on time's worth

paraphrased memories, because the process of writing out the last post brought them up.

:...a bunch of robots and magical girls. how can anyone like this crap?

: that sounds horrible.
: it's what I do for a living.

: I would found a school for orphans and force them to learn math and physics.

: I don't understand fantasy sports.
: I could say the same thing about coding.

: I don't want to sit in an office job all day.

: do you live to work or work to live? I work to live.

: stop playing bejeweled.

It's the ways in which we evaluate how we spend our own time, and how other people spend their time. It's always annoying when people tell you what you shouldn't be or should be doing with our own time, or judge us so to speak (especially parents...). Even with regards to my own activities, I always feel somewhat self-conscious with what people see me doing, like I feel some kind of obligation to at least look like I'm being productive even though productivity ends up being somewhat relative. Like how I'm guessing spending quiet time with God would probably sound like a waste of time to an antitheist, or conversely doing... entirely non-God centered things to a religious theist, I suppose.

Since time is evidently precious, how do you qualify what's a worthwhile activity vs. a waste of time? For some reason I feel predisposed to label activities that create or produce some kind of result that will benefit or is more relevant to other people as time-worthy. Perhaps by how much value it adds or contributes to another person's life, if you could quantify such a thing. By extension, would that make other activities that are more self-oriented (consumption of media for one thing) more of a waste of time?

And what about the different kinds of jobs out there? In small group we had a discussion about how the cultural environment of the Silicon Valley can feel... soul sucking in the way. How we get preoccupied over working on things like coding projects that (well I guess to non-technical people at least) can seem like they have nothing to do with life itself. How dangerous it is to get sucked up into this overworking, self-centered, comfort-seeking culture, while forgetting about the bigger picture of the world today. To be honest, it wasn't something I had seriously thought about before, because I felt so acclimated to living around here that it didn't occur to me that I might be neglecting other significant things in life. Although part of me wondered, is it really that soul-sucking if I don't necessarily feel the same way so much?

But then it goes back to the feeling of futility I was having a few days ago. Am I really wasting my time doing what I'm doing right now? But, shouldn't the enjoying the process of doing what I'm doing be enough?

I feel like I'm asking too many questions in this post. But it's not really something I have clear-cut answers to. As with everything else in life.