1). You get to rewatch and rediscover Cheers. It's actually a very warm-hearted, hilarious show, you realize. Of course, being a sitcom, you'll get ridiculous episodes like the one where Diane is forced to marry Sam because her dead father wrote a stipulation in his will that he would cut off funds to her mother if Diane didn't get married exactly ten years after his death. But I can forgive that. You always forgive family.
2). Movies are suddenly really different to you. You grow bored and restless during most summer blockbusters, predicting plot points way in advance, growing irritated at the fact that every woman in the movie is, at some point, half-naked for no good reason, getting annoyed that not one of the five credited screenwriters bothered making any of the peripheral characters interesting and instead allowed them to be defined by their hair color and/or race. Conversely, you can watch a Slow-Ass Movie like "Meek's Cutoff" without falling asleep and actually fully appreciate what it's trying to do.
3). Tired? Take a nap.
4). Related: you're pretty much never tired.
5). Remember reading? You get to do a lot of that. You had forgotten how engrossing and rewarding of an experience it is to rip through a book in a day.
6). You have the time and energy to learn all those things you've never had the time and energy to learn. Remember in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray learns to play the piano with his infinite time? You learned After Effects. It's a strangely empowering feeling knowing that you can do some basic special effects now. You hunger to make films again. You haven't felt that in a long time.
7). You feel a genuine sense of self-confidence for the first time in a long time because you're doing what you love. You're not making any money doing it but goddamn is it wonderful that your main concerns on any given day are all related to making short films.
8). You're writing again. And, if you can be frank, it's mostly good. In fact, you've started a novel knowing full well you will probably never finish it. But you feel good about it. It's a good story and you love all the characters in it, even the villain who you named after your last boss. In your novel he will be a lost soul who never felt like he belonged. This is probably true for his real life counterpart. You forgive him. That ends up feeling pretty good.
9). Everything becomes a joke. Or, rather, you're thinking of good jokes all the time. You think they're good, anyway. Like when you started riffing about tubers. ("You call that a sweet potato?")
10). You deeply admire how the cashier at the grocery store is keeping the line at the express lane under control. You stop short of telling her this because you don't want her to think you're flirting because you aren't. You just really admire how good she is at her job, and you think she should hear it. She probably never hears it, not even from her bosses, especially not from her bosses. You even admire the way she tells the customer after you - who has way more than ten items - that next time she should go to a non-express lane. She somehow says it without sounding rude, yet with an unyielding tone that lets you know that if you ever happen to run into that customer again it will be in a non-express lane. You have to figure that among the world's population, this cashier in front of you is probably in the top one percent. This makes her as good at her job as Michael Jordan was at his. You smile at her as she hands you your receipt. She smiles back. You walk to your car wishing you had told her, "You're doing a great job, by the way." Those would've been the exact words you would've used. Nothing more, nothing less. She would've thanked you, maybe held a delicate hand to her chest. She'd tear up just a little, just enough to put a shine in her eyes, and she would've gone home to her kids or her boyfriend or her girlfriend that night and smile at them and just watch them. They'd feel her eyes on them and feel loved. And you would've walked out of the store thinking of your old co-workers and how you wish you would've said those same words to them more often. Because they were awesome, weren't they? Yeah. They were pretty much the best. Top one percent, easy.
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