How To Steal A Day
The Friday newsletter is playing hooky and wasting a day the right way.
Twenty years ago, we had Bob Hope, Steve Jobs, and Johnny Cash1, and I had a lot more time on my hands. Now we have no hope, no jobs, and… well, you get the idea.
When you’re younger—before serious careers, marriage, children, and all the trappings of supposedly-responsible adulthood take hold—it can be easy to take a day for granted. They’re so cheap and plentiful you can spend them or waste them without a second thought, like the oysters or lobster that once teemed so bounteously in the harbors of East Coast boomtowns they were considered poor man’s survival food.
Now, much like those seafoods, days seem like a luxury good to me. Each one has a value assigned to it, each one is allocated to some purpose or another: parenting, work, commoditized hobbies, Sisyphean journeys of personal improvement. It can feel downright scandalous to waste a day doing nothing of value.
So instead, I’m going to steal one.
The paradox of the last year is that, despite there being not much of anything for a p…