Where does the time go, when you’re an adult? Take tonight, for instance. It’s about 7h30 as I write this. All I’ve accomplished so far after work tonight is to do my grocery shopping, heat up some leftovers for dinner, and finalize my hotel plans for the coming weekend. I still have to write, and I’d also like to get a shower in. What I had hoped to do was to have a nice quiet evening, one where I could kick back with a video game. That is, if I could decide what I wanted to play. By the time I finally get around to what I “set out to do,” it’s likely to be three hours after I got off work, and I’ll have a good hour or two (if I’m lucky) to relax before I have to go to sleep if I want to be any sorts of functional for the work day tomorrow.
Intellectually, I know this feeling of not accomplishing anything is irrational. Like this weekend, for instance. I recently picked up a new pair of gauntlets for SCA heavy combat, and I got them padded up and re-gloved for use at practice this week. In the grand scheme of things, the turnaround on this project was lightning fast; I still have components for a new breastplate I’ve been meaning to assemble for the past six years. But I still feel like I’m wasting time, like I can’t accomplish all the things I want to, no matter how hard I try.
How can I fix this? Do I need to carefully audit what I’m doing every minute of the day? That seems like it would take a lot of mental effort, not to mention more time. Do I just need to adjust my expectations? Probably; if you figure out how, please let me know. I guess one of the costs of being a responsible adult is all the time you spend on things you need to do, at the costs of things you want to do.
If so, that’s really a downer, and I wish there was a way around it. Maybe with enough money one can buy time, but I’m nowhere near that threshold. For now, I guess all I can do is just soldier on, letting the slight resentment towards my obligations build up over time, until it overflows into a weekend where even less gets accomplished than usual as I binge on some book or video game.
brace yourself. According to Einstein’s theory of the relativity of age/time, time accelerates with age requiring that we need to do things faster than we ever had before or just give up, which was my choice.