Time to kill

Of all the epiphanies that can strike a person at utmost inopportune moments, the ones about ones own character and passions is the most monumental. There I was, reading through some of my daily customary internet garbage, that this one shook my world. Well, not something so intense, but exaggeration goes a long way in trying to make a story more digestible. Ironic, in a way. So the digressions aside, today while reading an article on the quality and experience of leisure, I realized what truly drives me.

I've always been very vocal about the fact that hard work is my drug, that I can sit for hours on end at some challenging enough task, one that tickles my grey cells and puts me in a stupor-like zone where the world seems to recede into the background. Today, it struck me that I can only be comfortable in my leisure time, a time of doing absolutely nothing "productive" in the conventional sense, when I have filled up my quota of "work" for the day/week/month.

When I'm deep in a project, working and clicking away on the mouse to make things happen on that rectangular screen, somewhere deep in the dark recesses of my being I am creating a time for leisure which is guilt free. So the question is that, do I really love working, or do I love the feeling of having "earned' the guilt free leisure time when it does actually come my way?

Has the conditioning of this capitalist world been so thorough, that I cannot allow myself a period of nothing-ness, without having deposited in the bank of workaholism? Even more worrisome is the fact that most of my free "me-time" is peppered with myriad versions of distractions and activities, which are universally considered to be fun. And today I realized a deeply latent fear of not doing anything with my leisure, as if leisure also has to be filled in and scheduled out in a likeness of the calendar at work.

Is this what I do to myself or is there a larger force at play,one that afflicts so many more in varying degrees, across all walks of life. Maybe I'll schedule an evening of not doing anything, so that can also be cancelled out of my to-do checklist.

Digital Hoarders

Clutter. There’s a lot that has been said and discussed about how having too many things and  too much stuff can negatively affect your life. It crams up your abode, leaving no scope for ‘white space’. It also gives valuable insights about the person and their way of life. Why do we like collecting stuff,  sometimes even the things that we don’t need or want? Maybe it is that our possessions give us a chance to exist outside of ourselves, or maybe a chance to attach myriad meanings to things that make sense only to us.

Considering that our identities are constantly being shifted from the ‘real’ to the digital realm; observing  a person’s computer, their various external HD’s and other storage devices can give us an idea of their hoarding habits. If I take my own example, I realise that I have tons of movies on my computer that I haven’t seen, books that aren’t read and music that hasn’t been on my player even once. Still, this doesn’t stop me from downloading even more of these digital artefacts, to lovingly store till the day comes when I would be motivated enough to go through them.

Somehow, having them seems more important than experiencing them. I do watch a movie once in a while or click through an e-book at express speed on a few occasions , but the ratio of the time spent in doing that is much less in comparison to the time I spend in looking for even more stuff to download and keep.

What does this say about me and countless others? Has our practice of acquiring things seeped into our digital habits too?

Just a few thoughts that mulled around in my head when I heard a few friends talking about 1 TB hard disks running out of space and my own laptop HD graph lurking in the overfull red region.