All we've got is wasted time

Our lives are full, completely full, of time.
We wake up by the electric-glow of an alarm clock, make our morning coffee with an eye on our watch. We pay attention to the digital clock in our vehicles as we head towards work, and we push the timecard into our workplace's clock as we “clock in” to our workplace.
Much of our lives are spent on watching the clock, noticing time and conserving every second – so how strange it is to me that we end up wasting so much of our time on things that barely deserve a second.
At the beginning of this month, I chose to end my movie/tv show streaming services of Netflix and Hulu – I reasoned that it cost me more than I wanted to be using it...and that I was watching movies and television when I'd rather be doing something else.
I enjoy reading and I write or do needlework and photography in my free time – but finding “free time” had been the problem as of late. Instead of picking up a book at any spare moment I got, I was watching Netflix; instead of writing, I was flipping through Hulu to find something to mindlessly watch.
As a younger person (with fewer things to take up my time) I could easily read five 200-page books in a week. While I doubt I'd be able to do that now, the knowledge that I am a fast and voracious reader haunted me; in recent years, I've been lucky if I finished a book a week.
It wasn't that I had slowed in my reading speed (I blitz through reading material at an unnatural pace still), it was that the moments when – as a teenager – I had chosen to pick up a book, I was instead turning to other things, to time-wasters such as TV or social media.
Now, I certainly don't think there is anything wrong with a bit of television here and there – but I had reached the point where it wasn't “here and there” - it had become a crippling waste that consumed the moments when I would rather be investing in myself and the things I enjoy doing.
For all our time-consciousness, we are awfully bad at actually conserving and wisely using the limited amount of time that we have to spend.
We live in a time and era where there are a billion and one things all vying for our attention – there is the chirp of our smartphones when someone has responded to us on social media or the hum of the TV while we are with our families; there are Google calendars filled with to-do lists and stacks of responsibilities that demand our instant attention.
There are articles to study, shows to watch, books to read, friends to visit, places to go, jobs to complete – the list can go on and on and on, and its a never-ending churning of the machine of time that pulls us along with it.
Time seems to stretch on, beyond any of us – and yet, it is incredibly finite.
There are only so many hours in the day, only so many minutes to use and seconds to waste.
Once, I had someone ask me what was stopping me from doing more of the hands-on crafts that I enjoyed. My answer was simple: “I just don't have the time.” But when I later looked closer at my excuse, I realized how shallow and feeble it was. All I have is time, I have plenty of time – I'm just not using it correctly or wisely.
In the worlds of Charles Darwin: “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
We aren't just “wasting time” when we invest in things that steal our attention and focus, because time is truly infinite. We, however, are not; our lives are incredibly brief and finite in the grand portrait of history – when we fritter our moments away, we aren't wasting time, we are wasting ourselves.
And I, for one, feel like life is simply too precious and brief to waste on something that is a thief of my time.