The abundance of choice

As a preamble to this post, let me start off by saying, I agree. Yes, this is first-world problem. I realize how lucky I am, for this to even be a thing in my life.

So generally there are two things that motivate my choices in life. Time and interest.

The former is the finite resource of our existence. I’m 37, and for some years now I have come to value time a lot more than I used to. A typical workday looks something like this for me:

• 15 minutes getting up
• 45 minutes walking the dogs
• 15 minutes breakfast
• 10-15 minutes commute
• 4 hours work
• 1.5-2 hours working out (commute and shower included)
• 4 hours work
• 10-15 minutes commute
• 30-45 minutes making dinner
• 10-15 minutes doing the dishes

By the end of this routine, it’s usually somewhere between 19h30 and 20h30, depending on various circumstances. Which leaves me between 1.5-2.5 hours of free time. What I do in those hours is very important to me. But choosing what to do in those hours is tremendously hard.

On one hand, I want to develop more skills. Either drawing, playing music, coding, writing, … On the other hand I want to relax, like reading a book, playing video games, writing this blog, solving puzzles, … To top it all off, I want to spend time with the people I love.

I can’t fit all of these things in the time window I have. Ideally I would be doing everything that piqued my interest if time weren’t an issue. Since this isn’t an option, and I have too many interests, all I’m left with is a choice. Would I be rather doing one thing or another? And how can I possibly rank one activity above another?

How do you rank meeting up with a friend over playing a videogame? Both give me joy in very different ways. Both fulfill different needs. There’s no possible quantification for these activities.

Last September I went to Canada on 4-week trip. During that time, I’ve read about half a dozen books. Since then, I’ve read two… I love reading for the exact same reason I love video games, I enjoy good narratives and like being swept away in another world. Feel what they feel, live amongst the characters, experience the highs and lows of their journey. Yet for some reason reading had taken a back seat to all other activities, for reasons that are not clear to me.

It’s not that I haven’t done anything productive with the time I had, far from it. I can convincingly say that I don’t feel like I have wasted time. Yet I still have more interests than time. I have this feeling in the back of my head that there are só many things to enjoy, to learn, to discover, to experience and so little time to do them in.

However, there are some criteria for stuff to be allowed in my free time bubble.

If I don’t enjoy it, I won’t power through and keep pushing to see if I might enjoy it at the end. I’ll drop that experience and replace it for something I know I will enjoy. Prime example is a book, if I’m not engrossed after 30-50 pages (and I don’t have evidence that it will get better), then I’ll drop it in favor of another book.

If my time isn’t respected, I’ll drop it. Like in a video game, if I have to grind for hours on end to achieve something you actually can’t do without, that is something I’m not open to anymore.

If I get frustrated, I’ll drop it. This is mostly when developing new skills, if I’m hitting a wall and making the same mistakes again and again. Then it’s time to take a break and revisit the issue another day. No point in banging my head against the wall over and over.

These seem obvious. And I’m sure they probably are to many, but it took me longer than I’d care to admit that dropping an activity is just as important as picking one up.