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How much free time do you have?

erikrood.com

141–150 of 226 posts

Re: How much free time do you have?

#141
post #128

I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person. I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else. In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.

The trick seems to be to identify your various different out-of-energy states and what activity is consistently restorative for each. Then, get experience with those activities when you’re fresh so that you have less of a hurdle to jump over when you really need them. The biggest issue, of course, is that it requires you to experiment with new things when you’re dead tired in order to figure out what helps in the fir…

I think the benefits of active versus passive leisure time is an interesting area to explore.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#143

I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person. I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else. In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.

"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part." -- Bertrand Russell, http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Damn, and it was written in 1932.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#144

In my probably unpopular opinion, parenting shouln'd be on the list. It's not a forced activity like sleeping or eating or commuting. It's a conscious choice people make between it and other hobbies.

That sounds very naive. Yes people have chosen to have kids (and some haven’t) but you also chose where and how you work so by similar logic we should discount those choices. Once you have kids there are a lot of things that aren’t optional, and unlike a long commute aren’t easy to change.

You choose how and where to work, yes, and this is already factored in the form by the duration of the commute. Unlike having kids, you can't elect to not work though, because you need money to pay for buying food and shelter. (Unless you are in survival mode, in which case the concept of free time is probably foreign anyway).

Re: How much free time do you have?

#145
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alabama forbids abortion even in cases of rape. Some other states have very short time limits for legal abortion.

You can still give it up for adoption right after birth,no?

Has anyone in this conversation considered that maybe the devil has plenty of advocates on this topic and doesn’t need anymore?

Re: How much free time do you have?

#146
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ll probably get absolutely nothing extraordinary done in it. Despite there being plenty of things I could be doing. The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.

> The 40 hour work week is tyrannical. If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace. It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.

It is solved. Everybody can choose a job where they works less hours or become a freelancer and work as many hours as they want. This doesn't work on a global scale, but as an individual, that choice is possible.

The problem is that people want to buy more than they can afford from doing less work.

There is no way to resolve this. As long as there are status goods like sneakers for $1000, people will have to work the hours needed to afford them. You can only have fewer hours if everything is standardized to the point that machines do all the work. But who wants to live in such a world of uniformity?

Re: How much free time do you have?

#147
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you forced to have children?

Are you forced to have a job, groom, eat or sleep?

Yes. If don't eat or sleep you die. These are required activities, not things you can decide to do or not do, so they are not competing for free time.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#148
post #123

I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person. I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else. In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.

This is largely effected by the nutrition / mental / health state of the individual. I personally spend a lot of time (cooking, sports, spend time researching mineral/vitamin/other supplements), and it took me around 4 years to find the things my body needs. I am now very rarely "energy exhausted" and mentally clear the whole day, having more energy than 10 years ago. The message here is that one can spend time and p…

Do you have any reading materials that you can recommend that helped you to figure this out?

Re: How much free time do you have?

#149

I spent several years working toward the goal of maximizing my Free Time, and hit a point a couple years ago where I'm effectively as Retired as I want to be, at any given moment. The SaaS businesses tick away in the background and seldom require my intervention apart from a quick customer service email sweep every couple days. I'd recommend this path over the VC + Co-Founders "Startup" life that gets promoted here s…

I'm currently learning Django to do exactly this. How did you handle monetization and marketing, if you don't mind me asking?
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