The Value of Time Well Spent

From The Desk | The Gentlemen's Study

Something I said in the last episode apparently ruffled some feathers. Whether it was misunderstood, taken out of context, or a failure on my part to accurately communicate my point necessitates a response.

I talked, in that episode, about my own history with sports. About the hundreds — probably thousands — of hours I spent over the years watching games. Genuinely entertained by them, genuinely invested in them, the way a lot of men are. And I talked honestly about how, looking back now, I've come to see that time differently than I did while I was living it.

Some of you heard that as an attack on sports fans. I want to clear that up, and then I want to go further into the actual argument.

What I Was Not Saying

I was not saying sports are a waste of time. I was not saying the men who love watching them are doing something wrong. I was not passing judgment on anyone's Saturday afternoon, and I was not suggesting that a man who enjoys football or baseball or whatever his game happens to be is somehow failing at the pursuit of virtue this show is built around.

I like sports. I have loved sports. There is real good in them — genuine athletic excellence worth admiring, shared experience with friends and family, the specific kind of communal joy that comes from caring about something together with other people. None of that is nothing. I was not arguing that it is.

What I was doing was something more personal and more specific. I was describing my own honest accounting of my own hours — and asking, out loud, on the air, whether the ratio I had settled into for a long stretch of my life was actually the ratio I wanted, in hindsight. I found myself lacking, and I found in my honest self-evaluation that I wasted too many hours that could have been better spent.

The Actual Argument

Here is what I actually believe.

Time is the one resource no man gets more of. You cannot save it, cannot earn it back, cannot borrow against a future supply of it. Every hour spent is an hour permanently gone, spent on exactly one thing and nothing else, forever.

That is true of every hour, including the hours spent on things I enjoy. It was true of the hours I spent watching games. It is true of the hours I now spend reading, writing, sitting on the patio with a cigar, or writing outlines, posts, and episodes for this show.

None of that means every hour has to be maximally productive or self-improving. I am not building a case for a life with no rest, no entertainment, no simple enjoyment. I said as much in the episode on presence and again in the episode on the man cave versus the study — rest matters, leisure matters, a man who never stops is not more virtuous, he is simply more depleted.

The question I was actually raising is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with once you give it an honest evaluation. When I look back at a specific stretch of my life where sports occupied a genuinely large share of my available leisure hours, what did those specific hours actually produce, compared to what the same hours might have produced if I had spent even a portion of them differently?

A game I watched ten years ago is gone. I could not tell you the score today if my life depended on it. I remember almost nothing specific about most of those hours — not because I wasn't paying attention at the time, but because that is simply the nature of that kind of content. It is built for the moment. It does not accumulate and it carries no lasting value.

A book I read ten years ago is still shaping how I think, right now, today. An idea I encountered in my twenties still surfaces in conversations I have in my fifties. That is the nature of that kind of content too. It does accumulate, compounding quietly over years in a way that entertainment consumed for its own sake generally does not.

That is not a moral claim about the people involved. It is simply an honest observation about two different kinds of hours, and what they tend to leave behind.

Why This Isn't About Sports Specifically

I want to be clear that sports were simply the example that happened to be true of my own history — the specific thing I personally spent a large share of my leisure time on for a long stretch of years. The argument isn't really about sports at all. While there are other arguments I could and do make against sports, this one wasn’t ONLY about sports. It applies just as directly to any hour spent on content built for the moment rather than content built to last.

Hours spent scrolling. Hours spent on shows that are pleasant but forgettable. Hours spent anywhere that produces genuine, real-time enjoyment and then leaves behind almost nothing once the moment has passed.

I am not asking any man to eliminate those hours from his life entirely. I am asking him to actually look at the ratio — honestly, without defensiveness, the same way I had to look honestly at my own — and decide whether it reflects what he actually wants his hours to be building over the long run of an entire life.

The Question Worth Asking Yourself

Here is the version of the question I'd actually put to any man, sports fan or otherwise, and it is the same question I had to put to myself before I ever said a word about it on the air.

If you added up every hour you spent last year on content built purely for the moment — and then added up every hour spent on something built to accumulate, to shape you, to still matter to you a decade from now — what would that ratio actually look like?

I am not asking you to feel guilty about the answer. I asked myself the same question and did not love what I found either. That is precisely why I brought it up on the show in the first place — not from a position of having already solved it, but from the position of a man who is still working it out himself, in real time, one week at a time.

The point was never that sports are completely bad. The point is that every hour is doing something to you, whether you're paying attention to that fact or not. And it is worth occasionally stopping to ask what your hours have actually been building.

Pull up a chair. You're welcome here.

— Keith