[JakeTheAndroid]

When I was a kid I went to work with my dad sometimes. He owned his own painting/handyman company. One of these work trips had a lot of work but very little an 11 year old could really do. I spent most of my day doing nothing, and it felt like the longest day of work in the world. I was tired, bored, and felt like I had actually worked all day. My dad said "sometimes having no work feels like more work doesn't it?" and honestly, yeah. Sometimes that really is the case.

A few years ago I had a tech job where they straight up didn't have work for me to do. For the first month it was amazing. But after a few months a day of doing nothing was completely draining. And my dads words rang in my head again, and I was like damn that as true now as it was when I was 11.

Doing nothing is shockingly hard mentally. We need to be engaged in stuff day to day, and without that engagement it seems like we spend a lot of energy trying to find something to do.

[cowvin]

I was a summer intern at a big defense company for one of my first summer jobs. They gave me some fairly simple work but not enough to fill my day. I ended up reading a lot of books for a large chunk of my day. =/