Life in today's society is fucking pathetic. Time is gold, they all say. We've got 24/7 lives now, with all-night convenience stores, videostores and gas stations. Time has become a commodity, on the same line as anything else. Oh, you can't actually BUY time in itself, but you can someone to do things for you, which will save you time.
Cleaning lady, Dishwasher, take-out meals...... You're buying time.
And what do you do with that precious time you just bought? Normally, you choose to spend it in front of the telly, computer games what have you? My point is; A hundred years back, there was no such thing as free time. You worked when the sun went up and you stopped working when it went down again. Very easy stuff. Big yellow blob in the sky, oh, must be working, then. Humanity has spent an enormous collective effort at getting things done in a so effective way. And we're too good at it. We're so good that we've can make a living off things that are designed to WASTE time, because wasting time is so much fun!
Haven't we all done it? Stayed up too long only to watch a film in the telly, or playing some compyuer game "Only one more level before I go to bed, I promise", although we had something important to do the next day? You get addicted at wasting time. There's a threshold where you say to yourself, "ah, fuck it. Tomorrow no school. I'll stay up and surf the internet or whatever....talk to people on MIRC." I know. I've been across this threshold many times. It's fucking scary. The inutility takes control of your life, and you feel that you don't count in the long run, no matter what you do.
To make things worse, we spend time discussing the things we're all wasting our time with. Yes, okay, Fanfic is a waste of time. But it's still a waste which produces SOMETHING, a product which we can point to and say "Hey, at least SOMETHING came out of it". Discussing whether someone has the right to critise another man's fanfic, however, is so lame-arsed I won't be bothered. Mankind likes to critise each other, to point out the shortcoming of the man standing next to you for the whole world to see. It's what we do best.
That, and wasting time.