But What Now?

Playing Computer Games

Leisure is taking time off. Leisure is doing something you love to do. Leisure is sometimes just escaping to your computer to play games after a long week of taking care of too much, too fast with too few breaks five days in a row. That’s called work, the state of non-leisure. The place we yearn to leave (or at least I do) as soon as we can.

I love Pogo. Usually when I get on Pogo and play my favorite games there are on average another 350,000 players online at the same time. That’s a pretty large number, but not when you compare it with YouTube.

Here’s a video I found on YouTube that someone put together showing some of the games. It’s a couple of years old, but if you’ve never seen Pogo before it will give you an idea of what they’ve got. I love the pool game.

Watching YouTube

I’ve found that when I get on YouTube, time just disappears. I get on to watch something and then I start watching all the related videos and before I know it a couple of hours may have passed. My friends report the same thing. In fact, now that I’ve put a link to the site here, I’ll probably lose you for a few hours.

Ernie Zelinski’s books are all about leisure. He’s helped me understand what leisure is at a deeper level and with this new found grasp I am more than ready for retirement in a year. It can’t come soon enough for me.

I know I won’t sit around all day playing computer games and watching videos on YouTube, but I will part of the time and I’ll feel less guilty doing it because my time will belong to me. During the day instead of responding to the requirements of my job, I will be working towards goals of my own making (i.e., the things I’m trying to fit into my evenings and weekends now and feel just too mentally exhausted from my job to really give real justice to). Instead I play computer games and zone out for awhile.

When I let myself indulge in leisure time, I usually come out the other side refreshed and renewed. I’ll write more later about other forms of leisure, that is, after I play a few more games of Tri Peaks Solitaire and watch a bunch of videos on YouTube.