks. But overall? It wasn’t even that bad.

We have a remarkable ability to adapt and make things work. However, in the absence of concrete commitment, we will be locked in a state of flaccid determination.

If you’d like to waste your life, spend a lot of time talking about what you want to do. Tell people you are going to write a book for the next 10 years without ever writing a page. Talk about your new fad diet every few weeks after abandoning the previous one.

Skip the precommitment. Don’t burn the escape bridge. Give yourself a list of excuses and alternative, easier paths. It’s the surest path to never getting anything done. If you need inspiration for copouts, just look around you.

Talk about people for the wrong reasons

The next time you see Cristiano Ronaldo playing football, make it a point to discuss his personal life, who he’s dating, how vain he is, or some misguided comment he made a few years back. Don’t bother discussing his training tactics, how he positions a ball perfectly before taking a freekick, how he creates openings by drawing defenders towards him, freeing up teammates to pass to. You won’t be doing anything different than the other time-wasters.

When I get on social media, I’m always surprised at how emotional and hyper-involved people get with the lives of celebrities, arguing in favor of or against the latest nothing-burger stories. You’d think these people were related to these celebrities.

My girlfriend, who is an archaeologist, often calls and tells me of incredible breakthroughs they are having. I feel grateful for being able to hear such stories. The other day, I read about how the new mammoth remains being found are usually male because of male recklessness and risk-taking (falling into tar pits). One can’t help but wonder if it stemmed from a game of chicken with the tar pit ledge. These humorous, albeit grim facts, like so many others, seem to fly unseen against gossipy, judgemental drivel that we bury ourselves in.

It doesn’t have to be that way. This world is alive with pulsing information, ideas, and concepts for you to explore.

But if you’d like to waste your time in things that don’t matter, there are certainly mountains of hollow content to indulge. Do what feels good now. Let insecurity and fear drive every conversation and life decision you ever make.

What I know for certain in these first 37 years, the best decisions are often ones of omission, of saying no when your desperate to say yes, of taking away things that taste so sweet in the moment.

Some day, sooner than you’d expect, you may look back and wish you’d taken a few more risks, looked away from things that don’t matter, and chosen a different path than the one you are on right now.

It isn’t too late.