doing things i actually like????
tick tock tick tock
How do you spend your days? Mine are, unfortunately, pretty predictable. I’ll sleep in longer than I’d planned, scroll on my phone in bed, scroll on my phone between sets at the gym, rush around getting ready, go to work, scroll on my phone while at work, come home and scroll on my phone while I’m on the toilet, and while I’m waiting for dinner to be ready I’ll scroll a bit more. Then I’ll go to bed later than I’d planned, read for half an hour, and then I’ll scroll a bit further before I eventually turn the light out, annoyed that I didn’t do it twenty minutes earlier when I’d finished my book chapter.
The point is that I run out of time to do the things I actually want to do. And it’s not that I don’t have the time, clearly. It’s that I don’t make the time.
There’s a famous quote from author Annie Dillard that goes like this: “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives,” and as saccharine or earnest or cringe or (insert your own critical adjective here) as that may be, I fear that it is very true.
I saw a tiktok recently about how modern ‘aspirational’ life content promotes having the perfect day, every day. How much stuff can I fit in? How productive can I be? Can I do housework, buy a coffee, go for a walk, go to work, get life admin done, get a facial, see friends, call my parents, meal prep, clean my bathroom and put my laundry away all in one day? According to the internet, yeah. We are. And we’re supposed to look pretty doing it.
As appealing as it seems when you’re watching someone with shiny lustrous hair live a ‘perfect day’, every idiot knows that the reality of sixty second ‘live my day with me’ vlogs are neither real, practical nor replicable.
Crazy Hot Take: I don’t think that scheduling the fuck out of our days is the answer. A day is not an orange to be squeezed until all that is left is warm skin and pith, and neither are you. There has to be some kind of in between, some middle ground.
It’s all well and good to say “I want to spend more time doing things I like”, but it’s also easy to fall into the trap of trying to ‘do better’ by someone else’s standards. For example, telling myself that I need to keep up with my Goodreads challenge doesn’t actually make me want to read. Why is it even a challenge? Who am I trying to impress? It just makes me stressed about reading, which makes me not want to read. I want to read for the joy of it, because I’m invested in a story and its characters, not because I want to check it off a list.
I don’t need a metric, I need the time. And again, it’s not that I don’t have the time, it’s that I have a bad habit of wasting time away.
So how can I find the time to do the things I like, while ensuring that I’m not stripping the joy from those things by being militant about scheduling them in? There’s no whimsy when there’s no spontaneity, and life without whimsy is just depressing.
Below is a list I’ve compiled of all the things I like doing, that bring me joy, that recently (and in adult life in general) I haven’t found the time to do:
reading fiction - I’m reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell at the moment. It’s SO GOOD.
reading nonfiction essays - I’m currently halfway through Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which I am very much enjoying. I find I don’t understand a lot of the 60s references and have to google a bit, but I don’t mind that. I take pencil notes in the margins and I feel like I’m learning.
actually read the substacks I subscribe to instead of looking at them in my inbox and thinking ‘yep i’m going to read those’ and then never reading them. I think I need to figure out a way of getting them on my kindle (question mark??), because I really don’t like reading on my laptop or phone, and it’s definitely a barrier for me. Any recommendations on how to do that PLS let me know.
playing games on my Nintendo Switch. I fucking love Animal Crossing and I haven’t played it in months (sidenote, Animal Crossing builds and island tours on YouTube are fucking fantastic. My fav girl is Liss the Lass). It’s relaxing, low stakes and honestly, an amazing creative outlet. I’ve also recently started playing The Witch’s House, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood (things are getting witchy in here) and I also bought Hogwarts Legacy (I know, I’m sorry I gave her my money, but it was on sale so sue me), which I’m excited to start playing. I often feel guilty for spending time playing games, and I think I need to reframe my thinking. They are fun, intellectually stimulating, and they’re also a form of storytelling, and I love stories.
watching video essays or just learning about things I’m interested in. For example, I’ve become very curious about witch mythology and the historical origins of witchcraft. I found a really great podcast called Witch from the BBC that I’ve listened to a couple of episodes of, and if you’ve got any recs on that front I’d love to hear them.
drawing. I’ve been drawing forever and I haven’t done it in so long. I really miss it. I filled a whole notebook in 2020 (because I had nothing else to do) and I love how it made me feel: like I had created a body of work.
collaging. I had a creative surge (swell? burst? idk it all sounds cringe) last night and made this^^ for my sister’s birthday. It was two months late because I just kept putting it off and putting it off, but the two hours I spent doing it were the most relaxing two hours of my week. There was also no plan, I just followed my creative nose, which was so freeing??? I also listened to Post Malone’s new album whilst I did it. Would recommend.
mending/alter my clothes. I’ve got a whole pile waiting for me. I find it so relaxing and satisfying, but I never seem to get around to it. The pile just sits there collecting dust.
writing this blog - there are SO many half baked ideas in my drafts.
diary writing/journal entries/creative prompt writing. I’m doing my final project for my uni masters at the moment, and it’s an 8000 word creative piece. We’re being encouraged to journal and creatively write outside the piece itself, so I’ve been trying, but it’s haaaard.
Anyway, that’s that. Wish me luck on my journey of finding joy I guess. Until next time, lovers xx
p.s. here are some piccies that are inspiring me at the moment:
