“Free” is one of my favorite four-letter words. There's almost no other more powerful marketing word. (Except perhaps “you” because people love to have people pay attention to them.)
Sadly, free isn't free. Everything has a cost. There's no such thing as a free lunch. It's so very easy to be lured into doing someone else's bidding by something free.
Much of the Internet is the embodiment of free
At no other time in our history on this planet has so much content, so much capacity for communication, and so many ways of self-expression been available to us, for so little cost. Just about everything is available on the Internet, and much of it for free.
A motivated person can learn just about anything from information on the Internet. Heck, that can be accomplished without ever leaving Wikipedia.
A motivated person can get just about any question answered either through a Google search, or by finding the right forum to ask in.
A motivated person can create something of value, put it on the Internet, and have it pay dividends to society long after she's gone.
A great bargain, or an extremely high-cost mistake
However, free is not the same as without cost. Time spent on the Internet is time spent. The time is gone, never to return. The cost of free can be huge.
Have you ever watched a really worthless YouTube video somewhere, and thought — or even commented underneath — that “that's 3 minutes of my life I'll never get back”? Well, this applies to every website visit, every article, every video, every podcast. The time is spent on everything.
Whereas a motivated person spends time on the Internet wisely, others spend it foolishly. (Probably most people are somewhere in between.)
What's deceiving about the Internet though is that (beyond the cost of Internet access) so much of the Internet is free. Literally endless entertainment of each and every flavor you enjoy, publicly or in secret, is available for the taking. Abundance of entertainment, to the fourth power. Evening after evening, week after week, year after year.
The entertainment is inexhaustible.
Unfortunately, we're quite exhaustible. When our time is gone, it's gone. We can't go back and get some more. We can't even buy more. We're done.
A life spent on the pursuit of free entertainment is an extremely high-cost mistake. We over-consume free entertainment, and it ends up consuming us.
I certainly don't claim to use my time on the Internet wisely all the time. At times, it pains me to say that I've used very little of my time on the Internet wisely.
I don't watch a lot of TV, but that's only because I can easily “turn on the Internet” as if I'm turning on the TV. Some websites don't expect a thing of me and are very easy to consume. This is passive entertainment. Not at all like going to a website deliberately to learn something new, or to create something of lasting value.
Does your Internet time have a purpose?
I think that's the key question to ask. Are you using the Internet to further your goals? If not, then it may be (a) your goals are unclear or non-existent, or (b) those goals aren't really that important to you. If you're using the Internet to unwind, do you continue to use the Internet after you're unwound? Is it a habit that isn't given much further thought?
Using the Internet purposefully and productively is the key to taking advantage of free rather than being taken advantage of by it.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch” rings true in your post! The internet is a time sink. A few years ago I was playing a myriad of Facebook games, until I realized that I was wasting several hours a day on that. I quit playing every single one and have since labeled then “Time Vampires”. If you put a dollar value on every hour of your time and did a quick analysis, I think you would find that spending time on the Internet costs you a lot more than you realize!
I love the internet and spend a great deal of time on it. My one concern about the internet is no one edits what is on the internet. I am not talking about various legitimate publications, but the fact that anyone can publish something even if it is false. There is so much information on the internet, it is difficult or impossible to edit all this information. For me, it is the price of freedom!
Don’t you know: it can’t be on the internet if it isn’t true!
I look at a good portion of time spent on the Internet as entertainment. Which in the past might have cost you money now can be had for ‘free’.
As far as gathering information, a lot of times I will go look for information about something (maybe how to fix something around the house or whatever) and it might take ten minutes of going through pages that don’t really have what I’m looking for, but if I find what I’m looking for in the end, it’s still time well spent overall. Otherwise, you often would hire someone, spend time calling someone, or traveling to a library or home improvement store to get that information. Sometimes you have to do those things anyways, but a lot of times you do end up saving time and money.
Ouch. Point taken. Last year during Lent (I’m Catholic), I took a Facebook fast for the entire 40 days. During that time, I was far more productive with my Internet time than I’d been previously. I realized how much time – and, hence, money (at least for me, since I work online) – I was wasting on those sites.
To put it concisely: free things often hide enormous opportunity costs.
Wasting away on the web is so easy. You hit the nail on the head. I often go to the library to get away from the distractions of home to get work done, but even there its easy to get distracted. Productivity will always be a struggle, I think its just a matter of really assessing what you do with your time and make a conscious effort to improve what you can.
I would ask you and anyone else this one question: Is it really so necessary to spend 100% of our time being productive?
It’s all well and good to want to use time planned for production to not be wasted, but not all of the time we have should fall into that category. I think it’s ok for people to lose themselves online or in a tv show for a little while–there’s no harm in it. Honestly, I think it’s quite important.
I’m totally on board with the idea that time is the most valuable and fleeting resource available to us, but not allowing for some frivolous, unproductive play is just as bad as not being productive at all. As with anything, balance is the key, and you have to allow for the play to make the work worthwhile (or do the work to make the play possible).