There is a version of me that plays guitar.
Not well, probably. Not professionally, either. But fluently enough to sit down at the end of a long, busy day and play something, just to unwind. I can see him clearly — this other version; he is opening the bag, extracting the guitar, tuning it, hitting the strings with the plectrum to test the sounds. He’s not Jimi Hendrix, he’s not Carlos Santana, he’s not even Eric Clapton, but he knows how to touch that sweet guitar to play an adapted version of Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen (my favorite song for a while, a couple of years ago).
I can see him because I own a guitar. It’s been sitting in my apartment for years, waiting for the adult version of me to find the time that the teenage version of me had in abundance and wasted completely. I got this guitar and I’ve learned how to make it talk – that’s not a sentence you’ll hear from me very soon (you’ll have to listen to Thunder Road for that).
That’s the price of distraction. The person you didn’t become.
I’m writing this for two kinds of people.
The first, and most obvious, are the teenagers. If everything goes the way it should, you’ll be the good old days of the person you’ll become. If you’re reading this, though, chances are that you found yourself stuck in a place you don’t want to be. Maybe you’re living constantly attached to your phone, maybe you spend your afternoons on your bed looking at the ceiling with nothing going on in your mind and a joint in your hand. Maybe, just maybe, reading this will scare you enough to shake your mind and turn a corner in your life. You’ll thank me in a decade or two.
The second kind of people is the category I’m a part of, the one that wasted their own teenage years and now would give a foot to have them back. The good news is – our feet are safe; this kind of deal isn’t possible. The bad news – we have to live with the consequences of what we missed, and, oh boy, we missed a lot. I feel you, my friend.
When people talk about wasted time, they usually count hours.
“I spent three hours on Instagram today”
“I woke up at 11 A.M. this Sunday morning”
“I scrolled social media all evening after dinner instead of cleaning the kitchen”
Sure, it’s a useful calculation, but it misses the deeper cost. The real damage isn’t measured in hours; it’s measured in the absence of a self.
I grew up without hobbies. Not because I was lazy — of course I was, but I was a kid, laziness is expected. I wasn’t even prevented by force majeure — I had time, more than I’ve ever had since then. I grew up without hobbies because I filled every available hour with something that asked nothing of me and gave nothing back, and I called it “living”.
The result wasn’t just wasted time; it was a teenager with nothing to say. A teenager with nothing to say is a boring, empty person – the worst possible flaws according to other teenagers, at an age in which peer pressure is a horrible monster. I was a person with no identity and no personality — I had never “filled” myself with anything.
Here’s what nobody tells you about hobbies: they’re not leisure, they’re the most important construction work one can do for himself.
Every hour a kid spends learning an instrument, practicing a sport, building something with their hands — that’s not time off from becoming a person, that’s actually becoming one. The interest becomes part of your identity, and that becomes confidence, something to talk about. A way of moving through the world that has nothing to do with what other people think of you.
I know I’m not the only one in the world who hasn’t done this work. I’m not going to lie to you, that was a serious mistake. If you have the same issue and you’re around my age (33 in 2026) you have probably already noticed that when you look back you see this huge swath of absolutely nothing. I don’t have a solution to offer you – to be honest, I don’t believe it exists. What I can tell you is that, in my case, it has caused some deep insecurities that I still carry to this day, and I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of them. It’s not just about the hobbies; imagine all the events that happen collaterally in your life just because you practice a hobby: maybe you’re fifteen, you’re on the bus, going to the chess club, and you’ll meet your first romantic partner randomly, or you’ll see something weird on the streets that will win you the envy of your classmates. Everything is possible. A life without hobbies can easily become a life with nothing.
Not all is lost, though: we might not be teenagers anymore, but we’re not dead, yet. Sure, our minds don’t have the same degree of plasticity they had when we were fifteen, but this doesn’t mean we are set in our ways forever. Nobody said the good old days have to be during your adolescence; we can still build our own. I’m working on creating something worth remembering, and I want you to do the same.
I’m not saying we need to fill every moment of our waking time, that’s irrational and detrimental. The mind needs some rest; you have to allow a period of nothingness in order to let the brain fully incorporate your newfound personality. How does one distinguish between wasted time and rest, though? It’s not as easy, because they feel identical in the moment but are completely different in their effects.
Rest earns itself. If the thirty days before today were full, if you were really present in your own life, then a day of doing nothing is recovery, and it’s probably long overdue. Your mind and body need it. Lying on a couch watching something without guilt is a legitimate human activity when it follows something worth recovering from.
Wasted time is the same couch, the same screen, the same absence of demands — but it follows nothing. It precedes nothing. It exists in a life that has no momentum to interrupt, no effort to recover from, no direction it’s temporarily pausing. Don’t lie to yourself – you can tell when your brain is resting from when it’s doing nothing. Let it rest, but not so much that rest transforms in wasted time.
Hindsight is always 20/20. I couldn’t have understood any of this at fifteen. The ability to see your own life from the outside takes years to develop, and therapy, and enough distance to stop being inside the problem.
But you might be reading this at fifteen. Or at twenty-five, early enough that the guitar is still waiting and the deficit is smaller than mine. Please, don’t let it rot away the same way I did.
Let’s not get too idealistic, I know the distraction will always be there. It gets more sophisticated every year — better algorithms, more content, more platforms. I just don’t think these distractions are worth a damn, in comparison to what we can become as a full expression of a human being. We are at the top of the food chain on this planet (we hope so, at least), we can’t let a stupid smartphone dictate our thoughts.
The version of you that plays guitar, or runs, or speaks another language, or knows how to make something with their hands — that version requires time. Specific, irreplaceable time. The kind that doesn’t come back. Don’t let it pass through you.