Advertisers know full well humans are feeling-driven creatures. We could usefully resolve to harness this fact ourselves by systematically pursuing the feelings we want from our free time.
The New Year is when many of us try to change our habits, resolving to cut back on alcohol, save money and exercise more. But we might also usefully take a step back to ensure our free time satisfies our appetite for feelings and sensation.
Free time is a precious commodity, of course, but it also poses a very tricky problem: How do we best fill it? There is such a vast range of realistic options available to us–from transcendental meditation, to crochet, to kendo–but how can we choose or decide if the choice is a good one?
Having a good way to choose could mean we spend our free time better. I suggest the feelings and states of mind we want as a goal. This is a route to a form of Epicurean hedonism, where we make our own idea of happiness top priority. This is more likely a rich mixture of interwoven feelings and mental states rather than constant euphoria.
It avoids necessarily setting ourselves measurable criteria like, say, getting a better 100m backstroke time or mastering another 20 chords on the ukulele. Having too many concrete deliverables like these can make our free time feel too much like work time. Making a hobby feel like a job is to undermine the freedom of our free time.
Marketing and advertising is by its nature highly compelling and persuasive, but also an unreliable guide. Businesses’ main goal is to make money, not to help us make the choices which serve us best. Similarly, love us as they may, our friends and family can urge us to do things serving their interests or fulfill their preconceived ideas of what we want.
The alternative
Instead we could make our free time choices from scratch. We first try to define the outcome we want–in this case the feelings and states of mind–and then work back to what might deliver it.
Take a blank sheet of paper and pen and brainstorm, trying to focus on what we want to experience. We should try to be clear that they are what we want, not what other people want. We are all different.. Write them down haphazardly as you think of them. Some may be new or surprising. Or we might find we dig up feelings we had long in the past.
The second stage is to work on delivering this list. We can try to think of activities where you had the feelings or mental states on our list. Maybe they are things we have not done since we were children or teenagers. Be honest and put them down in a list. Check back to see which feelings and states are covered by your activities and try and fill in any gaps.
Perhaps you might have a state of mind “feeling fresh”. This could make positive activity out of not doing something, like avoiding alcohol, smoking or cream buns. You might also find an activity has given you feelings you do not want alongside the ones you do. In this case, perhaps there is a way to approach it differently, “Play guitar, purely for fun.”
Maybe there are some of the objectives we wrote down which are not covered by activities. In this case we might need to think of some activity experiments that we think might fill that gap. We also might need to thin out the activity list and prioritise.
Together our two lists are the beginning of a positive feeling-focussed mix of activity, using our own direct experience to achieve what we want. We can harness a fact advertisers widely use to serve business ends to serve our own. ■