Hours of watching other people’s lives make you an expert in theirs and a stranger to yours.

Hours are finite in a literal way, and time spent following what other people are doing is time not spent inside your own life. Watching feels like participation, which is the difficulty, so you can end up knowing a great deal about somebody’s week and very little about what you want from yours. No judgement is needed here. It is a question of where the hours actually went.

Spend one evening this week on something of your own that nobody will hear about. Notice what you are still thinking about afterwards.