In Search Of Wasted Time

It is a truth universally acknowledged (in 2026, anyway) that if a person spends enough time online, and chooses to share their thoughts, they will be trolled. And I am no exception. It hasn’t happened a ton to me, and the comments haven’t been nasty enough to leave permanent marks, but it has happened, and will continue to happen.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bug me. It’s a tiny bite out of your ego, especially if what you put out there is intended to be useful or helpful, but that’s not what bothers me most about nasty little online digs. And yes, I know that often, this sort of vitriol is bot-generated, and that’s not what irks me either.

Trolling drives me crazy because it is an abject waste of time, both mine and the trolls.

I don’t think I ever realized how affronted I was by time-wasting until I was trolled. Deleting and blocking the perpetrator only takes a moment, but that’s my moment, and so are all the moments I spend later on, grumbling and sulking about it. And the slug on the other end (if they were even human), probably spent only a few minutes typing and hitting send, but how much of their day was spent being a pain in the butt to others? What weren’t they doing while they were busy calling people names and picking at their work? How much of their time and mine got stuck to the stupid and unnecessary bit of feedback they left?

So, do people troll online (or offline, for that matter) because they’re woefully over-scheduled, and it’s a quick bit of relief? Or do trolls have way too much time on their hands, and they do what they do because it’s a challenge to find something meaningful to do? Where do all of us stand on free time, and the best way to use it?

I suppose this question could be approached quantitatively. If some bitter, basement-dwelling grouch chooses to dump on 20 posts per day, how many hours does that amount to per week, per month, or per year? How many units of daily life does a troll spend sourly commenting on a celebrity’s haircut, a seasonal flavour of latte at Starbucks, or the latest superhero movie? I’m not talking about clever, insightful dialogue about these things (that would be most welcome), but just general nastiness for the sake of nastiness. It seems like it could really add up.

It could also be examined historically and sociologically. It’s no secret that the industrial revolution did a number on our perception of time, not to mention the amount of it we had to spare. In terms of when we sleep, when we eat, or when we do work for others, we still run on relatively the same principles of time management as we did over 200 years ago. The spare time we have between these things is still expected to be spent on particular activities, namely, those that will “contribute to the economy”. We aren’t exactly set up to know what to do with the precious few minutes we have to spare here and there. Someone usually tells us how to spend it, and right now, we’re encouraged to spend our spare time unleashing fury on one another.

There’s also a neurological side to all of this, and I’m not a neurologist, but there must be some sort of dopamine blob dispensed when one takes a cheap, unprovoked shot. The fix is quick, but it still comes at the expense of time that could be spent chasing the kind of buzz that comes from more productive, positive pursuits. Could salvaging lost, wasted time result in happy chemicals, if we were aware it was happening? If I consciously reclaim the five minutes I might spend hating on a stranger, and do something creative or productive, does the very act of taking back my time itself make me feel better?

Is laying claim to lost time one small way to tackle hate and abuse? If those doling out the awful don’t seem to care about the moral and social implications of mudslinging, could they be enticed to put away the daggers if it was clearly pointed out to them that they by being useless and spiteful, they are literally running out their own clock? We have apps that count our steps and our calories, but what if one of them measured the minutes we pissed away being an ass to others? If someone had raw data like this, or even a set of suggestions of other ways to spend their time, would it help? What if you found out that in the time it took for you to cut others down anonymously, you could have taken the dog for a walk, baked brownies, or taken a hot bath?

It’s probably naive to think that cruelty could be curtailed simply with a reminder of the swift passage of time. Maybe it’s because I’m in the second act of my life, but it’s something I think about a lot. This isn’t just the suggestion of a whiny creator who wants everyone to like them (though I really would prefer to be liked). It’s a plea from someone who would genuinely like things to get better, and who thinks that a re-evaluation of what we do with ourselves in our precious spare moments might be part of that. Spending time on things that are productive, constructive, helpful and fulfilling is an act of rebellion. Spending time in a deliberate, conscientious way is beautiful anarchy. I don’t know that anyone can give us a definitive list of which actions and pursuits are worth it. Figuring that out is kind of how we give meaning to our lives, to our world. The same applies to pointing out the stuff that simply isn’t worth the minutes, hours or days it costs us.