The Struggle of Free Time

Last night, a young man told me he wastes his free time scrolling YouTube and TikTok, leaving him empty. I suggested he read something good and he immediately named a book I knew was awful. “I have no way of knowing what’s good for my soul or what’s killing it,” he said. That’s exactly why we’re doing this series: how to use our free time well. Because he’s not alone. We’re flooded with options: news, sports, social media, movies, podcasts, endless noise. How do we choose well?

Our soul, and by this I mean our mind and emotions, must be nourished or starve. The intellect needs to be fed by truth, and the emotions need to be nourished by beauty. That is what we are supposed to do with our free time: nourish the intellect with truth and the emotions with beauty. But beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. Beauty has an objective quality. It is comprised of order and surprise. Order is just when something is right, when something is the way it’s supposed to be, or when something does what it’s supposed to do. Surprise is our response to something that isn’t obvious, what we did not expect. It’s new, fresh, clever, original, and therefore interesting.

But much of what we consume is junk, or poison quietly killing our souls. So ask, “Is what I watch, read, or listen to true, beautiful, and good? Or am I delighting in disorder and perversion?”

What do we mean by order?

As we said, beauty is comprised of order and surprise. By order, we mean things being the way they are supposed to be and doing what they are supposed to do. Disorder is the corruption of the way things are supposed to be, and it’s when they don’t do what they’re supposed to do. We should get pleasure from order and displeasure from disorder. And stories can contain disorder without being, in themselves, disordered.

For example, 50 Shades of Grey and Anna Karenina are both stories about love affairs. However, where 50 Shades of Grey wants us to delight in the disorder of the affair, Anna Karenina is about the consequences of the affair. It wants us to see the disorder of the affair. It wants us to desire the beauty of married love. 

Beauty powerfully engages our emotions, and emotions are about how you feel. So, is a show or movie, book, piece of music, or art causing you to enjoy disorder, does it make you feel good about disorder? If so, that is not good. 

What do we mean by surprise?

The second half of beauty is surprise. Surprise is the mind’s response to what it does not find obvious, what it did not expect. It’s new, fresh, clever, original, innovative, interesting. The element of surprise keeps us from taking order for granted.

I used this example the other day - your wife will appreciate you if you go to work every day and come home every day. But if that’s all you do, she will find you boring. However, if you surprise her by doing something for her that she did not expect, she will think it’s beautiful. But not ALL surprise is good. She will appreciate you if you surprise her with flowers. She will not appreciate you if you surprise her by not coming home at all. Because something that’s surprising but disordered is bad. 

Let’s take two stories with twist endings: Memento and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and, warning, we’ll spoil the ending of both.

In the end of Memento it’s revealed that the main character, who has short term memory loss, is not actually searching for his wife’s killer, but he’s actually framing other people for her murder and then allowing himself to forget so that he can endlessly hunt others down and kill them in order to enjoy the feeling of avenging his wife, even though his victims are actually innocent. It’s well executed, but the whole movie is about delighting in the main character’s murder spree.

On the other hand, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has a similar twist in which we learn that the narrator, the main character, is actually the real killer. However, Agatha Christi never blurs the lines of morality, and the killer is brought to justice by Poirot. The story is delightful because we’re engaged in catching a killer, not in the killing itself.

These endings are surprising, clever, and unexpected. One teaches us to delight in the good, the other teaches us to take pleasure in disorder. 

You will know a tree by its fruits

The best way to know whether your use of free time is good or bad is to pay attention to how it makes you feel about life. When we feed the emotions with beauty, we should come away from it with a greater sense that a good God created a good world, and He created me to be very good, and that He is bringing everything to a good end. When we use our free time well, we feel happier, more grounded, more alive. But binging on mindless entertainment is a terrible diet for the soul. You feel disgusting afterwards. You feel worse. You feel less happy about your life. You feel less able to face reality. 

And consuming entertainment that is disordered is worse. It poisons our soul. It makes us angry, full of anxiety, depressed, and it feeds our vices of pride, vanity, envy, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. 

So, what are you doing with your leisure time? And how do you feel afterwards? Do you feel more excited to be alive? Or do you feel more intimidated and less enthusiastic about the real world? Or worse, does it cause you to desire what is evil and give you a disgust for what is true and good? That should be your first clue.

Leisure Isn’t Escape — It’s Delight in Reality

True leisure isn’t about escaping life; it’s about rediscovering its goodness. We rest well when we remember that a good God created a good world, and He made us to share in that goodness. When we use free time only to distract ourselves, from work, from responsibility, from our own thoughts by vegging out, it’s a sign we’ve forgotten that life itself is a gift. The devil wants that forgetfulness. He wants us to live in fear, anger, and despair, feeding on the world’s disorder until we believe that nothing is good.

But beauty restores our vision. It wakes us up to reality as it truly is ordered, surprising, and good. When you listen to great music, walk in the woods, share a meal, or read a story that moves your heart toward love, you’re not escaping life; you’re learning how to rejoice in it again.

So, as a resolution, examine what you watch and listen to. Does it make you feel more alive or less? Then choose something that fills you with gratitude and makes you more alive. Let your free time become thanksgiving. Because when you learn to delight in what is good, you’re already obeying St. Paul’s command, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.”

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