Every moment of your life belongs to you to invest whatever effort you wish whether to help yourself or another person. You have power to order your free time.

For a whole day, or a whole week, or a whole year, or even perhaps for seven years (I did that a long time ago), unplug your television. What will you do with your time?

Television is full of anxiety producing jeopardy that drive the plots in police stories, medical examiner investigations, reality shows, remodeling shows and many others. Instead of passively watching stories about what tv characters are doing, you could create and write a story with characters that you may begin to care about. There’s no deadline when you take pleasure in creating a story all on your own. What will your story show you about your own experiences and opinions? Will you learn a new way to appreciate your own creativity? Will you learn to appreciate the knack of story-telling that others have entertained you with for most of your life?

Maybe instead, you will want to investigate a topic of interest like symmetry in physics, or art or some other branch of learning. You could look into emergent properties in complex adaptive systems. Our economy is a complex adaptive system. So is the politic. And social networks. Would you like to avoid being manipulated by social networks? Stop visiting them and start investigating them by learning how more social networking isn’t the same as a little bit of it. How can a social network create crowd effects? How can it affect your opinions and beliefs?

You could instead design and build a new piece of furniture or sew a new duvet cover or make (really) almost anything. Paint a picture. Write a poem. Write a letter.
Your pent up potential is wanting to be set free. Grab some courage and face your world of open possibilities. There’s no telling where it may take you if you make something, learn something, or do something new.

If you want to learn about how our political and economic system works to create or limit new opportunities for you, get a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, available at Amazon.com. Learn all about political ideologies and the people who invented them. Learn about the policies that affect American outcomes over history.