The psychological importance of wasting time
It&#x27;s harder to follow this advice when you&#x27;re self-employed—in the bootstrapped, struggle-with-bills, glorified one-man-show sense, not the funded-with-plenty-of-runway sense. In addition to the guilt and social pressure to &quot;look busy&quot;, there&#x27;s the knowledge that making rent really is tied to how much you work. That leaves one feeling not only guilty for doing not-work in the abstract, diffuse sense related to societal messaging, but indeed, it feels <i>financially irresponsible</i> and often <i>financially deleterious</i>.<p>It&#x27;s not that grinding away at the PC makes one any more productive than folk who follow the article&#x27;s advice. It&#x27;s just an even bigger weight on one&#x27;s shoulders. Instead of feeling like you owe society, your coworkers or your employer something, you think about owing people paychecks that don&#x27;t bounce and owing the bank account balances that aren&#x27;t negative.<p>Seeing past that and becoming aware that taking a walk now and again won&#x27;t change any of that in the big picture, because the big picture depends on the more cosmological success or failure of your business model to grow&#x2F;scale, is hard when life is that kind of constant struggle. And then you constantly feel like a moral failure—I mean a real piece of shit, not just a slacker getting away with slacking—when you binge-watch something on Netflix or cruise HN or YouTube because you&#x27;re constantly burned out.