I'm wasting my life and I love it
Comes included with a guide to life-wasting
The greatest art I have made, has always been from being in pain. I’m not in pain anymore, so I don’t dole out a lot of art.
Not that I’m some world famous artist, and my words will be remembered long after I’m gone. But that tiny sliver of a chance that I had to maybe making great art, the kind that makes people put up posters in bedrooms with words that I arranged next to each other, that chance has almost vanished.
Because I’m not really in pain anymore.
I worry a lot. I worry about sane things. Adult things like money and my dogs health and what people think about the quality of work I do (for the money).
And worry doesn’t make for great art. Neither do sane things. Because art, as you may have already known, is absolutely insane.
So, what do I do with my life instead? I’m wasting it.
Today, I thought I’d write a letter to tell you how I’m wasting it, and how you probably should, too.
I’m going to keep this short, because I want to prioritise other ways to waste my life rather than writing at the moment.
“You’ll waste your potential”. This was the line that rung the loudest in my childhood. Like I’m some nuclear weapon, that’ll always remain securely stored in an underground bunker.
“You see these other people, wasting their lives, do you want to be like them?”
I mean, if wasting their life looked like going fishing in the rain, or going to the movies, and NOT wasting it looked like trigonometry, then without hesitation, yes.
But then, I was not rebel writer, then. I was good student. So I was more potential, less waste.
Now, I’m wasting.
I’ve gone from young and ambitious, to “this boy will go on to do great things” to crashing and burning in my twenties, to finally getting to a place where someone can confidently look at my life and say “yeah, I don’t know where he’s going with this”.
A guide to life-wasting
#1
I’m wasting my mornings reading fiction these days. “My Friends” by Fredrik Backman is what I’ve been reading. As a result, I’m crying from my nose, empathising about the problems of made up people, and my wife isn’t very happy about that fact, because I don’t cry easy, and it is one of her bucket list items to make me cry.
She gives me looks, with subtitles that say “you didn’t cry at our wedding, but sure, cry reading your book”.
Side note: My nose never quite learned how to stop crying like my eyes did. When you’re told that you’re a boy and boys don’t cry, the first thing you learn is how to blink away your tears that form in your eyes every time you feel sad. But my nose never quite learned the art of blinking away. And nose tears, how ever much you push them up, keeps coming back down. Not aggressively. But calmly. Passive-aggressively-slowly. Like they’re not on your team. Like they want to embarrass you in front of others, by teaming up with lime green coloured snot and trickling down like an artwork of embarrassment.
So, yeah, thank god I didn’t cry at the wedding.
#2
I’m wasting my time walking my dog. I remember one of the “productivity gurus” (who I very much listen to and take a lot of advice from, just btw, let’s not pretend like I dont’t sin regularly) saying once about how dogs are just liabilities. They just drain you of money and time. They are a loss making hobby in his opinion.
What a proud, poor loser I am.
#3
I’m wasting time telling stories on the internet. I don’t like attention. When people look at me, my spidey senses tingle, and I sense danger. For me to remind myself, that not all strangers are danger, and most of the strangers just want to feel less like strangers and more like friends. To have a person. Even if that person is a stranger on the internet talking about trivial things like knee pain in your thirties.
To give into the urge to tell the stories I’ve always wanted to tell, is the bravest thing that I’ve done this year.
I am wasting time saying no to opportunities.
I am wasting time trying to perfect the best air frier potato pops for Arianna.
I am wasting time drinking too much coffee, doing too much work, making too much money, and then feeling like I don’t have enough coffee in me, or I’m doing enough work or making enough money.
You never have enough time or money. Or coffee.
I am wasting time writing this letter to you. And how I love wasting time.
Advice: Waste more time reading books than scrolling Instagram. Because books waste time vertically. Instagram does it horizontally.
Last night, I wasted time that I could have fallen asleep and gotten to that near perfect 8 hours sleep number, by instead listening to Ana read “The One and Only Ivan” to us.
It always starts with “you need to go to bed now” to “two minutes” to it becoming fifteen minutes and nine reminders on how TV time will be revoked. And then, after her “bedtime routine” which goes way past any sane adult’s bedtime, she’ll come to us, just when we’re almost asleep.
And then harnessing all her inner cuteness, she will say “can I sleep with you guys today, instead of my room?”
And my voice obviously emerges first in an “of course!”, and my wife’s right after like a supervillain’s, with just one word mumbled - “weak”.
So then we waste another ten minutes, adjusting limbs and pillows, to find our individual sleeping positions. Khushboo is always in the middle of this sandwich. The life of it all, that holds us both together. Our glue.
And then we waste time, listening to a dramatic reading of The One and Only Ivan, while smiling at each other with half open eyes, wondering how we got so lucky.
Waste your life away, my friend. Potential usually has a lot of trigonometry written in the terms and conditions.
Wouldn’t you rather read a nice book out in the sun about made up people, and cry through your nose?
Love,
H.