From a quote from a Kottke.org post:
It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do _costs_ time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; _their time needed their art_.
Jason in his own post goes on to say:
a few years ago I shifted my thinking around time & energy. I noticed that when I thought or said “I don’t have time for this”, what I really meant was “I don’t have the energy for this”. Obviously I have time to do all sorts of things — I spend many hours during the week in front of the TV or on my phone watching/reading garbage — but it’s actually the energy that’s the issue.
My experience is that we are collectively going through chronic mental exhaustion. Between info hungry work, and social media, and chats app, and the anxieties and attention they all demand and the anxieties they create, we no longer have the mental energy to even look forward to our art, our interests.
Like Kottke and the people he quotes, life may need us to forcefully make time for it so as to gain some mental and emotional bandwidth back.