I feel like part of growing older is learning to be comfortable wasting time.
As a kid, I would be antsy about perceived wastes of time. But I wasn’t impatient, I just fundamentally morally objected to these things that I didn’t think were important.

And so I waited until I was an adult, with the goal that, when in charge of my own time, I would be able to spend it doing only meaningful things.

Nota bene: I’m referring here is “wasted time” from a kid’s perspective. Workouts and washing dishes and church services and the time spent sitting at the table staring around the room while you wait for others to finish eating. As a kid I would have fought to eradicate boredom, I suppose.

But I’ve kind of given up that fight; I’ve conceded that most of my time is unimportant, that most of my life is unimportant; that you can drive yourself crazy if you try to do only meaningful things. Like I don’t know if there are enough interesting or meaningful or motivated things in the world for me to enjoy them every second of the day. I wonder if the moments of boredom give significance to the moments of non-boredom. I wonder if you get desensitized to novelty so that you constantly need more of it.

And yet, I can’t shake the conviction that my life is meaningful, that to throw away even a small part of my time to the void would be a sin. That not caring is the only and most destructive vice. One of my core beliefs is that everything is infinitely interesting. Everything is infinitely interesting.

So I think there lies the secret. Time spent working out or doing dishes is time glorified, far more than time spent chugging entertainment-made-liquid from the spout of novelty. Even though the latter seems more interesting, more inspired, from the point of view of the child, it is really the real waste of time. The child is forced to look for the interesting things in the dining room, when they’ve finished before the adults. The adult has to chose to look for the interesting in the mundane, and very many adults don’t.