How to Really Enjoy Your Free Time
If you have some free time during the holidays, can you spend it on something fun? What about your free time tonight – what will make this time enjoyable and rejuvenating for you? Here’s an idea: you might want to make sure you have two different kinds of entertainment.
This is what I mean. Let’s say you grab a beer from the fridge tonight, sit on the couch with your partner and watch your favorite TV show. You get all the pleasure of this experience right in the middle of it: it is short-term entertainment. After the show is over and the beer bottle is empty, your fun is mostly over.
But there is another way to spend your free time – let’s call it long-term entertainment. Maybe you go to the gym and do some deadlift work. During each climb, you may not get much pleasure; these lifts are hard work and you may be tired and sore. Or, say you decide to bake cookies instead when your little one is “helping”. Cooking is work, and redirecting your toddler’s energy is more than twice as difficult. Both of these hypothetical evenings are not enjoyable in the same way as watching your favorite TV show.
But they are enjoyable in the longer term. You will look back lovingly as you and your child baked cookies, and you will also have a batch of great cookies to show. If you continue to work out in the gym, you will soon be lifting more and more, and you will be proud of how far you have come and how much you can lift. These activities are rewarding, if not entirely fun at the moment.
One theory calls these two activities casual leisure and serious leisure . I think I would rather call them short term entertainment and long term entertainment. If you ever use your free time only for things that are enjoyable in the moment, you may end up feeling like you’ve wasted your time. On the other hand, if you devote every free minute to a hobby that is just work in disguise, you will start to feel exhausted, even if all these projects are worth it.
So the next time you’re planning something to do in your spare time, make sure you consider both types of entertainment. Bake some cookies, then sit down and eat a few as a family snack . Go to the gym and then come home and have a great bath . Or perhaps you can combine the two types of fun with an activity that leaves you with enduring knowledge of how to learn a new skill .