Here it is! The final Depth Year Diary! You probably saw I published my review of the project over on the main site, but that doesn’t mean that you and I can’t finish up with our usual secret discussions. From next month onwards I’ll be doing another year long series, so if you’ve enjoyed these more private looks into my life then you’ve no reason to suspect they’re going away. Only the focus will change.
So I guess – that was my depth year. It was a success. I was delighted that David Cain over at Raptitude cited my review in his own post about Depth Year 2020, and if you’ve been tempted by the diaries I’d certainly recommend it as something worth doing. I won’t be doing Depth Year 2020 but I might well do Depth Year 2021. Maybe. We’ll see how long the lessons from this one stick.
Really what I’m hoping from this process is that from this point on, at least until my psyche needs a bit of an MOT and service, I’ll have a healthier relationship with consumerism because I’ve gotten out of the habit of wanting things. Or rather, wanting things immediately. That’s powerful, because I think once you’ve gotten over that hurdle you start to view possessions differently and in a way that puts you firmly in control of their acquisition.
I published the review about two weeks into December and called it a success, but I kept on following my roles for the remaining two weeks without breaking. Even though I was given a number of gifts at Christmas (games mostly) I refused to play them until the 1st of January rolled around. I kept myself to the rules, and as such I entered January feeling not just that I’d done well, but that I’d done well even when I’d removed the factor of public accountability. I could have just slipped out of the depth year once I’ve published the review, but I didn’t. I mean, I guess I could have said at any time I was succeeding while hiding a massive Amazon receipt behind my back. Insomuch as public disclosure kept me honest, the lack of it kept me equally honest for the final fortnight.
I was also given a number of vouchers for Christmas, and rather than instantly leaping inton an orgy of spending I mostly used them to clean up on the wishlist I’d been keeping through the year. The games I said I still wanted – well, I bought then. Ditto for the movies. I also bought a Discworld book I had no idea had been published (The Ankh Morpork Archives) and a Switch game called Ring Fit Adventure because, weird as it sounds, I’ve been missing my exercise bike. Everything else I bought with the vouchers was equipment or furniture – things that will permit me to do the things I already do in greater comfort. Even some of that is just replacing what I’d abandoned during the move. For example, I’ve bought a portable monitor because I went from three monitors to two during our emigration. No special reason other than I didn’t think the monitor would survive a third move and since it gave up the ghost shortly after it was disconnected that seems to have been the case.
My new desk is a bit smaller than the other one I had, because I’m in a much smaller room. My third monitor is almost always just used for Youtube or Netflix so it doesn’t need to be a 27” monster like the others. A small 15” device will be ample, and so that’s what I’m getting. I also bought a television sound-bar because I worry my massive sub-woofer is going to be an annoyance for our downstairs neighbour. She says ‘no’ but I can’t discount that response might just be out of politeness. Anyway, living in a flat means I need to be more mindful of the noise we make.
So, even though I’m now freed of the depth year restrictions I’m not using the opportunity to load up on frivolity. Now the vouchers are gone, I doubt I’ll buy anything except board games (for Meeple Like Us) for a good long while. I’ve done a bit of browsing of Amazon and a lot of the time my response to seeing something is ‘Yeah, but who has the time?’
For example, I really like the look of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. A Dark Souls game with lightsabers? Sign me all the way up. Let me get my card.
But…
I just started playing Witcher 3 last month, and I already know there’s easily a month of gameplay in there. Games I was given over Christmas include Astral Chain, Dark Souls for Switch, The World Ends With You and more. That and the fact I bought Disco Elysium which is another lengthy RPG experience. I was also given Little Friends: Dogs and Cats, because we can’t have a real dog in our flat and I really want another dog. If we didn’t have a restriction in the lease I’d get myself another Yorkshire Terrier in a heartbeat. Both my previous dogs were Yorkies and I have a considerable degree of brand loyalty.
But yeah – all those games and so I think ‘Okay, but when would I get Fallen Order actually played?’. I’m thinking of this not in terms of money or opportunity, but in terms of the time cost. I don’t need Fallen Order right now. I’m good for new games. Presumably at some point it’ll be in a humble bundle and I’ll maybe play it then. I can wait and save myself the £50, and not lose anything in the process.
And that’s heartening to me because it’s exactly how I want myself to react when I see things I would like. I was a little worried that, losing the rubber-banding of a public pledge, I’d revert back to my ‘Ach, I’ll get it for when I want it’. It seems not though, and part of that is probably down to the other secret measure of success for the Depth Year.
I’ve talked publicly about the pledge I made – no new things. And in that respect, barring a few exceptions, I’m pretty happy to declare success. The other goal, which I didn’t really quantify, was ‘making a dent in my various media todo lists’. I’m not sure I did that, or at least not to the extent I would have liked.
One of the good things about doing the Patron Newsletter every month is that I have a record of everything I read, watched and played. So here’s the stats of when I was ‘done’ with something whether finishing or giving up.
| Category | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
| Books | 6 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 1 | 5 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 1 |
| Video Games | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Movies | 9 | 5 | 7 | 7 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 4 | 7 | 9 |
| Television | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
You can see from this that I’ve done pretty well for books (52) and movies (64) but less so for video games (25) and televisions shows (27). It’s not so much a dent in my todo lists, but a small scratch. Sure, I did merrily abandon hundreds of books and DVDs on our way to Sweden but many of them still exist in digital form somewhere in the house. I’s probably not a reasonable goal to assume I can manage more games or television shows in a year – they take the longest of any of these categories after all – but it still seems like there’s a lot of work to do to really start exploiting my collections rather than expanding them.
Let’s assume I still have 30 years to live. Hahaha. But just imagine there’s a medical advance out there that turns a man made of doughy human flesh into a fresh youngster with a reasonable additional lifespan ahead of them. With these figures, I can expect that I have a ‘media budget’ for the rest of my life. I can expect to manage somewhere in the region of…
| Category | Lifetime Num Left |
| Books | 1560 |
| Movies | 1920 |
| Video games | 750 |
| Television Shows | 810 |
No word of a lie – aside from television series I’ve already hit a lot of this budget without buying another thing. I have 655 Steam games and about another 80 on my Switch. Another 50 or so on my phone. God alone only knows how many in my unclaimed Humble Bundle keys.
In terms of physical books I once had a collection of about 2500 and while I had read most and no longer own the bulk of them… well, let’s just say I dread to look at what’s on my Kindle. The daily deals are a killer. My media centre has 1265 movies on it (and yeah, I’ve watched a lot of them but far from all) and 231 television series. Assume I have a ‘completion’ rate of 60% across each of the categories. This is what I have left, fresh and unexplored, without spending another penny:
| Category | Num Completed | Num in Library | Num left | Years to Use Up |
| Books | 52 | 1800 | 720 | ~14 |
| Movies | 64 | 1265 | 506 | ~8 |
| Video Games | 25 | 760 | 304 | ~12 |
| Television Shows | 27 | 231 | 92 | ~3 |
I really should stop crunching stats, they just make me feel a bit sad.
Anyway, that’s the context of my accomplishment in Depth Year 2019. I haven’t actually calculated an accurate completion rate – it’s probably better for some things than it is for others. Even so – it’s hard to look at any new thing as anything other than the newest entry on a todo list I might never complete. Every time I buy from Amazon I’m doing so in open defiance of God, and that feels a touch risky. Also though… pretty brave?
It all just makes me feel a little down about the nature of mortality. This isn’t a fear of death, not really. Death in my mind is inextricably linked up with the Discworld books and IT’LL JUST BE LIKE MEETING ONE OF MY HEROES EXCEPT HE WON’T DISAPPOINT ME. But with all this… maybe I don’t actually need to play Fallen Order at all, right?
Instead of thinking ‘this is a thing I would like’, it’s worth me considering ‘sure, but is it worth one of the finite number of slots I have left in my life?’
In most cases, the answer is going to be ‘no’.
So, normally at this point in the diary we’d look at the wishlist and see how it’s changing. Things are a bit different here. This is how it stood at the end of November:
- The Joker
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- The Outer Worlds
- Disco Elysium
- John Wick 3
- The Irishman
- Recorder
Recorder fell off in the course of December, although mainly just because I didn’t think about it again until now. I had to google it to find out what it even was. Everything else stayed, and so I have them all now. Except for the Outer Worlds, which I preordered instead. It’s not available on Switch just yet and that’s where I would want to play it.
That means really I’m starting a fresh list now, and it contains only one entry:
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (1 month)
And I think in the new series of diary posts I’m going to keep doing this list because it’s been a fascinating process (for me, at least) to see how my wishes have grown, intensified and then faded over the course of a year. I think though what I will do is make a note of how long a thing is on the list, and if it’s ever longer than… say… six months? Then I’ll get it because it’s clearly got staying power. By that time the hype will have died out and who knows, it might even be possible to pick it up at a bargain price. As I’ve said many times before – this isn’t a process about saving money. It certainly doesn’t hurt if that happens though.
That brings this series to a close. Twelve months of success in not adding to my media collections, and mediocre success in actually whittling them down. Still, the public part of the pledge was always the bigger and more important one and I’m happy that went well. If you’re interested in taking the plunge yourself, I recommend you check out Raptitude and join the Facebook group that has been set up. If you’d like something a little less… extreme… then perhaps the Cardboard Diogenes Club could be a model for curtailing consumption while still permitting yourself the spontaneity of spending. You can’t actually join the Cardboard Diogenes Club but you could certainly start your own knock-off counterfeit version.
See you all next month, I hope, for the first entry in our Gaming in Gothenburg series!