Addictions

People seem to joke that they are addicted to gossip, the news, sports, the Internet, or their phone. They don’t think it’s serious because there is no real harm. Unlike drinking until the early morning and waking up with a hangover, spending the night checking updates of all your favorite blogs doesn’t seem to have any negative physical consequences.

I do think that there are some, but that’s not the topic of this article. Instead, I want to talk about what to do if you think that your “addictions” aren’t so funny anymore and you’ve realized that they make you much less productive or social than you otherwise would be. I couldn’t give you a plausible reason if you were able to restrict yourself to at most 30 minutes of distractions a day, but if it is much more than that, then you may want to think about it. Also, I don’t claim any kind of elitism with regards to the medium. Spending eight hours a day perusing the New York Times is hardly better than roaming some phantasy landscapes in World of Warcraft or losing yourself in online discussions.

I am a man of simple principles, and if you think an area of your life has gotten out of hand, then I wouldn’t know of any better solution than going cold turkey and just cut it off. If your spare time consists of playing online multiplayer games, and you realize that you won’t be able to “compete” anymore if you don’t invest at least six hours a day, then delete your account and stop playing it altogether.

Other “addictions” are much less intrusive, but if you compulsively check your emails every few minutes, and many people do that, then make use of certain tools. There are programs that allow you to block websites for a certain amount of time, and if you don’t know any other way around it, then check your emails once a day, get it over and done with, and set that program that blocks access for 24 hours. Parental filters are another option, which may be useful if you are a red-blooded male and compulsively check certain kinds of online material. I am not necessarily differentiating between, say, baseball stats and porn. Each is bad in their very own way.

Unfortunately, these days many people don’t even know how it was to live without the Internet because they grew up with it. Yet, instead of using it productively, it is replacing TV as our tool of choice for wasting our life. Yet, there is so much more you could do with your time, if you don’t allow yourself to get trapped in “entertainment.”