Reasons to Waste Your Weekend
There’s a specific dead zone of Sunday afternoon—too late to matter, too early to start dinner prep, no energy left for anything real. That’s when you’d come across those lists, the kind where someone’s compiled ten stupid things you could do instead of whatever you’re actually supposed to be doing. The first one’s usually manageable—trim your toenails, call someone you’ve been meaning to call. By the tenth you’re supposed to be committing actual crimes, and the whole thing’s obviously a joke, but there’s something appealing about the permission structure anyway.
These lists circulated constantly back in the early 2010s, when ranking things and daring each other was still treated like infinite entertainment. The joke was always escalation. You’d watch it tip from mildly ridiculous to obviously, cartoonishly illegal or cruel, and the humor was in how far they’d go before it became impossible to laugh along. It worked because nobody actually expected you to do any of it. The whole thing was collaborative absurdism. You read it knowing it was a joke, and you understood that the person who wrote it knew you knew it was a joke, and that layer of agreed-upon unreality was the actual appeal.
The honest part was hidden in there somewhere. You’re not actually looking for permission to hurt someone or commit fraud. You just want permission to not be yourself for an afternoon. You want to live in a different story where the rules are absurd and stakes don’t matter because the whole thing’s obviously impossible. The specific content of the list almost doesn’t matter—it’s the frame. It’s the collective agreement that yeah, okay, let’s imagine being someone else. Let’s imagine the weekend being something other than what it is.
I haven’t seen lists like that in a while. Internet humor got meaner or it got worse—more branded, more earnest, more exhausted. Those lists disappeared into the same exhaustion that kills everything online eventually. But I remember what they were doing. It was the smallest rebellion, the most consequence-free way to imagine yourself as different. Stupid and pointless, sure. But the appeal was real.