Spare Time and Hard Work
17 Sep 2018Half rant, half motivational speech. Mostly rant. Twice this week I was accused of having "a lot of spare time". I find this rather offensive.
Spare time is, presumably, time spent not working. It might also mean time spent not doing anything. Or maybe it means time having fun. By any definition, I don't have much of it!
We all, obviously, have the same amount of time. We sell some of it to our jobs, and we waste some of it sleeping and eating. Some of us sell more, some of us waste more. What's left after that? Enjoyment time? The micro-moments that exist between the things we have to do? We stick to schedules, perhaps, and try to make our lives more efficient. I think that everyone is inefficient. I think it's impossible to make good use of time. The only thing you can hope for is to do slightly better, and be slightly less inefficient, than other people.
Let me talk about a couple of years ago. I was working for a startup company and because I didn't know any better, I was working 60 to 70 hours a week for almost nothing. It was a nightmare. I had no social life, no enjoyment, no relaxation. There was conflict, and there were tears. In the precious moments when I wasn't working, all I wanted to do was to curl up in bed and watch a shitty anime.
But it was during this time, this horribly busy and miserable time, that I produced the LED Earrings. It took about three months, squeezing in maybe one or two hours per week. I am not fooling around when I say that the hardest part of that and many other projects is the commitment, the mental effort of finding the time to work on it, forcing oneself to working on it, instead of running back to the comforts of anime and chocolate and vodka and cigarettes.
I don't understand the reasoning when someone looks at those earrings and says "That guy had a lot of spare time on his hands". That guy succeeded because he put in a huge amount of hard work – hard work to find the time to dedicate to the project, hard work to overcome the emotional burdens, hard work to suppress the symptoms of his misery. You think this site exists as some temple to the author's satisfaction and contentedness in the universe? Jesus, the whole point of a creative outlet is so that you can get away, get from one day to the next, to spend an hour or even a few minutes without worrying about the realities of life. If I have made good use of the micro-moments, it is simply because I am terrified of idleness.
Whatever you think, and despite what I may have said in the past, projects like those earrings did not materialize because I was twiddling my thumbs with nothing better to do.
You're lying to yourself if you think that you haven't got enough "spare time" to do projects or learn new skills. You may not have the willpower, or the ability, but few people do when they start out. The point is that spare time is rarely the problem. Willpower and ability are things anyone can work on, can practice and improve upon. If it was easy we wouldn't be ranting about it.
For every project I've put here, there are probably an equal number of failures I haven't mentioned. And I don't mean a failed project where we learn from where we went wrong and try harder next time, I mean a failure of willpower. Failures where I give up because it's too hard, failures where I just don't have the dedication to see it through and the entire time I've invested into it has gone down the drain. I don't talk about these ones because it's depressing, and depression is contagious, and if we didn't put on a brave face then we might as well all just kill ourselves.
"Spare time" is a mindset, a broken mindset that puts every last problem away in a neat little box. But life is chaos. We make things so that we can pass time with the minimum amount of regret. I'm still just the miserable, disenfranchised misanthrope that I always was, but at least now I have something to add weight to my rebuttal. mitxela.com/rants is the one forum I have where I can tell the "spare time" accusers to fuck off.