Wasting Time...

It kind of panics me.  How much time I waste at home scrolling social media.  When I travel, I am barely on it.  But I come home and it is like some sort of drug I take to ease my life.  It isn’t really even enjoyable.  I just do it because, well, I guess that is why I am writing about it, trying to figure that out.

The older I get, the more precious time becomes.  However, here I am wasting countless minutes, then hours which add up to days that I am mindlessly scrolling the internet.  I avoid news.  I can’t handle what is happening in our world today.  I just can’t.  And if I allow myself to be exposed to the news, then I will not be able to even get out of bed.  

I have trouble understanding why I am so good at gate keeping the news out of my life, but allow myself to be barraged with social (if we can even call it that anymore) bullshit that passes for entertainment.

I would go on a social media diet but I have to post shit for work so I can’t get off of it completely and I feel shitty if I am posting shit and not looking at other people’s stuff.  Feels wrong to post but not view.  So I do.

I feel like I fill my life with so many things that I do not care about.  And I can’t even tell you why...boredom?  Malaise?  Laziness?  Convenience?  Conformity?

Why at a time in my life where I feel how very quickly the time is passing, am I choosing to waste it?

I do not have good answers today, but at least I am asking myself the question...which is a start I guess.

Perhaps I am unhappy and this is something I do to distract myself from how I really feel?  So easy to disappear into the social media maelstrom and just lose yourself to hours of endless scrolling at what we now rely upon for gap fillers.

I know I have the power to change it.  I know that I am the master of my own destiny in this realm and many others.  And in this situation, I choose to just be passive in my endless scrolling.

I feel the need right here to justify myself.  To tell you that I only really do it about an hour a day.  But that would be a lie.  If I am idle and not engaged in other things, I am fucking on my device, scrolling or checking messages.  It is like some sort of external control that I report into all day, every day. A seemingly benevolent dictator which is actually more like acid rain for my brain.

I mean I know I could be worse, but I also know I could be better and that has me perplexed...if I know I can do better, why am I not doing it?

I am tired.  That is an excuse, but also truth.  I feel tired a lot of the time these days and my days are long and busy and filled with endless tasks and asks.  So when I sit down, and my phone is always near, it is just easy to disappear for a little while into cat videos and funny posts about dating and how much it sucks.  I mean the cat videos make me smile and laugh so there is a positive angle to my rotting.  But I really feel like I do not need any more confirmation that dating in 2025 is total shit.  Thanks Universe, but I have a great deal of first hand experience in this already...

I guess if I am being honest, I can say that I feel stuck in my life.  On the verge of transition from daily parent to empty nester.  Not sure how long the now adult child will reside at home but I will own that I feel somewhat trapped by my job, my financial commitments and the ever ticking clock that doesn’t seem to ever let up on its constant tic tocking.

I do not have time to waste...and, yet, here I am wasting my life every single day mindlessly scrolling myself into oblivion.  I am tired, mostly of myself, I guess which is why the scrolling is such an apt gap filler.  It fills all the me I am not sure what to do with and supplants it with whatever crosses my stupid phone screen.

Time moves on and leaves us all wanting more.  A nostalgia for the past and a hope for the future.  Meanwhile most of us remain completely unsure what to do in the present. So we waste it.  Myself very much included.

I feel like I need a life overhaul...something big to mix it up.  And as I type that I feel a certain level of fear creeping in because I can feel the change coming...and I am not sure I am going to like it.  We always tend to feel that the change coming is going to be good...but sometimes it isn’t.  Sometimes hard things are on the horizon.  And I think I can feel that now.  I do not want to call it forward, beckon it from the beyond.  But I feel like some major life shifts are coming and I am not really sure which way those are going to cut.

So I scroll to keep myself mildly entertained and engaged.

Again...still.

An endless loop that we are all trapped in because the payoff costs us nothing and seems to give us something to be hopeful for in a world where it feels like hopeful things are vanishing faster than we can conjure new ones...

Again...still.

I will not make wide sweeping proclamations of change right here.  I just don’t have the energy today.  I will, instead, just own, I see it and I am willing to change.  And that has proven to be enough of a catalyst for change in the past, so I claim a tiny bit of hope for today that this intimate knowledge I possess can grow into a modification of my own behavior...

Again...still.