I've been told me and my family are over-stimulated. My brother's down time consists of banging a guitar for hours and hours on end to superloud rock songs playing in the background. My youngest brother's downtime is a little bit closer to yours. He plays video games or works on creating computer programs until his hands go numb. My older sister cannot sit for five minutes without a notebook in her hand, writing something. And I paint, sing, dance, write, read, draw,etc. whenever I get a free minute. (This includes vacations.) It's not really goal oriented, and we still get with the flow. But we're all introverts, and our vacation away from the world uses includes the least amount of people possible. (That includes television stars.)

Life in big cities is always demanding in a lot of ways.

Going from no structure to a structured day suddenly shocks your inner peace and balance. You subconsciously feel that you failed yourself because you went from a freelancer to an employee and in order to do that you had to subconsciously close the doors of the desire to do whatever, whenever, wherever that freelancers can.

Believe it or not- I am pretty sure you do already- but the stimulus that comes out of activities, both outdoors and in doors, is the fuel that can get you going. You take that stimulus away and force not only your free thinking brain to generate structured work but also your body to sit in a chair all day when prior to that you had the ability to stretch, lay down, run, eat drink e.t.c and you have a pretty unhappy whole.

You are subconsciously trying to find that freedom of thought again without having to be jerked back by thoughts of the task in hand and maybe your brain thinks it will find it in the movies; there the impossible is possible.

I do not believe that down time is time spent doing nothing. How come meditation is seen as "something" but video games are "nothing"? In my opinion we need to give ourselves a break and be comfortable with just "being".

The challenge, in any case, is finding the right balance between consistency and variety, pressure and release, etc.

Before, I'll bet you missed stability. Now, I'll bet you miss the freedom. That's been my (similar) experience...

A-men to your blog entry, Jay.

I think a lot of what determines the way people spend thier leisure time has to do with the economic structure in relation to personal interests and abilities. I have a friend who is an electrical engineer. He works on sub-stations all day and although his job sounds painfully dull to me, he absolutely loves it. He stays late at work not because he is more ambitious that the rest of us, but because he so enjoys what he does and he's getting paid to do it! I look on people who have abilities and interests that align with financial reward with great envy. I love lots of things but nothing I am likely to get paid for. Sure you can follow your dream and try to do what you love but lets face it,in many cases people will not be paid for doing what they take the most fufillment in. You can only pursue your blossoming singing career for so long before you will have to take an office job to simply survive. I love to paint, to jog, to write music and pen creative stories. I spend much of my "down-time" doing these things because I can't do them at work. My friend who is viewed at work as "Mr. Motivation" comes home and sits on his ass all night. I leave a boring yet not very demanding job and come home and do activities. People seek a balance and thier life's pleasures and life's work sometimes dictate how that balance is found. If you feel like doing nothing then allow yourself to do nothing. Your body and mind likley need that down time and thats something. Now if your work is both demanding and highly unfufilling, maybe reconsider the job.

There's a surprisingly simple explanation. For a person who's constantly busy doing something. Not doing anything is 'something.' It's a purposeful antithesis to always doing something. Take it from another overscheduled (and type-A) person.

Yeah. There is that constant struggle between wanting pure passive recreation and wanting to use free time on things that are also productive. Those two desires are at constant war. I haven't figured out how to resolve that. Every time I think that I can be satisfied with just coming home after the day jobs and passively indulging electronic media and leisure reading, I find the yearning to work on that novel screaming at me again. And for some reason I haven't been able to balance writing with the passive stuff in the evenings. Hmmm...