Midnight Musings

Like the average adult needs about 8 hours of sleep every night, so that cuts your 24 hours to 16 right off the bat.

You’re working for 8 hours, so 8 left.

But you actually work 8 to 5 at most offices, not 9 to 5, and that lunch is basically just long enough to retrieve food and eat. 7.

It took you 20 minutes to shower this morning, 10 to get dressed, and 45 to make a bowl of oatmeal and eat it. We’ll say 15 to get your stuff together and out to your car. 5 and a half.

You get home and have to cook dinner, 30 minutes min for that, probably more like an hour, so somewhere between 5 and 4.5 hrs left. And then you’ve got to eat it, 30 minutes if you’re being healthy about it.

So at best you’ve MAYBE got 4/4.5 hours left every week day and that’s assuming you ran exactly zero errands, didn’t stop by the gym after work, didn’t have to stay late, have a wicked fast transition time between tasks AND a commute of like 5 minutes by car. If you have to go to the store after a quick run at the gym, pick your kids up from soccer across town, and you factor in a 30 minute commute both ways, you’ve got enough free time for like one episode of show Monday through Friday. And weekends have got to be for cleaning the house and going to visit your mom for a few hours.

When do you write, or paint, or read or sew or go on hikes? When do you go on spur of the moment adventures with your wife and try to perfect your grandma’s soda bread? What happens when it rains on Saturday after being sunny all the rest of the week so you can’t go to the zoo that day and you don’t have enough money for the museum? Why are we all just content to postpone our whole lives, put off “happy” and “healthy” for a miniscule amount of extra value we’re producing for someone else?

And it’s also a thing that fascinates me about hustle culture like. When do y'all rest? When do sleep and food happen? How do you make 3 different jobs work without dying?

Of course you don’t need to take 45 minutes to cook a basic meal and eat it. You could hustle it. You could, say, “optimise” your lifestyle by taking time once a week to cook a batch of nutritious paste or whatever and just grab it out of the fridge each morning and stuff it into your mouth, chew while getting dressed, and be out the door in five minutes.

But is that any way to live? Did we, as a species, spend thousands of years developing the culinary arts and recipes so that most of the population could eat nutripaste each day?

Cooking is an art and a social activity, eating food is a social activity.