Recycling wasted time

I’m fairly good at wasting my time.

I spend precious minutes that could be used towards improving my resume, developing new professional skills, starting a creative project (and actually finishing it), on aimlessly scrolling. It’s important to note that the content I’m consuming might not be considered “aimless” to my 13-year-old self, whose top priorities included perfecting my liquid eyeliner technique, self-loathing by digitally comparing myself to peers, and painfully ruminating on why I was born with an angular roman nose instead of a petite ski slope schnozzle.

After consistently dipping my nose into my keyboard throughout the workday, I promised myself I’d take a deep and cozy nap as soon as I got home. However once I had arrived, I instantly found myself stepping out of a Linkedin rabbit hole trance where I’d washed up on a random profile belonging to someone from Beijing, China studying at Duke Law University then another individual working in finance at Paramount Studios. My instinctual thought — “wow, I suck.” But seconds later, the Gods of victimhood decided to disown me, and I was granted the notion that…I have a choice in this too. 

On a macro level, I really only had two options.

Option 1: Wallow in self-pity as I compare myself to others’ professional achievements.

Option 2: Feel inspired by others achieving their goals and apply that to my own individual journey. 

If you need help guessing which one I went with, the automatic version of myself would not have typed this out. She’d continue scrolling through the profiles, wondering if maybe these individuals were just lucky or happened to go to the right elementary school where their second grade teacher Mrs. Sweetheart molded them with adoration and candy bribes to become who they are today. “I didn’t have such luck,” she’d sigh, “I had mean teachers and my parents were critical. That’s why I’m not where I’d like to be in life.”

Now my current self isn’t perfect, she’s still bruised from blips of the past but she also acknowledges that staying entangled in the tormenting knots of these narratives isn’t doing the present and future dimensions any favors.