Four fun but pointless things people do to kill time

1. Make elaborate travel plans and itineraries for trips they know they won't go to.
   
   I do this all the time. I look at flight bookings, optimize on dates and times cross reference with my work days, make sure I have that time off. I'll then look up hostels, hotels, airbnb's, and figure out what makes the most sense. If there's a good deal, I'll extend my imaginary trip to a month, adjusting flights accordingly. I'll look at activities to do, museums readings performances, nature activities, hikes scuba dives, and make a nice little budget. For food I plan to eat at the local not too expensive places or make food by myself. Then there's the people I want to meet and how I'd go about making friends. I spend several hours even days figuring it all out. And I look at the plan and say to myself, gee that sure would be fun! I start looking for holes in the plan, poke holes rather. Ooh if I took down the monthlong trip by 7 days the price for the rental would be half. Ooh, if I left four days later it'd be even cheaper. Oo I should take the train instead so I see more of the place and save money. Huh, if I'm going to be taking trains I might as well sleep in them, that way I can do travel and stay in the same time and money. So I can cancel all those  nights in the hotel. Oh, but that means...that if I sleep in trains every night as I move between towns, I can save on all that money. I can pay for public bathrooms for showering. And for food I can always get fast food, they do say fastfood is different across different countries so it'll be a great way to do a food tour of fast food. Wait wait, so if I spend the first ten days travelling in own state and eating nice food here, I'll actually be saving seventy percent of my costs. And so on and on and on. By then the trip is like four days long and involves me basically sitting on the train. At which point I decide that if I wanted to sit on the train I could just sit on my bed and pretend I was on a train and watch those videos from the train video. And that kills my interest for the trip usually.
   
   
2. Make elaborate resettlement plans that will likely never come to fruition.
   
   I've really lived in two cities, three if you want to stretch it, over the course of ten years in the U.S. Eight of them have been in one city, four while I was in college. I have done detailed research on renting and/or buying apartments in maybe fifteen cities across the world, out of which I've done three quite seriously. New York, Philly, and Northern Virginia. It's fun, it lets me imagine what my life would be like, what the costs would be what tradeoffs would be involved. Never end up following on them in most situations because for some reason or the other it doesn't pan out. It's mostly because of the work situation not going the way I intended it to.
   
   
3. Make big plans to change careers
   
   This I don't work on as much as the above two, but I imagine myself in so many other careers that I grow into. Agriculture person. Surgeon, inspired by Grey's anatomy. Lab PI directing engineering innovation lab. A famous writer. Poet. Political activist. Business owner with a small conglomerate -- the conglomerate is important because otherwise one might just be a shopkeeper. A successful homemaker. And so on and on and on. I'm being a little glib here, some of the above plans are more serious than others, but you get the gist, it's fun planing for career change.
   
   
4. Come up with ridiculous business ideas
   
   This is an exaggerated version of something I have been working on. The agriculture idea I have been talking about here came from one of those idle musings. I've worked on it more than I have on anything else ever. But I do make a lot of plans, detailed or otherwise, intending to do something or another. A great website, a great service, plan it out sketch out the details, figure out what resources and people I'd need, how the budgeting could work, what the failure scenarios are like etcetera. Then I figure if the idea was any good someone else would have done it better and made a tonne of money and abandon my idea. Often I'll discover there's already a business that already does something similar and be disheartened.