People always tell me I’m lucky that I have so much free time.

Now I’m not contending this point, it’s certainly true that if one defines luck as “an unlikely circumstance occurring and bringing success” then I suppose I am a little lucky in that I work 5x less than an average employee who hits 40+ hour weeks 48 weeks a year.

So I’m occasionally lucky. Cool (I’m sure I’ll be labouring this point in the future). And free time? I have lots. But what I want to propose here is that the weight of time is equally drowning when you have too little or too much.

The time you have is positive only when it is not free. Free time, I reckon, is dead time. It is unscheduled and therefore empty and what is the point in creating more empty time, everyone has plenty (probably way too much) of this; the waiting for your trains, the waiting for something to download, the cancerous scrolling through some moderately attractive person’s social media feed. This idea of desiring “more free time” is a trap. You don’t want more free time, you want more time spent doing the things you like.

I really should take my own advice because I spent a lot of time this year. I spent it trying to free up more time – time in the future – by decreasing my workload to such a minimal amount that I am the envy of 9-5ers and the antithesis of workaholic hustling types that are adamant that “80 hour weeks are necessary to meet your #goals”. And shit. It worked. It was certainly a worthy investment.

Now this freeing up of time is the easy part (for me – lucky), the real issue comes when you try to figure out what to do with this time and another trap appears when it feels like work is the only thing to do. Kind of defeats the purpose of freeing up time though, doesn’t it?

So what do I do with this crushing weight that is attempting to squeeze me (the round peg) into more work (the square hole) or into idleness (the squarerer hole)? Well to that question I am unsure.