When you are a kid and have a holiday, your main activity is doing nothing. As an adult, that nothing turns into catching up with everything you could not for the life of you find time doing. Of course you can do those things on the weekend, but it is the weekend — a time where you want to relax because you are sick to your stomach scheduling chores.
When going to bed last night I realised I had not finished writing the Dokter’s Weekly Report. Which in turn means I also forgot to publish it.
A while back I did mention I was toying with the idea of putting the Dokter’s Weekly Report on the back-burner for a bit — now that I am back battling with academia again. By neglecting the report completely last night, I will take that as a sign to do so — ignore it for a bit until I have more time on my hands.
What I might do instead is to write a shorter version of the Dokter’s Weekly Report with no specific date, where I pick a certain article I write a longer comment to. Instead of picking several articles, and tweets, each week and adding short comments to them.
This is the beauty— not really —of being an adult. You suddenly have to— presumably —do a lot of things, based on the— faulty —logic that they have to be done. Or else something really bad will happen to you. Even of you do not know what that is or why.
Which is why I often find myself, even when trying to relax, that I am not really doing exactly that. The time where I would exclusively sit still, only listening to music, is extremely rare nowadays. Because if I am not working on a 2000-word academic essay, I am scrambling to finish a column — and if I am not doing either of those things, I am busy with tedious chores.
It does not surprise me that there is so much focus on how to be most effective with your tasks and so many articles talking about procrastination. What all these helpful guides and informative articles seem to ignore very graciously is the fact we as a society have created this delusion that doing nothing— taking a break longer than five minutes —is not an option anymore.
Got five minutes to spare? Then you must be procrastinating or not prioritising your schedule correctly. Because what you should do is to wake up in the morning, start working, have dinner, work a bit more if you can and then sleep — lather, rinse, repeat.
As if we are living in some kind of feudal system again, where you only exist for the purpose of working.
Kind of ironic, how most of us as teens longed for the day we become adults and could free ourselves from our parents — moving out to enjoy the freedoms we thought they had. Only to find out that you really are not that freer. Which might explain why some people become more cynical and disgruntled in their older days — as I have become.
Holidays should be by default double-length as an adult. If you have a week off, the first week is expected to be used to catch up on various adult crap, the second week is meant to be used to do absolutely nothing.
