Does your loneliness increase when you don’t have plans? Do you feel worse if you’ve been swiping on any of the dating apps? How do you feel after you realize you’ve lost a couple of hours watching aimlessly YouTube videos or scrolling through Facebook? Do you often feel bad for you have spent your free time?
I have a subscription to MasterClass, the online portal for classes. (check it out, it’s cool). I was watching Billy Collins, a poet, discuss the romance of time. Mr. Collins explained that the romance of time is the fact that we are losing it every minute of every day. Time is scarce. He is talking about the existential issue of death and that we don’t live forever. Our time is an asset to us.
Many of my clients who are suffering with loneliness feel they do not have a meaningful purpose in their life. They do their job, but it isn’t something they love. They may feel they have a purpose to find a relationship, but never seem to get the right person. They are often spending many hours on their phone searching and scrolling at superficial levels, but never learning or accomplishing anything other than to kill time.
Does this seem familiar to you? Well I want to challenge you to start to pay attention to your purpose and how you spend your time. Today is Friday and why not start today.
Let’s start simple. Start to look at how you use your free time. If you have an iPhone, you can see how much time you spend on your phone and how you use it. My clients will share with me how they can have spent up to 8-12 hours on tinder or any other dating app in a week! Look at how you are using your free time. Does it enrich you? Are you putting it towards something of knowledge? Or are you just killing time, saying you are relaxing.
I want you to start to think about the purpose of your free time or how you want to de-stress. What is the meaning of it? I want to challenge you to see how valuable your time is. How we spend our time reflects how we feel about ourselves.
What meaning do you want to have for your free time? How do you want to feel during and after you have done something to de-stress? If you want to feel less lonely, you will need to have purpose and structure to your downtime. The time spent will have to be towards something, like knowledge. You may think, that sounds stressful, I want to relax. We’ll you can accomplish both.
Here are some ideas for you.
So many people spend hours scrolling Facebook and then clicking from link to link. I want to challenge you to become more aware of your world. Consider replacing reading Facebook with getting a subscription to a newspaper to learn what is going on in the world. In your downtime, read the news. So much is happening. Becoming are of your world helps to connect you to the larger world, may inspire you to become active or at least understand what is happening. Quality newspapers are The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera. These a few suggestions. Again, you want it to be high quality.
Another suggestion is the Master Class. In your down time, learn something even if you won’t use it immediately. You never know how it may inspire you. MasterClass has several very interesting courses that are in short segments and a great app making it easy to use and click on instead of going to Facebook.
Another option is get Kindle on your phone. Research poetry, these are short and allow you to experience a human emotion as expressed by the author. You can keep short stories. These are great ways to read and be transported and filled. You don’t need to finish.
Read a cookbook and think about planning a weekend meal for yourself. Think about trying a new recipe.
Set up a space in your house to do arts and crafts. Having a designated spot makes it easy to come and work for short periods of time. Often it doesn’t require much space.
These are just a few ideas to think about how you can better use your time and give it purpose. If you have purpose, you’ll feel less alone and have a higher quality of life. It also makes you feel more confident and give you new things to talk about and discuss when you do meet people. You never know where it can take you.
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