September 2021 marks the fourth year of this blog. So it’s a good time to reflect on myself.
I believe the quality of articles has increased this year. I don’t like bragging, but I can’t help but feel like I put a little bit more effort into my words nowadays. Of course, the editing contributions of my friend Alex cannot ever be overstated. It’s thanks to him that my essays look as professional as they do .
Have I made good on the “an article a month” promise so far? We have 4 months and I need to deliver 6 new posts (counting this). I need to make up for the past years as well, 2020 was kind of an embarrassment for the blog all things considered If I give myself 2 weeks between each article, I have the potential to deliver 8 essays, anything more would make me run out of topics pretty quickly, somewhat hurts the visibility of the posts and I don’t think I can even deal with the workload. But, an article every 2-3 weeks is not so bad, and I am quite confident to keep up my promise from now on. How? First, a little story:
When I was a teenager, there was not much going on with my life. Most of my time was spent on school and related activities and was quite isolated in many ways. But then, I started going to university. My English was now proficient enough and I had lots of free time, so I could finally surf the Web.
And surf I did. On various forums, sites like Wikipedia and TVTropes, I have devoured every novel information like a starved animal, most of which would be obvious to most of you, but not to me, because I was living in a bubble. One website in particular would prove quite influential on me: Youtube.
There were let’s plays, media reviews, little weird videos and all kinds of interesting stuff. I have watched so many videos, for years. A lot. Admittedly too much. However, I got a lot of out of it too:
My English jumped from “usable” to “casually good”
It gave me motivation and a pop culture foundation to start this blog!
I discovered a good 95% of the music I listen to here, especially anything that’s not from a game or anime soundtrack.
Some of the best things I have watched were on Youtube. Both educational and artistically. (A recommendation list is a decent idea for another blog)
Youtube, for everything bad about it, is actually a quite amazing free source of constant and easily-available entertainment, both to listen casually and to actually learn things from.
It is also “the constant and easily-available entertainment” part that has bitten me quite a bit in recent years. Easier than studying, creating, working, reading, playing, messaging, showering, cleaning… I won’t say it’s addicting. For one, I have never craved it constantly. I could do just fine when I did not have access to a computer. Also, I was well-aware about its ability to eat my time for years.
But it was so easy. Just watch this video, maybe that one too. Just a 10-20 minutes before getting into any kind of work. While distracted, the mouse hovered on Youtube again and again. It’s just so easy to watch when you just hop on the computer, taking a break, eating something, feeling tired at night, or just want to do nothing in particular. Serials or movies are not really the same for me, they require commitment. Youtube doesn’t. It’s always there. Occasionally, a circular interest takes over me and for a time, my use of Youtube will be limited. But, I always return to it not long after. Occasionally, Twitter has proved itself to be bad for my productivity as well, but nowhere close to Youtube. Youtube was always there, was never noticeably dull, and most importantly, demanded nothing but my time.
I knew this was draining me slowly and making me quite unproductive. “Productivity” is a heavily loaded word, but I use it here for anything I want to do. I love learning, getting better at things, or just engaging in some art, you know? So, I tried to fight back against it.
My method was putting them in the background. Most Youtube videos are quite understandable without actually seeing them. Occasionally, it worked well enough. I was writing articles, playing games, chatting with my friends
and while catching up to the good content.
These spikes of productivity were the exact thing that deceived me. After all, under enough pressure or with a burst of passion I was quite capable of having a nice couple of productive days. This is exactly what made idle watching so dangerous. It is how Youtube proved to be “draining”. “Listening in the background” stretched one hour of writing into a whole day. Paying attention to anything for long proved quite difficult. Scant few types of videos are actually non-distracting, but even they can open a door to distracting videos. For every one decently productive day, I was having a week of trying to do anything in the middle of Youtube and Twitter feedback loop. I was zombie-watching.
About a few weeks ago, I said enough was enough, and stopped watching videos.
This was not giving it up cold turkey, I tried that and that doesn’t work. Old habits eventually creep in. No, this was a fundamental shift in how I was going to use the website. I decided that I will watch Youtube only in two cases:
When it’s maybe one-two hours away from sleep and I can’t think of anything better to do.
When a video is genuinely worth allocating time, I will still prioritize watching it in “off-work” hours, unless it is relevant to the work I am doing.
The immediate effect was to realize how truly draining the zombie-watching was. Like wow, there is so much time to do things now. When I want to sit down and study for a couple of hours, I can do that now. I can write articles without the ebb and flow of my attention, I don’t have to look at the same screen the whole day just to be able to write a couple hundred words. I don’t need to scapegoat responsibilities like cleaning or shopping for my lack of time, I have time. I don’t need to turn to the same Youtube videos I have watched a dozen times or refresh the page again and again just so I can distract myself from the gnawing feeling that my life is slipping away. When I lay in the bed I don’t have to think about how I am useless and unable to achieve anything. I have never been this productive for this long even with some external force pushing me. It doesn’t feel like a sprint either, I just have the willpower to start and finish any task, something I have lacked since I began 10th grade. Knock on wood...
After not watching for a while, not watching indeed has proved quite easy. This is how I can say with certainty that I wasn’t addicted. Regardless of the quality of their videos, I wasn’t following most channels I did out of active interest. They were just good enough content that I can use as someone would get drunk to forget the pains. Quitting made me actually appreciate the limited time I now spend watching videos. They feel enjoyable in a way that the never-ending mill of content I was half-watching while trying to do something never was. They stopped being “content”, they became comedy, opinion pieces, documentaries, tutorials, cute animal videos again.
The final revelation was that I was, actually, quite bored. I craved something that wasn’t Youtube, that wasn’t just someone else's opinion or research. I wanted to engage in art, to learn and to create! After a long time, I played video games again, and without trying to listen to something in the background, without Alt-Tabbing every ten minutes to check the timeline or refresh the Youtube page! And I found out that my habits made me somewhat fragile! A couple of years ago, I was able to play games for hours and hours without breaking a sweat, now playing more than about 4-5 hours makes me somewhat tired. But it’s all good, it means the brain is getting used to paying attention again.
Part of the reason why the new posts were coming so erratically was that I was plainly having a hard time coming up with something interesting. Living so passively drained my creativity quite a bit too. The topics I have written about for a couple of months were either long in the drafts, or were found by mere accident. Sometimes, old ideas did not help either. Some topics have been in the drafts for so long that I have completely forgotten my opinions about them. In retrospect, it is actually miraculous that the posts turned out as good as they have.
My sole steady creative output was my amateur constructed language project, which I gave a little introduction here last year. After a couple of months, it too succumbed to my circling interests. There were other excuses too of course, like school and housework. Months later, I returned to work on it, but didn’t like where it was going, and began anew. It’s 90% thanks to that project that I was spared from falling into serious mental issues, quite similar to how I was using this very for a similar effect back in 2017-2018. That time, being enrolled in graduate school saved me. This time, it’s entirely through my own efforts and some feedback from my family. No more trying to write anything in between endlessly chasing every new video or tweet. I am really determined. I won’t feel terrible for my own foolish habits! No more!
So then, what will I do instead? Maybe watching some anime I wanted to watch for years, reading and finishing some physical books, paying proper attention to my school, doing real programming work, actually planning a program to study Japanese in a disciplined manner and so on…
What does this mean for you, dear reader? Well, as stated before, I intend to release a new essay every 2-3 weeks. I can’t always guarantee that they will be as big as the previous one, but hopefully, you won’t be disappointed quality-wise.
I don’t like to publicly declare article topics because I can change ideas fairly easily, but you might see a couple of articles on video game genres. That topic is quite interesting to me, and it’s something I can endlessly talk about. I could also remake more articles. The ones that are old enough that most people won’t remember. A lot of stuff on the website could use a clean up. Perhaps my opinions have even changed since then. In particular, Battle of Middle Earth articles still stand out as disappointments to me. Other than that I won’t promise anything too specific, just your usual video game musings, and perhaps some other media critique as well. I hope you enjoy those!
One topic that was in my head for quite a while is how to present my conlang project. Should I do it when it is developed to a certain point or should I release small stuff while I am doing it? Unless you are already greatly into conlangs, neither seems like an interesting prospect. I want to make it appealing to a more general audience, and maybe get people more interested in languages too? Lofty ideas, surely, but a woman can dream.
Certainly, I have a lot of dreams. One of them is to have another 4 years writing this blog. 4 good years. Perhaps one day, it will be more famous. But I don’t care too much. Enjoying that there is a place I can organize my thoughts and knowing that other people also get to enjoy seeing it matters by itself. Being able to make an allowance on top is already miraculous enough. Perhaps one day I will gather confidence, discipline and enough literature background to try fiction writing too.
For that to happen, I need to avoid falling back to destructive cycles again. So far, it’s going pretty alright, but there are still improvements to be made. Some say that worrying about time efficiency is a product of capitalism. Which is largely correct, and we need to all remember that we are not factories, that mindset is equally destructive. But no matter what, I plainly don’t like the feeling that I am doing nothing with my time. If I could live in a society where I could sleep all day without any repercussions, the feeling would still haunt me. At its core, it’s not really about a sense of responsibility towards others, but something deeper. Not a cry to “Create, create, create!” but a raw desire to keep the thought-mill spinning. Daydreaming has been my most defining trait since when I was a wee child. Dreams forever await me to weave. And for that, time must be used cleverly. There is no merit to cry over wasted opportunities, no point in worrying about an uncontrollable future. I just want the seconds slipping away at this very moment to amount to something. Just not empty-brain watching life as a film reel.
My advice for you is the same too, dear reader. If you sincerely feel that Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, a Discord channel, a video game or any other nominally recreational way to spend your time is making you miserable, then quit! Perhaps you don’t need to give up entirely, then restrict yourself! Customize the social media for your benefit, don’t finish the series you don’t enjoy. Stop making memes about how you keep doing the thing you hate. Change is not easy, it took me so long for me to fully gain this level of consciousness, you might have many additional problems that push you into this cycle, and the entertainment industry very much feeds on people’s bad habits. Something in our hearts wants to keep us in perpetual misery in regret and yearning. It seems inescapable at times. But know this, you are never too late to reclaim your present, no matter how many times you have relapsed. Your day can always be a little better...
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This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons, namely: Effy, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Morgan, Olympia, Otakundead, Sasha. Also thanks to Alex(@jyhadscientist on Twitter) for his perfect editing work
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