Killing Time

Every weekend tips column is the same. Ten missions. Be kind to yourself. Do something stupid. Here’s what actually happens: you get home Friday and immediately don’t know what to do with yourself. You take a bath with wine. You pull on clothes you haven’t worn in years. You spend three hours searching the internet for photos of yourself, and around the time your neighbors might be wondering why you’ve been in front of a screen this long, you stop caring. You cry at a song you know is bad.

The thing about weekends is you need permission to waste them. The world says optimize, improve, become someone. But mostly weekends are just survival—five days of holding it together, and then thirty-six hours of trying to remember what it feels like to not want anything from yourself. That might be a bath. That might be a movie you watch twice because your brain isn’t working right. That might be standing in your closet at 2am in a weird mood.

Some people turn their weekends into projects. Good for them. I think the best ones are the quiet ones where you disappoint no one, especially yourself. Where you exist for a while without a plan. Where the only goal is to feel less tense on Monday morning than you did Friday night. Everything else is just killing time until then.