Entertainment

Entertainment, and recreation in general (wait is entertainment a subset of recreation or vice versa, or are they just two different words for the same thing?) is tough. Now you may scoff at that statement, you may laugh, you may even derisively point your finger, but hear me out. The reason entertainment is tough is because it’s so easy to overdo it, I mean how do you know when you’ve had just the right amount of entertainment, not so much that you were recreating when you could have been profitably working. Just enough to be recharged, but not so much that you’re enervated and listless, and then there’s the problem of participating in the right form of entertainment. Ideally you want something that will restore some of your mojo and be fun at the same time. This can be trickier than you might think. A backpacking trip into the deep wilderness would seem very restorative, but it can just as easily end up putting one into a Thoreau-esque Walden state where before you know it you’ve bought some land to build a cabin and tossed your computer into the trash.

Of course the preceding paragraph took as one of its default assumptions that entertainment and recreation are necessary. That may not be the case, though even Stephen R. Covey in his best-seller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” made “sharpening the saw” his 7th habit. Certainly one can come up with countless examples both contemporary and historical where people have gone long periods of time without engaging in the kind of activities I think of when I speak of entertainment. Of course they did have entertainment, but it was a lot different than the choices offered to me. It’s very rare that “gathering around the campfire and dancing” makes it on my list of potential recreational activities on any given evening. And that really brings up another thing that makes recreation tough, there’s so many choices. Do I watch my NetFlix movie? Go for a walk? Play any of 20 different computer games? Read the book I’m working on? Nap? Play board games with the family? Etc…

Now I’m sure most of you are thinking that by whining about recreation I’ve reached a new low… Probably, but like Stephen says sharpening the saw is important, and lately I seem to not be very good at it. For example one would think that I would return from GenCon revved and ready to go, but mostly I’m just tired, which may have everything to do with the sleep debt I’m still carrying and nothing to do with my recreational choices, but the point remains I think it’s important to occasionally recharge the battery and at the moment I don’t seem to be doing as well as I could with that aspect of my life. This is not to say I’m not engaging in any recreation, if anything I’m over-doing it at the moment.

Over-recreated