Back in the halcyon days of 2008 (uh, by halcyon, I mean the world was crumbling, but in a different way), I had a Netflix subscription. I would go onto the website, train the algorithm on my preferences, and set up a queue of DVDs to be shipped to me. I got one DVD at a time and watched about three or four DVDs per month.
I watched the BEST stuff: incredible movies, both domestic and foreign; wonderful TV shows; lectures on fascinating topics. All of it—even obscure stuff—was available, and I watched a ton.
A few years later, Netflix finished its transition from mailing DVDs to primarily streaming their content. They adjusted the pricing to discourage the older DVD model, and they stopped replenishing the stock of DVDs, so things got harder to track down, and wait times got longer and longer.
Instead of watching my weekly DVD pulled from a highly-curated list and delivered to my mailbox, I started streaming.
I spent more time watching, and I got less out of it.
Part of this might be that we think more highly of our future self than our present self. Future-me likes to watch cerebral films that have shown at festivals. Present me will watch SVU reruns for the hundredth time if that’s what’s on.
I think that’s part of it, but something deeper is happening here. Piggy over at Bitches Get Riches recently wrote about the difference between recovery and recreation.
In short, recovery is what we do because we need to relax, decompress, numb out, process, or otherwise, well, recover from the stresses of our jobs and lives. Recovery is what we do to return to some sort of baseline state after being stressed. Recreation, meanwhile, consists of true leisure—activities we do purely for their own joy and not with an explicit goal of achieving some other state of mind.
The trick here is that, sometimes, the activities can look similar, but the impact is entirely different. Harking back to the Good Old Days of Netflix, there was one memorable time I watched my weekly DVD, thoroughly enjoyed it, and wanted more. I found something interesting to watch on broadcast (this was before smart TVs and on-demand streaming were a thing, especially for grad students). Somewhere in this second choice, I slid into drift. I was disengaged from the content, yet too tired to make the state change required to turn off the TV and go to bed.
So I sat there, slouching further and further into the couch. Eventually, that program ended. Some sort of news-ish true crime program came on. I remember this acutely because, at some point, the program cut to uncensored images of a murder scene. Including the remains of the victim. The weapon used was a shotgun. (WHY WOULD YOU BROADCAST THAT????)
That was enough to get me up off the couch, but not what I would recommend viewing immediately before bed.
What had started as true recreation had slid into something else entirely. This suggests a couple of guidelines for recreation.
First, decisions made in the moment are often lower quality than plans made in advance. My pre-made decision was excellent. I enjoyed it deeply and found it restorative. But it took planning and a modicum of delayed gratification to execute. When I attempted to replicate this in the moment, it failed miserably.
Second, it suggests that we ought to beware of drift. An example: when running overground, we are constantly adapting our pace to our energy and the terrain on which we are running. When we run on a treadmill, for the most part, we continue at one speed regardless of flagging energy or changes in incline. We stop (or at least vastly reduce) making decisions based on our needs and conditions and instead respond mechanically to external input.
When we have to exert effort to keep going, we adjust or stop when we get tired. When we have to exert effort to stop, we keep going when we are tired.
But with running, at some point, we will exert the effort to hop off the treadmill or hit the “STOP” button because it costs more effort to go on than to change states. This is not so with any infinite stream of information or entertainment; changing states can often cost more than staying put, and thus we end up sliding into a state of torpor as the flashing, blue-tinged lights bathe our faces. There is good leisure to be had on our glowing rectangles, but one must be wary and wily to get it.
The original model suggests the difference: DVD vs. infinite stream. The DVD is, by its nature, finite. This is a feature, not a bug. When on the edge of the Danger Zone, we do well to make choices with built-in break points. Natural boundaries are our friend.
For good recreation, for good leisure, you need to start from a place of chill. Freaking out about what isn’t done at work or home is hardly conducive to relaxation. I’m not going to go as far as saying one must achieve perfect zen or anything, but to engage in an activity fully, you need to not be actively engaging with other activities. That includes worrying about work or the state of the house. (By all means, if something is literally on fire, drop everything and attend to that. But most problems can wait. I promise unfolded laundry and unreturned emails will still be there tomorrow.)
There are three things that I find helpful for disengaging. (Please note that I am only so-so at following my own advice. Such is life.)
First, whatever your job is, treat your work as blue-collar. Clock in. Clock out. When you are clocked in, you are at work. You wouldn’t twiddle through your socials on your phone if you were working a machine that could take your arm off, so don’t twiddle them in your cube. The corollary here is that when you clock out, you are clocked the eff out. If an actual fire is destroying the building, and it is your job to handle the building, okay. You can respond to that one. But if it’s just an “urgent” email coming hours after you have clocked out…that one ain’t on you.
Clocking out, for me at least, is helped massively by taking about 15 to 30 minutes at the end of the day to figure out what got done, what is still outstanding, make a rough outline for the next day, and at least triage my messages to make sure that nothing is likely to go to crisis before I clock in the next day. And when I open myself to the world (creative work comes first, then I open myself to other people’s problems), the first thing I do is check messages to make sure nothing has popped up and handle anything that has. I have a checklist for my daily check-in and my daily check-out. And another one for an admin chunk where I deal with some (not all, never all) of the administrative crap that needs to be handled.
If you have a commute, consider how you might make a portion of it active. I know this isn’t possible for everyone, but driving a car is a boring, sustained-attention task in which the stakes go up to life and death for screwing it up. Some people claim to find this time relaxing (how???), but it just isn’t for me. My all-time favorite commute involved a 5-mile bike ride to the train station (north of Chicago, all seasons—even when the weather was crummy, it was still better than being in a car), and my second favorite commute was a 20-minute walk. There is something about fresh air and gross motor function that makes a person feel alive.
Now for the part I’m worst at: build in build in recovery during the day. If you come home (or clock out) and are totally spent, you are totally spent. You can’t start something new and engaging (or even start making dinner) when you are totally spent. Sometimes this will be unavoidable, which is why takeout was invented, but it’s not a particularly fulfilling way to live every day. To combat this, build in some recovery time in your work day. Get up from your desk. Walk around. Get outside for a bit if you can. (I’m pretty sure this is why people smoke.) Take actual coffee breaks. Eat lunch somewhere you don’t work. Share some of your breaks with a friend. True, this does take some time out of your day, but the thing is, that probably wasn’t productive time to start with. And you will be more effective when you return for not being so damned tired.
And as someone wise once said: While it might seem like we don’t need to be intentional about our recovery blocks, I’ve learned the hard way that we actually need to be more intentional about them than about any of the other blocks precisely because we’re over-focused on output.
And the thing is, you are going to take the break anyway. That is how one ends up scrolling one’s phone during the workday. Planning to be at 100% all the time isn’t realistic. You are going to flag. If you find a time in your day when you regularly find yourself scrolling your socials at work, try actively planning a recovery activity in that time and see how that affects the rest of your day, both at work and outside of it.
If you need more recovery after work, plan for it. Maybe this looks like meditation, a call to a friend or loved one, or a workout of whatever flavor you actually enjoy. Hand on heart, I swear my weekend is 10x better if I do something active after work on Friday. Not because, after five days of work, I’m raring to go and exert yet more energy, but because it breaks the siren call of inertia enticing me to become one with the couch until Monday morning.
The next step is planning your recreation. While also making sure that everyone stays fed, watered, and clothed, the bills are paid, and the general environment is kept to something functional. This is a whole other kettle of fish that I will…stir?…next week. Stay tuned!
If you know what the heck one does with a kettle of fish, please tell me in the comments! How do you recover from the stresses of work and life?
I have used the dvr function as a tool for my "recovery". If I watch TV at night after the kids are in bed, it's usually 1 show. I check the dvr (with my phone) to see what shows are recorded, and I watch just that recorded show. Then I turn the TV off and go on with my evening. I don't flip channels, I don't watch "the next program", in fact I can't think of the last time I watched live TV (now my hubby on the other hand is watching all the basketball right now, so we have been enjoying our evening decompress TV in different rooms.)
If I want to binge a show or watch a marathon, it's intentional.
Oh man, this was a great article. So much reminiscing about the good ol days of DVD watching, except for me it was getting them from the library. I didn’t even know there had been a DVD delivery service in Netflix’s past. Fascinating. The finite task versus infinite pool thing is so true.
I love the idea of planning recreation, but my only roadblock seems to be a belief that if I plan it, it will become “work.” I think this is why my planning and time blocking has stayed only for work hours. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I guess I’m just scared of “ruining” my recreation somehow with tools and mindsets I associate with work brain. Lots to think about!