It's a Saturday morning. I woke up at 9, it's now 13 and so far today I've done...nothing. Nothing good, nothing bad, I'm not happy, I'm not sad, I don't have to be anywhere, I don't intend on going anywhere, I didn't plan anything for today, it's entirely my "free time". How I loved free time in the past, free time meant doing everything I wanted to do when I couldn't. Nowadays, free time has become polarized. When I don't have free time, I wish I had free time, I have ideas about what I could do with it. When I do have free time, I have no ideas and I basically waste it on nothing. And nothing illustrates that outcome better than the summer. If I do have something planned for the summer, I end up doing that. Otherwise I end up doing nothing. And it's much the same kind of feeling that has filled many summers as I have right now, a feeling of nothing at all.

What happens is that I methodically reject every option open to me. I try to get some work done, half an hour into it I'm bored with it, I have no drive to work. I start a book, I get sick of the book. I watch some tv, I get sick of tv. I run through the bookmarks in my browser, exhaust everything of interest there in 40 minutes. I check my email, nothing new there. I start randomly clicking through my filesystem, hoping to find something interesting, but of course I've seen it all before. And so on and so forth. Instead, I wish there were *something* meaningful that I would like to do right now. It doesn't mean there isn't anything worthwhile to do, there just doesn't *seem* to be anything. It's a problem of being entrenched in my own world, people try to help and suggest things to do, but of course those suggestions sound no more interesting to me than the things I've already conceived and rejected myself. And someone trying hard to sell an idea that isn't actually very good, piling on false enthusiasm, just makes me want to ignore them.

When I was a kid and I got in this situation, sometimes I would ask people for suggestions. Invariably, those suggestions rarely opened my eyes to anything I hadn't thought about before, or they would be variations and combinations of my own ideas, things that were already painfully obvious. What I'm really looking for is new impulses, distractions maybe, to guide me in a direction I hadn't seen before, that I didn't know existed. That's the only way I get interested in doing something.

Is it a necessary part of life to feel emptiness ever so often?