What is a Wasted Life?

Consumerism and the reckoning with life’s absurdity

Benjamin Cain

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Photo by Antoine GIRET on Unsplash

There’s a trope in popular culture that you shouldn’t “waste your life.”

Here’s an example of life advice on how to realize you might be committing that grievous sin. A digital marketer and life coach realized, as he says, that after settling down into his job, ‘I’m just “putting in time” now, waiting for something better to happen in life. If that’s not wasting my life, I don’t know what is.’

The problems for him were the routines: “You know, the whole 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, office routine. On top of that, I had my chill-out-after-work-in-front-of-the-TV routine. Sure, I still went out with friends, but I couldn’t help but feel my life was reduced to nothing more than a boring rerun.”

Moreover, ‘Most people don’t recognize these “harmless” routines they may have fallen into, so they go about their lives as if nothing bad is happening. But these routines are lethal in their tendency to waste lives if left unchecked. People often don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.’

That’s just one example of a great many more warnings you can find about the wasted life. As of this writing, if you google “wasted life,” you get 206 million hits. Some related searches are “wasted life depression,” “wasted life…

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