Why are Adults so busy?
I read this and I think that it mostly sounds like a list of self-created problems, largely arising from the author&#x27;s vanity and poor impulse control, that need to be solved.<p>The crucial #1 thing that&#x27;s <i>entirely missing from this list</i>, though, is cultivating personal connections with other people.  That&#x27;s the thing about your life that most strongly determines your happiness, as well as your professional success, your educational opportunities, and your love life (obviously).  And it&#x27;s not just a matter of taking care of dependents (#13), because it involves people who aren&#x27;t your dependents, too.  This list implicitly relegates that to last place, behind ironing your shirts, fixing dents in your car, and fucking off at the gym.  Don&#x27;t do that.  Spend time on connecting with other people <i>every day</i>.  Help them.  Listen to them.  Work with them.  Play with them.  If you don&#x27;t, your life is going to be terrible, no matter how much money you have, how clean your toilet is, or how up-to-date your sound system is.<p>I&#x27;m not speaking theoretically here, although there&#x27;s lots of psychological theory backing up what I&#x27;m saying.  I knew a number of people who killed themselves.  Don&#x27;t be the next one.  Connect.  On your deathbed you aren&#x27;t going to wish you&#x27;d owned a more complete set of cutlery.<p>And this is, in my experience, the biggest difference from childhood — you have to <i>deliberately</i> connect with people, because it doesn&#x27;t happen by default.  As a child, your parents will invite people to your birthday party.  As an adult, if you don&#x27;t invite people to your birthday party, you won&#x27;t have a birthday party.  This is more an opportunity than a burden, because it means <i>you choose who to create connections with</i>.<p>What about the rest of this stupid list?<p>I&#x27;m going to mention my life from time to time in what&#x27;s below, but I don&#x27;t want you to get the wrong idea.  I&#x27;m far from a paragon, of self-discipline or anything else.  I&#x27;m not holding my life up as a model to be emulated, although it does reflect my own values to some extent.  I&#x27;m saying, if even I can do this shit, any fucking idiot can do it.  Probably you can do better.<p>1. &quot;Have money&quot;.  Okay, I like to have money.  I like to work, too.  I&#x27;ve paid my own way (and sometimes some other people&#x27;s ways) since I was 18; I&#x27;ve been lucky in that this has been a lot easier for me than for most people.  But honestly, I haven&#x27;t been shallow enough to equate financial independence with adulthood since I was about 12.  Housewives aren&#x27;t adults?  But I was an adult when I was paying my rent by working at Taco Bell?  Please.<p>How much you have to work to make a living has a lot to do with how much you spend and how much you can bill.  Financially independent people&#x27;s spending, even in the US, varies from a few thousand dollars a year up to hundreds of thousands, without even getting into the super-wealthy.  Workers get paid anywhere from US$10 per hour (or even less for prisoners and illegal aliens) up to US$1000 per hour or more.  Outside the US, the variation is even greater.<p>Don&#x27;t tell me that across this entire range of expenses and earnings you have to work &quot;40–60 hours a week&quot; in order to have money.  You work that number of hours because it&#x27;s the norm, not because your living expenses magically adjust to match your earnings within 15%.  Then, you spend however much you make, instead of what you need, because you&#x27;re a fucking idiot.  I&#x27;ve been there too, man.  It sucks.  But you can stop doing that, unless you&#x27;re at the bottom of the income distribution or have extra expenses.<p>2. &quot;Cooking.&quot;  You can totally cook if you want to.  Cooking is an enjoyable activity, and feeding people even more so.  But you definitely don&#x27;t have to spend half an hour cooking breakfast every day if you&#x27;re short on time.  Boil half a dozen eggs on Sunday night, have an egg and a banana for breakfast each morning.  Make a casserole on Saturday, eat slices for dinner all week.  Have peanut-butter sandwiches and salad for lunch.  Cook dinner for yourself, a partner, and two friends; then you only cook dinner one out of every four times, unless you somehow get slotted into a housewife role.  Boil eggs, chopped onion, and cheese in a Ziploc bag to make a Ziploc omelet.  Chop vegetables on Tuesday night and use the vegetables in food for the rest of the week.  Use dried onion and garlic in bottles.  Make three liters of cooked rice and eat from it the rest of the week, or use a rice cooker.  Keep a seasoned salt mix in a shaker.  Keep oils for cooking in squirt bottles with conical nozzles next to the stove.  Make a big batch of curry, pack it into a dozen big Ziploc bags, and freeze them all with separators in between.<p>My breakfast this morning was canned mackerel, wheat crackers, and a peanut bar; lunch was instant noodles.  (I&#x27;m trying not eating after midday this week, although I&#x27;m buying the food rather than begging for it in the street in the traditional way.)<p>3. &quot;Laundry.&quot;  Don&#x27;t dry-clean your own clothes, as the article bizarrely suggests; that&#x27;s dangerous enough to outsource to a specialized company.  Don&#x27;t fold your clothes except on special occasions; wear knits instead.  Wear your clothes twice before washing.  Wear flip-flops instead of socks.  Synthetics dry faster, but I can&#x27;t wear them more than once; I can wear silk, wool, or cotton twice.  You can get laundry down to 20 minutes a week (per person) if you have a washing machine.<p>4. &quot;Cleaning.&quot;  This is largely a matter of how much living space you have, although yeah, I probably spend a few hours a week washing dishes.  When my then wife and I lived in a van, we sure as hell didn&#x27;t spend 5 hours a week each cleaning it.  We probably didn&#x27;t spend two hours a week between the two of us.  (We did have to spend a lot of hours fixing it, though...)<p>5. &quot;Buying stuff.&quot;  This is the only one on the list that actually saves you time — buying bookshelves is a hell of a lot faster than making them, not to mention toothpaste.  But I&#x27;ve still wasted a terrible fraction of my life on it.  You can reduce the time you waste on buying things by buying in bulk, often by buying online, by buying things that last, and by possessing less.  (If you are poor, you may find yourself obliged to possess a great many things, just in case; but if you are not poor, you can take advantage of the opportunity afforded by your money to only buy the things you do need.)<p>6. &quot;Bills.&quot;  My roommate and I have six bills: rent, internet+telephone, gas, electricity, water, and property tax.  Most of these come once every two months.  (The property tax we can pay yearly.)  It definitely doesn&#x27;t take us 16 hours every two months between the two of us to track and pay them.  Don&#x27;t live alone; that&#x27;s a stupid waste of time.  Of course, if you pick the wrong roommate, you could waste a lot more than 16 hours arguing... but that hasn&#x27;t been a problem.<p>7. &quot;Small errands.&quot;  Yes, these can take an unbounded amount of time.  Avoid them as much as possible.  A lot of these come from your possessions and bills.<p>8. &quot;Transport.&quot;  Yes, it&#x27;s easy to waste hours a day on transport (to say nothing of the time you work to pay off a car loan).  I live 20 minutes away from my office by public transit or bicycle.  Usually I read or write on the bus; sometimes it&#x27;s too crowded.  About once a month, I have to top up the transit pass.  This is a 45-second cash transaction at the ticket counter in the subway station.  I should probably spend a couple of hours getting my bicycle back in working order, because it&#x27;s often more convenient.<p>It&#x27;s easy to get into a position where you&#x27;re spending two or four or six hours a day on transport, and worse, transport that consumes your entire attention.  If you&#x27;re in that position, recognize that it&#x27;s an urgent problem and you need to get out of it.  Only isolation from other human beings is more psychologically damaging than long commutes, and only serious illness wastes more time.<p>9. Exercise.  (The article says &quot;staying healthy&quot;, but ⓐ that&#x27;s a lost cause, you&#x27;re going to fucking die just like everybody else, and ⓑ eating is already point #2.)  What the fuck is wrong with you that you drive a car to a job five days a week and then lack exercise?  How about walking a little bit?  I walk about a kilometer a day to get to the bus or subway, two or three kilometers most days.  If I bike to work and back that&#x27;s five kilometers.  Also you could work (in the traditional sense of the word).  I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s <i>something</i> in your house that could use some elbow grease.  A few weeks ago I was also taking the stairs the fifty meters up to the office — this takes four minutes.  I think I&#x27;ll start again tomorrow.