Don’t Suck Me In

Sometimes I make a conscious decision not to do something because I know I’ll just get sucked in and it’ll inevitably just suck my time away. For example, I avoid playing video games. I played them as a child (although not obsessively) and enjoyed them, but even then I think I realized that I didn’t really want to get too sucked into them. Video games take a lot of time and energy because you have to actively pay attention to them (you can’t half play them like you can half watch TV).

It’s not that many of the things I avoid wouldn’t be enjoyable, it’s just that it’s easy to become into something, and then you spend all of this time doing that something. Sewing is a good example of me suddenly getting into something, where I went from never sewing to buying a sewing machine, and then buying fabric (and more fabric and more fabric) and buying sewing patterns and notions. It was like a domino effect of getting more and more stuff, and then spending all this time sewing different garments. And while I like sewing, it certainly evaporates my time quickly [because it takes many hours just for me to sew a skirt. (Sigh.)]

Moderation is a good thing…if you can do it. But I think most people have at least something (if not a few things) that they do in excess because they love to do them. So I have to pick and choose which time consuming things I want to spend time on and which things aren’t worthwhile for me. Because there seems to be an infinite number of time suckage things you could do, but only a finite amount of time you have to do them in.