A new study claims that motorists spend nearly four days a year on average searching for parking spots.
Per freakin’ year. To park a car. What are we doing with our lives? We could be spending that time telling our friends and family that we love them — or on Twitter looking at Salt Bae memes.
Looking for elusive parking spots isn’t the only thing we’re wasting our lives doing. We spend hundreds and thousands of hours performing menial tasks our whole lives.
There’s cooking (2.5 years) and watching commercials (2 years) and working, which we will do for a whopping 10.3 years if we work 40 hours a week from the ages of 20 to 65.
But show me a millennial who actually will retire at 65 and I’ll show you a very fortunate person. A person who in all likelihood was given a million dollars by his daddy to invest in real estate.
Think if you were born into money and didn’t need to waste all that time working? Think of all the Salt Bae and “Cash me outside how bout dah” memes you could ingest? Think of all the things like “write a novel” or “climb Mount Kilimanjaro” or “clean out the garage” that you could tell people you’re doing and then never do?
So many lies.
Other extremely life-wasting tasks, according to figures compiled by Distractify, include spending three months of our lives in traffic, 1.1 years cleaning, 3.66 years eating and 14 entire days kissing.
Really? Who kisses anymore? I thought that went out with powdered wigs.
One that I don’t find that wasteful is the 92 days I will spend on the toilet during this lifetime. That’s time well spent.
Well spent on Facebook, looking at memes.
Unsurprisingly, the most time-consuming thing we do is sleeping. We spend 25 years of our time here on earth getting some shuteye. This is the only item I think we aren’t doing enough. You know those people who say things like, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” or, “When you sleepin’ I’m grindin’”? Those people are insane. They’re also lying. People who have to tell you they’re grinding or are on their grind aren’t grinding anything.
[makes the McKayla Maroney “not impressed” face]
Rapper Nas once famously said that “Sleep is the cousin of death,” and I trust Nasir Jones on most points, but this one I must disagree with. (Shakespeare, Virgil, Homer and Shelley all said something similar, but no one knows who they are and none of them is coming straight out of Queensbridge.)
Sleep is a refreshing escape from the daily grind of working and sitting on the toilet and kissing people. It’s a luxurious debauch. Those minutes spent lying there right before sleep, knowing that you’ll soon enter into another realm, a realm where anything and nothing is simultaneously possible — those are some wonderful minutes. If anything, we should spend more time sleeping. What doctor said eight hours is enough? Total quack job, that guy. The 12 years he spent training would’ve been better spent looking at memes of George W. Bush awkwardly trying to put on a poncho.
Did you see that? Hilarious. Especially when you put it beside the picture of the Beyonce birth announcement!
But I digress.
On my death bed, I’ll have many regrets, but taking awesome naps won’t be one of them. Spending 12 minutes looking for a spot in a Target parking lot so I can go in to buy a new duvet cover — that I will regret. What’s wrong with the duvet cover we have? Oh, it’s threadbare and smells like the dog? So what?
I’m getting very Grumpy Cat over here.
Also, reading back over this column I realize that I’ve spent about 90 hours of the past month looking at nothing but Internet memes.
Add that to the regret column as well. S
Jack Lauterback also is co-host of “Mornings with Melissa and Jack” on 103.7 Play weekdays from 6-9. Connect with him at letters@styleweekly.com, or on Twitter at @jackgoesforth.