‘What’s the most pointless thing you’ve spent hours doing only to realise it was completely useless?’ – 21 epic wastes of time

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time, as the old saying goes, and anyone who has spent several blissful hours mindlessly binging their favourite TV show will heartily agree.

However, while vegging out in front of the box is definitely therapeutic relaxation, there are some activities that genuinely are squandering precious seconds of our only life. They’ve been chatting about this on Reddit after user FreshModeSP asked this:

What’s the most pointless thing you’ve spent hours doing, only to realise it was completely useless?

People were happy to spend a little bit of their valuable existences replying, like these…

1.

‘Reading 200 Amazon reviews for a sponge. Ended up not buying it.’
–Reasonable-News-3218

2.

‘Thinking about conversations hours after they happened and trying to think of what I could have said differently.’
–General_Nup

3.

‘Arguing with strangers on the internet.’
–Simon_Klios

4.

‘The hours I spent poring over reviews to find the best humidifier. Ended up picking one up on a whim. It was $14 in the Walmart clearance bin. It works fine.’
–elusiveelation

5.

‘Spent hundreds of hours making a large and complicated cross stitch sampler for a close family members wedding. Spent a fortune framing it. They got divorced. I can’t even stand to think about what happened to it. Lesson learned.’
–Poodlepink22

6.

‘Moved into a new house and the back lawn was pretty nice but noticed the lawn and weeds growing up the fence on all three sides so I assumed they had mowed the lawn and didn’t edge it. I watered that lawn for two weeks before I noticed it was fake.’
–Free_Ganache_6281

7.

‘My wife watered a fake orchid for two years. You’re good.’
–Freakin_A

8.

‘Scrolling through Netflix for an hour only to rewatch The Office for the 12th time.’
–TheLegitimateGoose

9.

‘I spent weeks learning how to code and I made my own website for teachers to play a game in class. Got it fully functional. Later I was describing it to a friend and he said, oh kind of like ____.com which is when I realised someone had already made my idea happen.’
–Illustrious_Job1458

10.

‘Spent countless hours every spring and summer weekend for years fighting back honeysuckle, kudzu and bamboo, fertilising and weeding my lawn. Finally came to the realisation that none of it mattered, it was always going to grow back from all three neighbours’ yards. Now I just run it over with the mower and ignore whatever is left.’
–bluecheetos

11.

‘World of Warcrack…..I mean, Warcraft.’
–Youdontknowme1771