I Cut My Hours and Kept the Operating System

Today I caught myself thinking about how to be more aware of the moment. Actually aware of it.

Here I am. This is a moment. I could write something. Make something. Play some music. Do something useful with this small piece of life currently passing through my hands.

Then another thought arrived. Why am I even thinking like this? Why does a perfectly ordinary piece of time have to be used properly?

A free hour turns up and immediately I start working out what to do with it.

Maybe there is another state of mind worth entering. One where I am not planning, budgeting, thinking about work, analysing relationships, wondering how long I am going to live or preparing contingency plans for things that may never happen.

Just switching off.

I am not very good at that.

I have been future-orientated for most of my life. Some of that probably started young. When you learn there is not necessarily someone standing behind you to catch you, you learn to look ahead. You prepare. You work. You anticipate trouble. You try not to leave too much to chance.

Then working life reinforces it. Protect the career. Pay the bills. Meet the deadline. Do the budget. Follow the process. Keep people happy. Comply with ways of working you are not always comfortable with, because surviving in the jungle sometimes means bloody well camouflaging yourself.

Do that for forty years and you cannot expect your brain to clock off because it is Saturday.

The body might be sitting on the couch. The employee is still at work.

Which brings me, strangely enough, to doom scrolling.

We are constantly told that scrolling through YouTube shorts or Instagram is a terrible waste of our lives. And maybe it is. I have certainly lost hours looking at complete shit on a screen. Hours I am not getting back.

But I have started wondering whether something else is going on.

What if sometimes I am not scrolling because I particularly want to watch anything? What if I am scrolling because I want to stop thinking?

Maybe the mind just wants somewhere else to go for a while.

Something pointless appears on the screen. Then something else. Then something else. None of it matters very much, and perhaps that is precisely the attraction.

For a little while I am not thinking about work. I am not planning. I am not fixing anything. There is just noise where the future normally sits.

That does not make doom scrolling healthy. It might just explain why it can feel strangely attractive when your mind has spent the day chewing on things.

The problem is that this is not really rest. It is more like anaesthesia.

And making anything seems to require something different.

If I want to write something worthwhile, play music, or have a thought that feels like it actually belongs to me, I need some distance from working life. I cannot create while half my brain is reminding me that a spreadsheet needs finishing.

Creative thought needs some empty space. Not meditation. Not a retreat in the mountains. Just enough room for an unexpected thought to turn up.

And that is exactly the space the phone fills if I let it.

Which is where I have started questioning my own so-called transition to retirement.

I still work part-time. For about one hundred days of the year I am completely immersed in it. Fair enough. That is the deal.

What interests me more is the rest of the year.

Because even when I am home, not meant to be working, some part of my mind stays at work. Thinking about it. Preparing for it. Solving it. Anticipating the next problem.

So is that really a transition to retirement? Or have I just reduced my hours while keeping the old operating system?

Being useful worked for me. Being prepared worked for me. Fixing things worked for me. Compliance sometimes worked for me too. They got me through the jungle.

But you can stay attached to survival strategies long after you need them.

We do the same thing in relationships. Some people stay in ones that are broken to the shithouse because they still believe there is something left to fix.

I understand that. I am a fixer.

Not mechanical things. I am fairly useless there. People. Relationships. Situations.

Give me something emotionally complicated and apparently beyond repair and some idiotic part of me will still think, right, let's see what we can do here.

Perhaps work becomes another relationship we do not know how to leave. Not because we love it. Because we know who we are inside it.

There are rules. There are expectations. Problems to solve. People who need something from us.

Then one day you get the thing you supposedly spent decades working towards.

Time.

And time is surprisingly confronting when nobody has told you what to do with it.

So we start using it properly. Exercise. Travel. Learn something. Write the book. Fix the house. Improve your sleep. Get your steps up. Make the most of retirement.

Even freedom gets a performance review.

I am not arguing for spending the remaining years on the couch watching shit on YouTube. But I no longer think every unproductive hour needs rescuing.

There are moments when I notice I am not thinking about the future at all. Swimming in the sea. Playing music with friends. Listening to music. Talking with people I care about. Walking somewhere without needing the walk to count towards anything.

In those moments I am not managing my life. I am in it.

Maybe that is the thing. Not how to use every moment better. How to stop demanding that every moment justify itself.

Most of what I worry about will probably never happen anyway. And some of what does happen will be completely outside my control.

Eventually life makes a mockery of the spreadsheet.

So maybe the job is smaller than I keep making it. Look after the people who matter. Look after yourself. Make things when you feel like making them. And every now and then let an afternoon disappear without turning it into evidence that you have wasted your life.

Which I have just failed to do, obviously.

I took an afternoon spent thinking about doing nothing and turned it into a piece of work.