I woke up late today, about 11am, because I’m sleeping off a root canal treatment I had yesterday in Newcastle. Yes, my teeth are still fucking with me. Hopefully it’s all sorted now. So, I wake up and shuffle into the bathroom for a hot shower, climb into my clothes and then set the coffee filter machine brewing my morning cup. I can hear birds singing in the garden and I look out the conservatory windows to see the family cats chasing one up a tree.
My laptop boots up and I notice Steam is having a holiday sale. Chivalry is reduced from £18.99 to £4.99 so I snap it up and it downloads while I check my mails, books sales, and do my daily round-up of the few blogs I still regularly read (Steve Sailer, Heartiste, Vox Day, Roosh, D&P). Then I run around medieval Europe hacking limbs from rival knights for half an hour. Hmmmm, I’m hungry. I walk down the local pub for Cumberland sausages on mash inside a giant Yorkshire Pudding. I get a second coffee and read through my hardboiled detective paperback. It’s about 2pm now. I’m WhatsApping a few of the girls on my international rotation, hassling them for new naked photos. It’s Friday. Anyway…. I won’t bore you with my day. The point is this…… I begin to ruminate on the nature of free time.
There is only one truly precious resource in life – your time.
Time is the only thing you can’t get more of. It’s the resource you trade for everything else. When you go to work you trade it for money. With hobbies you trade it for fun. With girls you trade it for sex and affection. It’s your most precious resource and you’d better use it wisely. Don’t give it away cheaply. Don’t waste it. Don’t let people steal it. So my mind wanders further and I do a quick calculation of my free time now compared to when I worked “in the matrix” in my banking job. So, let’s compare:
Banking
- 07:45 – Wake up, shower, rush breakfast, get dressed, walk to work.
- 09:00 – Morning in the office, until the lunch break from 1pm till 2pm – half of that is walking to deli and waiting in queue.
- 14:00 – Afternoon in the office, usually getting out at about 6pm.
- 18:00 – Walk home, pick up dry cleaning, unburden myself of work clothes, put on normal clothes, start cooking.
- 20:00 – Finally I’m rested and well fed. My free time begins.
- 00:00 – Bedtime.
Now
- ??:?? – Wake up when I damn well feel like it.
- ??:?? – An hour or so on my business, blog, and related mails and admin
- ??:?? – If I feel like working I’ll do anywhere from one hour to ten hours work on a product or blogpost.
So I realised that while at work I only really had four hours of free time per weekday, or twenty hours a week. Now it’s more like fifteen hours per day is free. I’ve quadrupled my weekday free time. Now, that’s not to say I lie in a hammock and watch Family Guy all day but almost my entire waking life is a blank slate that I fill with the things I feel like doing and only those. Future project that over the rest of my life. Twenty hours a week vs fifteen hours a day. Let’s say weekends are the same in both lifestyles.
If you consider, like I do, that the real business of living is doing the things you like in your free time then I’ve “extended my life” by four times.
I’m not saying the maths is perfect, but it’s a thought isn’t it. Unplugging doesn’t just extend your life through better health and lower stress. You’re pretty much extending it just by the incredible multiplier applied to your free time.