On wasting time in the most productive way

A college honors essay

Ever since I can remember I have loved to learn new things. Never things pertinent to my education, like partial-products division or the oxford comma, but rather things I found fascinating. The problem in this lies where information meets capacity. I can name all forty-four presidents forward and backward, I am fluent in Spanish and capable of conversing in Russian and Korean, and I know everything there is to know about sixteenth-century wigs. However, as I progressed through the different levels of education, I began to forget things more quickly, such as when my homework was due or what my mom told me to get from the grocery store. My teachers grew tired of me taking up class time by asking random questions about unimportant subjects rather than answering their questions about things I really did not feel like learning about. I figured out hastily that my mind was similar to a computer’s hard drive: there wasn’t space for everything.

After I started high school, I developed a system for myself. After I had finished all my homework, with the help of a planner to keep me organized, I allowed myself one hour on the computer on any site I wanted. My favorite happened to be a website called “Today I Found Out…”. During this hour my mind flourished. I learned about megalodon, the ancient and possibly not extinct aquatic dinosaur that reached lengths six times that of a Great White Shark. I became well-versed in the works of Poe, Freud and Einstein. Sometimes I would read about cold cases from the twentieth century and formulate my own opinion on what had really happened. Those sixty minutes were the best waste of time I could have asked for. I truly believe that my one allotted hour per day taught me more about the world than I could have been informed by any amount of textbook learning or lecture hours.

Who knows how much of the information I learned will be put to good use in the future? Maybe I will be a future “Jeopardy” contestant. The only thing I am sure of is that those websites and being able to choose my own curriculum kept my love of learning alive. By being limitless in what I chose to focus my attention on, I was able to feed my curiosity while still leaving enough space to remember to do my science project. So were these times really a waste? At the time, maybe, but now I don’t think so. I suppose the only time we waste is the time we spend doing things we don’t thoroughly enjoy. I believe work has the potential to be a waste of time and relaxation can sometimes be productive. If everyone found a way to balance the two, there would be only time well spent; perhaps learning about the development of accents in the southeastern United States.