At least a handful of times a week I find myself shaking my head as I watch a YouTube clip, or hear a story, or take a look at a picture that someone's uploaded, and wonder, where on Earth did they find the time to do that?
Take Simon Beck, for example. He spends his days alongside the isolated, frozen lakes of Savoie in France, where he walks through the clean, freshly fallen snow, carefully plotting his path so that the footprints he makes with his snowshoes create enormous, elaborate geometric patterns in the snow that can only be seen from the sky. He plots them so carefully that some of them even look 3D from above.
Most of his pieces are the size of three soccer fields and he works for five to nine hours a day, or as long as he has enough daylight to see where he's going. The people flying over his masterpieces on easyJet must be incredibly moved and grateful - that is, if they stop watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond on the in-flight entertainment system long enough to look out of the window.
His designs are at the mercy of anyone who might cross his path while out walking their excitable dogs, not to mention the weather. Three days' work can be erased overnight by a heavy snowfall, yet on he plods. Fair enough, the results are spectacular, but one has to wonder where he finds the time? While he's off trampling through the snow, who's doing the shopping, getting the exhaust on the car fixed, or standing in the queue at Home Affairs?
The internet is home to millions of these kinds of people doing these kinds of projects. Some are certainly more futile and time-consuming than others. For example, did you know that there's a whole club of people who upload their favourite movies onto YouTube, but first they recreate the movie with their own soundtracks.
They mute the original soundtrack created by the professionals in Hollywood, and re-imagine how they'd score the entire two-hour long movie themselves. It's the equivalent of making a mixed tape, but instead of giving it to a girl you're trying to impress, you give it to a movie you're trying to impress. The term "get a girlfriend" does come to mind.
Other bizarre projects out there, while still massively time-consuming, are at least sweet and interesting, and stimulate some form of discussion.
Michael and Lenka from the UK woke up one day and decided to send a handwritten letter to every single person in the world. They started with a small village in England called Cushendall. So, on one day, every single person in the village received their very own hand-written letter or postcard in the mail.
The letters ranged from plain "hello, how are yous", to long rants about what was on television the night before, or poetic missives about what an amazing person the recipient of the letter is. Every single one of the 467 letters received were hand-written, original and personalised. Even the local post office received one.
I don't know about you, but some days I struggle to find the time to brush my hair and buy milk, let alone lie on the floor for two hours with my camera-phone poised, waiting for the cat to do something cute, or write 467 personalised letters.
If it wasn't for these strange and creative people with either insomnia or far too much time on their hands, our world would be a much duller place, and what would we e-mail to each other all day? Our inboxes would be empty, and half of Twitter-ville and Facebook-land would be a ghost town.
So, to the guy who decided to recreate an entire Eddie Izzard skit with Lego, in stop-frame animation: 16-million hits later, we're truly grateful you had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no friends, no commitments, no dates and no deadlines for a couple of months of your life.
And to the guy who took a photograph of himself every single day for eight years, and then turned it into a video, I'm terribly sorry but the guy who took a photograph of himself every single day for six years and turned it into a video, beat you to it, by posting his on the internet a whole month before you posted yours.