this may be me projecting my own sensibilities (and sorry if i am misinterpreting) but.... why cant people just hang out, take some time off and relax with friends?
why does everything have to be about "productivity" ?
My play time is 100% about maximizing my enjoyment and regeneration, to get me back to doing the things i really enjoy doing. Even my casual, lounge time is a calculated effort at that.
Now hopefully i have a healthy balance. I don't work myself too hard because i don't want to burn out. I'm also less productive if i'm burning out.
But yea. I just enjoy building things. It's who i am. If i had one wish it would be to not need sleep. With those extra hours i'd learn to woodwork or something physical, but still build - create.
My only regret is that my ability to build (software) is limited per day, and i give a significant portion of that to the necessities of life. Aka work. It's not making me rich, nor is it things i truly want to solve. But hey, i still enjoy it - and for that i am truly fortunate.
After seeing what my wife went through working retail; I can't imagine having to work retail. It was awful.
Wasted time is "I have a handful of really low priority things that I'm never going to do so I'll look at Netflix and see what I haven't watched yet". For me, though, it's a bit more than that. Our budget allows us to live just fine, but with what amounts to very little work, I can literally take my family on a vacation about every two months.
Before eye-rolls abound, we travel extremely cheap -- I'm talking week vacations, family of 6, under a grand. And I decided a long time ago that my priority with my children would be to put my money toward memories rather than "crap". We've had gift-less Christmas's in favor of a (way over-budget) vacation[0] more than once and we'll probably only do it that way from here on out.
Given a choice between channel-surfing-Netflix, which I get plenty of (and I think a lot of us find ourselves in that spot) and driving around to places in my local city that I haven't been before (and it's surprising how many there are), I'll take the extra paycheck. Honestly, I'm nearly out of things to repair/improve in my home with my spare time. There's still a whole lot closed down up here.
[0] Partly because of that, we have a hard time when we aren't planning a post-Christmas trip. Our kids don't want much. I mean, they have basically everything in the palm of their hands from Apple and Gooble, as it is. :)
> It shouldn't be about squeezing every last ounce out of an employee
At least as far as his business was concerned, if every one of those 9 employees weren't giving everything that was expected of them[2], they'd have failed. Really, they should have failed--my dad had underestimated how apprehensive the huge companies would be about working with a "brand new outfit" even though as far as the purchasing people were concerned, my dad was the last company they worked for. But after delivering early (and often himself[3]), he slowly proved that the last company really was all him).
> that's what the American dream has become.
[0] He received no compensation after the lawyers got their take.
[1] Several years later he purchased the old company back from the larger outfit that had originally purchased it. They remaining employees were let go -- the previous owner was planning on shutting down the operation as it was and there was enough bad blood built up over the years that the staff likely would have preferred to collect unemployment than just quit.
[2] My dad didn't handle operations/staff, he was sales/financials, they paid hourly and never played games with overtime (the majority owner of the last place tried that with a secretary ... who sued them with years of logged hours for documentation) and as far as I know, they laid all of one person off (and they agonized for weeks over it).
[3] He likes to tell a story about meeting with a plant manager at 3:00 AM. I'm going to butcher the story, but the manager, expecting that my dad was a lowly delivery guy for his company, started griping about how awful the boss must be for making him drive 150 miles in the middle of the night to deliver an order that was supposed to be there at 5:00 PM (he was rarely late, but it happens). I can't remember how it went down, but I'm sure the guy was shocked when he found out that my Dad was the son-of-a-bitch owner. :)
However, after spending almost a year hanging out at home and relaxing, it's actually kind of nice to get out and do something.
And of course, to each their own. Some people just enjoy accomplishing things and don't like sitting still. Others prefer to spend their idle time relaxing as much as possible. Neither is inherently wrong, and there's no reason to shame either group.
We could have stopped increasing our productivity in 1820, but I doubt most people today would like living at an 1820s standard, and in 200 years time, I think people will be glad they aren't living at a 2020's standard.
It doesn't matter how much you "side hustle." that isn't going to invent nuclear power or discover AC current.
There are plenty of kinds of wealth that don't involve money. Being wealthy in time is probably the most important one of all, given we can never get more time in this life, no matter how much money we acquire.