Of work...and not much else

Every weekend, an existential crisis takes over me. For someone who is so inherently lazy, a lack of work surprisingly unnerves me. I often do not do much about it, though. “Too much time” is never a problem when you can sleep at will. It has been over five months since I started working again. Not all weekends were as empty as this. Sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary - but there was often “just enough” work to do on the weekend. This was even more true especially in the beginning, when I was struggling to keep up with the demands of my job. For the last couple of months, I have begun to realize that I needed to work on the weekend. Because, simply put, there was nothing else to do. Not that I did not try. Since October, I have watched ~35 seasons of sitcoms on Netflix. And that is not counting all the MKBHD and Mr. Mobile videos I have watched on YouTube. I may or may not have spent my working days (and nights) watching an entire season of King Julien. Lunch times, half hour breaks between meetings, evenings, night times on the bed/couch - you get the gist. But the problem with mindless entertainment is that it is a good filler, but not a great main course. For some reason, I can not wait to go back to King Julien’s bodacious dances during a meeting, but on being faced with the prospect of watching it for the entire weekend, I feel like I can do better (blasphemy, I know). And this part is particularly worrying. I have never been too sold on the myth of productivity - of having to spend all my waking time working to make the most of my “prime” (which I am anyway sure I am already past). It is not as if I don’t have hobbies - I read ~35 books in the first three months of 2020. But those were all about product management, too (my job, for the uninitiated). Plus, I do not really think the lockdown has affected me that much - most of my deepest friendships were built over the phone. So what really is the problem? Is it the fact that much of our early life was spent in the pursuit of official goals (school, college, work), making developing a personal or social life simply a distraction? Is it simply that I woke up on the cribby side of the couch today? I suspect, the answer, unlike most of our politics today, is somewhere in the middle. It is pretty well-known that humans (and especially me) will pick the path of least resistance. Over the past 20+ years, I only did something when I had to, otherwise I would be perfectly happy doing nothing at all. Without meaning to, I somehow managed to become a part-time workaholic (the other times, I was simply a nothingaholic). Now, it is simply too difficult for me to find and develop a side hobby. So, I would rather continue doing the things I actually find easy (sleeping, Netflixing at 1.5x, listening to music, working, and cribbing about it) than try something new. And the “returns” I will get from working that one hour extra is much more tangible than sitting with my family or going to visit a few friends. I do not like to speak for anyone other than myself (I actually love to, but I shall claim otherwise for plausible deniability), but I feel that most of our generation did go through something similar. Our academic and professional lives have been perfectly gamified by society - you “level up” every year with some milestones to make it all feel important (board exams, promotions, awards, etc.). And all that is through the “conventional” path. Meanwhile, there are no prizes for reading too many books, not unless you go out of your way to seek them. Almost inevitable then that we seek purpose and meaning from our work - because we rarely have things outside it to seek it from. The picture is not as bleak as it sounds, though. I (and I suspect, a lot of others like me) genuinely enjoy my work. I am also grateful for the fact that I still have a job, and that I am able to do it from the comforts of my home near the people I love. If only, there was something else to do.