The Happiest People I Know Waste Time
We have been optimizing myself into misery trying to figure out why.
I know someone who takes a two-hour nap every afternoon.
Not a power nap. Not a “recharge for productivity” nap. A full, committed, completely unscheduled nap that starts whenever she feels like it and ends whenever it ends.
She does not have a morning routine. She does not track her habits. She has never once said the word “intentional” in a sentence about her own life.
She is also genuinely, consistently, annoyingly one of the happiest people I know.
And I have been thinking about this for a while because it does not make sense to me. By every metric I have absorbed from the internet, she should not be happy. She is not optimizing. She is not growing. She is not building anything. She is just living. slowly. without a content calendar.
And yet.
~ on the people who have it figured out without trying ~
You know the type.
The aunty who spends three hours making chai and talking to neighbors. The uncle who has been doing the same walk at the same time every evening for twenty years and cannot imagine why you would do anything else after dinner. The friend who reads for fun (not for growth). The person in your life who watches random television without calling it “passive consumption” and apologizing for it.
These people are not lazy. (I used to think they were lazy.) They are just not performing their life for anyone.
Including themselves.
And that distinction is doing a lot of work.
~ what the rest of us are doing instead ~
We are busy. Obviously. Very productively busy.
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We wake up with intention. We track things. We have systems. We are building towards something (unclear what, but definitely something). We read books that tell us how to read books better. We optimize our sleep so we can be more productive during the time we are not sleeping. We take breaks strategically.
We cannot remember the last time we did something for absolutely no reason.
And we are, most of us, quietly, persistently, undramatically unhappy in a way we cannot fully explain because our lives look fine from the outside and we have too many things to be grateful for to justify the feeling.
But the feeling is there.
~ the thing nobody wants to admit ~
Wasting time feels good because it IS good.
Not in a guilty pleasure way. Not in a you deserve a treat way. In a this is actually what your brain needs and the productivity industrial complex has been lying to you way.
Your brain is not a machine. (I know. Shocking.) It does not perform better with more input and less rest. It performs better when it is allowed to wander. To be bored. To sit with a cup of tea and not extract value from the experience.
The people who waste time well are not behind. They are not losing. They have just opted out of a competition that was never going to make them happy anyway.
And we are all standing here with our habit trackers watching them and wondering why they look so much more at ease than we do.
~ what I am trying to do about it ~
Honestly? Not much yet.
I still feel guilty when I am not doing something. I still catch myself turning rest into content (hello, you are reading that content right now). I still have approximately four ongoing projects and a running list of things I should be doing instead of napping.
But I am trying to notice the people who waste time well. To study them a little. To ask myself what they know that I have been too busy to figure out.
And sometimes not always, but sometimes I make tea and I drink it slowly and I do not check my phone and I do not call it self care and I do not post about it.
I just. drink the tea.
It is a start.
The happiest people I know are not doing more. they are doing less, slower, with less guilt about it. I am taking notes.
