Playing first person shooters in your twenty’s/thirties should be up there somewhere...
Context is everything.
Between paid work, house/family work, exercise, etc. I work as hard as anybody else I know, and I still enjoy a good video game session. I'll be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn in a few minutes. It's a better hobby than sneering at others.
It's a shame that leisure time itself has to be framed around work.
As we move forward we need to move past this concept of "work" and "productivity" as the main drivers of what it means to be human.
Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.
This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.
GP wasn’t sneering. GP was communicating something they experienced.
This is not a substitute for experiencing things firsthand, but I can certainly point to many novels that shocked me into thinking about stuff differently.
Good fiction reaches you in a strongly empathic way, in a place where you're uniquely receptive to it. This is valuable for teaching things about your own life and the lives of others, which seems valuable.
This one is tough for me.
Must all of life come down to having something to show for it?
What about those pockets of our existence where we can just _be_ and enjoy something for the sake of that enjoyment?
And if people stopped enjoying fiction, what motivation would there be for others to write if they had no readership to show for their work?
Productivity is a good goal but we're slightly more complicated as people than simple, single-purpose machines