It is unimaginable, the amount of time that is squandered in a day doing useless things. Time is often spent watching TV, reading useless things on the internet and just bumming around doing nothing. Sometimes I wonder on the magnitude of time just spent, "killing time." I do believe that in a single day, that amount could easily be in the ball park of 3~4 hours, or perhaps at least 1/4 of your waking hours (if you spend 8 hours sleeping per day).
There ought to be better ways of spending time instead blowing it away like this. Sometimes I think of this of a terrible waste considering the number of things a person could be doing or learning using this time. I never did say that you had to spend this time for work or anything, but just for something productive and life would be much more enriching.
Over the course of the last 2 years, I have prided myself on my ability to work effectively, sometimes operating at double the efficiency of my peers, just because of good management or finding some new tricks to fit more work into the same amount of time. Sometimes I come up with a neat little computer program that get things done nice and faster and while I am writing these little programs or whatever, I end up learning a little more about programming at the same time!
I do believe that there are enriching ways of living instead of just finding ways of simply killing time. It would be a terrible waste to do so. There are so many people out there working boring jobs, like at a till, a code (programming) monkey, quality assurance testers and such. I am pretty sure that that there are many that work these jobs just do it to get by. To me, a monotonous existence like that is terribly boring and people should be striving to have a far more interesting existence instead.
In the case for me, I am quite confident that I will not be doing boring things for a job in the future. Sometimes, I have these ideas that take me from something boring to something more interesting. "How can I do this better?" is quite a common question that I ask myself (technically it's "Oh my god! This is so stupid!", but it's the equivalent) then I go on a tirade trying to find a better way of doing it (whatever that is) or start fishing for interesting problems to solve.
Now that is the interesting thing, however. I am quite happy that I can be innovative sometimes and my ideas take me to interesting places, making me want to extend my knowledge and skill as I face different challenges as I dream them up and it is often that success is a result of a person flowing from one problem to another, solving them each step along the way. Once you start of like this, finding success seems like a natural progression. But the real interesting problem is where does a person get started?
That is the interesting problem isn't it?
For most people that spend most of their time just killing time, I it would be hard for them to get started. What I have found out so far is that in order for people to be inspired to do something, they need to be introduced to an interesting problem and start from there. It is only then, when people start looking at all sorts of practical problems that they themselves face and realize that others might be facing them too, it is then that people start understanding the bigger picture of how things work and what are the interesting problems that people face.
In terms of children, which many people refer to as "our future," I believe that the most important resource is squandered because we don't introduce them to real life problems. The mathematics, language, history, science and art is all taught without context, because without context, either the idea becomes confused or we lose it's meaning.
It's a terrible shame to have children all the way to university students insulated from the real workings of the world. Mainly, the reason why it probably ends up this way is that we worry about them screwing things up if people gave them real responsibility, but still, it is a very important process of learning which most of our youths are robbed of during their years of education.
Perhaps now, I would much rather be playing with a computer program, an electronic circuit or something instead of a video game. Either one of which I would consider as entertainment, but only one is actually nurturing. Perhaps instead of finding ways of killing time, a more interesting problem is finding ways of "playing productively."
2 comments:
Videos games are nuturing... there is a NEJM article detailing its usefulness in laproscopic surgery for general surgeons. I expect the same skill for interventional radiology (zap! let's hit the lesion WITHOUT puncturing the bowel!)
Anyways, sometimes downtime like on the bus or doing nothing is the best way to come up with ideas...
(I moved to Richmond Hill this weekend... I'm so tired and here I am on call...)
When I was younger, I did find games to be quite entertaining and educational to me. Especially when it came to real time strategy games and turn based strategy games where I had to effectively manage an economy to make a powerful army in the most efficient manner. My interactions in these game gave me an interest in differential equations which I would not pick up on until mid-way through my university career.
The problem, however is that though some games can be nurturing to the player, I would argue that most games are not. I will agree that action games like street fighter, counter strike and halo might improve a person's hand eye coordination but you could argue for the same thing for doing martial arts or sports instead.
In terms of intellectual challenges, games could be played where real life situations could be modeled. Like an economy, business and/or design competitions to make something useful. I would say that the skills picked up by the participant would be far more useful.
I for one, used to play a large amount of poker but have since quit. I have done all the necessary probability calculations for all sorts of hands and he probability of them improving them or getting them in a game situation. I have since been able to show with data that I play better than the average player with a 99%+ confidence interval with consistent winnings.
I knew the game so well that I wasn't learning anything and so subsequently quit to pursue other things. The calculation skills in probability I learned from that game allows me to do pretty good profit to risk management.
What is most important, I believe, is that games are not necessarily a bad thing, so long as you are learning something from them. If you spent your time and got nothing valuable out of it then I think that would be a terrible waste of time.
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