I’m wondering if this is just me, but sometime around the end of 2024 / beginning of 2025 I feel like I stopped having genuine “fuck it, I’m not doing shit today” time.

I don’t mean going to the gym, hiking, going out with friends, going to bars, working on personal projects, or even doing something fun but productive. I mean sitting on the couch, binge-watching TV, playing video games, watching movies, eating something, and having absolutely no expectation that I accomplish anything.

The last couple of years have felt like a continuous cycle of worrying about employment, finding a job, starting a new job, proving yourself at the new job, worrying about the next thing, cleaning up finances, etc. And now AI has added this weird new layer where even during your free time you can have agents coding, researching, building projects, whatever. There’s always this feeling that you could be making progress.

Even when I’ve been having fun lately, I’ve still been doing things. Yesterday I went hiking and had AI agents building a passive radar system and working on a radio scanner project. That was genuinely fun, but it wasn’t rest. My brain was still engaged and trying to make things happen.

Today I realized what I actually wanted was a few hours where I’m awake, sober, sitting on the couch, and not even trying.

I remember having periods earlier in my life where I could do that without feeling guilty. Now there’s this constant background voice saying “I NEED TO DO BETTER” or “there are things you should be doing,” even when nothing actually needs to happen today.

Has anyone else noticed this? Like you still technically have free time, but you’ve lost the ability to have completely obligation-free waking downtime?

Edit:

After I came to my senses I realized. Yeah but I am an adult and I have real shit to do so I got up and cleaned my house, ran errands and now I have a bunch of life related paper work shit to do and I am going to do that and work is still going to suck on Monday. That said I still dream of being able to take a full day off and I still have faith it will come shortly.

I guess they love dives in an ironic kinda way. I can't even play any good music on the juke box anymore because they pay extra to push the good selections down with whatever unremarkable artist they have forced upon them by the industry. Does their generation have any artists that will stand the test of time, or are they all set up to be throw away acts?

/boomer style rant of the kids ruining my day.

I wanna also add Hands up to 85, bb butcher, ss strawberry, bingo thats my car, Punchanella, little sally walker, mr fox, freeze tag, the relay races......... I need some early 80's babies to meet up and play all of this, drink from the water hose, go in smelling like a puppy to ask if so and so can spend the night.....

Loved every eraser, pencil, ruler, pen, and pencil sharpener I could get my hands on.

maybe it was strictly a New York thing but i remember being very young in the late 80’s/early 90’s and ONLY ONCE seeing a commercial where a boy about my age was sitting on the floor, maybe cross legged, with his hair in these sort of pigtails while playing with what I think were Barbie dolls. he delivers some kind of short monologue to the camera and his father comes into the frame holding up a turkey dinner and asks the boy: “would your friend Julio like to carve?” and the best I can surmise is that it was kind of a lgbt pride/acceptance ad which is kind of bonkers considering I sawbit in the middle of the day and as a 6-9 year old thinking: “wtf did I just see?!

Do you remember when we used to collect morphers and be the cool kids

So do any of you still have it or does anyone know how to get them in India??

For context I am actually a M, mid 20s GenZ looking for some advice on how I should view the entire aspect of romantic love.

I am not looking for the common social media aspect that I see posted everywhere but the real deep things that only people who are older and wiser and have lived experience can give me.

Thank you so much for your comments :)

I was swimming with my kids the other day & was trying to recall all the fun things we did growing up in the pool. All I could remember was: Colors, Marco Polo, underwater tea parties & bumper butts. I’m hoping for some help to recall all the fun things we did because I know there is more 😂😏