Here I am, at the start of December (time of writing), staring down the last month of this project. It’s looking good – achieved with distinction and with no shortage of associated real life improvements. I have a regime of protective talismans, in the form of plug-ins and software, that keep me from wasting my life online. I feel happier about the time I spend on the Internet.

So, here’s the December stats:

It’s a bit better than this when we do the usual deeper dive into the sites that took up my time:

The Bitwarden, Archive.org, Plex TV and Lastpass entries are all safe to excise (for various reasons), as is the kks.se entry. Carving out the usual ‘sites I don’t want to track’ knocks November down to a touch over 19 minutes a day. Still comfortably below the ‘Thirty minutes per day’ level that constitutes, for me at least, a reasonable amount of ‘screwing around on the Internet’. From January onwards I don’t think I’ll bother with regular audits via a time tracker, but I will maintain the hard limits on site usage. Instead I’ll treat the time tracker the same way I did in 2021 – as a broad tool for identifying where I am wasting time on a monthly, rather than daily, basis.

I went a step farther last month on ‘what do I do with all this information’, and actually wrote out the first draft of an auto-ethnography paper. It turned out reasonably well I think, but I still harbour reservations about the paper style. We’ll see how it goes when I submit it in January to a conference. I mean, I haven’t successfully completed the year yet but I’m confident I will and it will only need some tweaks to what I’ve written. Essentially the conclusion won’t come as a surprise – you don’t need to be a digital celibate to get the maximum out of the Internet. You just need to ruthlessly excise those elements that you don’t enjoy. Essentially you need to Kondo the hell out of your online time. What’s been most interesting about the process of writing the paper though has been going over these posts – essentially, the historical record – and noting just how it was going. The fact that there is a record at all is down to you folks – I wouldn’t have a paper to write if I hadn’t been documenting it here.

Really, I don’t feel like I have an awful lot more to say here – the project is all but done, we know how it’s gone, and it’s not going to really change much at this point. So I’m going to finish up this section by quoting directly from the first draft of the paper, outlining the toolkit I’ve used to draw protective pentagrams around the roiling hellscape of the unbridled Internet:

• Cold Turkey is an access blocker that integrates into your browsers to stop access to any websites you have indicated. It can work on a whitelist basis or a blacklist basis. For the first half of the project, I used it as a general blacklist with named exceptions based on the preparation work. This blacklist was lifted during work hours, but was fully in place at weekends and evenings.
• A Time Tracker plugin. I used a different one of these for each half of the project, but they were used to measure time I was spending frivolously – as in, time not spent directly on project or work-related sites. These are both filled with exempted sites, since I don’t care how much time I spend search for academic articles, or on our corporate intranet, or shopping for groceries. At the end of each month (with two exceptions), I’d see how much time I was spending online and adjust my various tools accordingly.
• Hosts Blocking. Most software platforms allow you to circumvent the normal lookup architecture of the Internet by redirecting certain URLs. I did this to sites that I didn’t want to accidentally enable – Twitter, Reddit, all the news sites and so on. It’s possible to unblock these sites, but the awkwardness of it forces you to think about why you’re doing it.
• Facebook Purity. Honestly, this plugin is just revelatory – it lets you turn Facebook from what it is now into what it used to be. You can use it to banish everything from sponsored posts to adverts. It turned my Facebook timeline from an obstacle course to an immaculate (and brief) update of status updates from friends, which is all I want from it.
• This is an offline reader to which you can send any interesting article with a click from a browser. It has become not just a way of ensuring mindful attention but also a treasure trove of references of my own passing indulgences. No longer do I say ‘I read an article once, on a thing I don’t remember’, because Pocket has the article right there.
• Highlight or Hide Search Results. This is a browser plugin that allows you to curate search results. It is awkward if you want to avoid Quora and that is the only place Google Search sends you, and this allowed me to align search output to project goals.
• This is a browser plugin that removes everything from suggested videos to Youtube comments. It allows you to switch off autoplay, and forces every access to default to your subscriptions page.
• This is a browser plug-in that removes some of the more disruptive content from Youtube. Most valuable for me is that it allows you to block Youtube Shorts, which have turned Youtube into a kind of pound-shop TikTok.

This is what you need, from my experience, to find the optimal balance between enjoying the Internet and protecting yourself from it.

Depth Year 2022

I haven’t written an auto-ethnography about my depth year experiences – I might, if the two I have written seem to work out. Two, I say? Yes, I also wrote one about the systematic process I have taken for the past three years to clean out my gaming backlog, which I have now done! As of the end of November, I have no backlog at all. That means I have been able to buy a few new games – as you may remember, the criteria is that I can’t buy games when I have games that remain unplayed. True, I still have ‘unplayed games’, but those games have been firewalled away as being games I have no current intention of ever playing. Games that just turned up over time and without active acquisition. If someone slips an unasked todo list intp my pocket, it doesn’t compel me to action the items upon it.

However, what the rule does mean that if I buy a game, I need to complete it or consciously abandon it before I can buy another. So it’s been a little bit unusual as a process. I bought 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim… and then completed it. I bought Vampire Survivors (literally the best money you can spend at the moment on a game), and completed it. Then I bought Moss VR – I still haven’t completed it yet so until I do, no more purchases. That is – until January 2023 rolls around and I am once again released from my obligation.

It feels good though to no longer have the obligation of a backlog hanging around my shoulders. Not only then have I achieved my ‘completed 100 games in a year’ challenge, I have also gotten rid of my todo list entirely. From this point onwards, it is perfectly feasible that I never have a backlog ever again. That is certainly my intention.

The final game – the one that cleared all my asterisks – was A Plague Tale: Innocence. That was a game I bought back in 2019 and never got around to because stealth games aren’t really my jam. It turned out to be great though, so it was a fitting place to end. Except… I didn’t end it. I’ve kept on playing, to the point that by the end of November I had reached 115 completed games, of which 104 have no asterisk against their name. If it seems like the arithmetic for this doesn’t work out from last month, you’re right – I went back and erased one of those asterisks head on. The average rating of the games I have played is 3.36. The average game length is 14.81 (I played Vampire Survivors a lot), and the median is 10. A total of just under 1700 hours of gameplay in 2022. I don’t see that getting much bigger this coming month, but it will a little.

However, if you add that to my playtime in 2021 and 2020, you get a more reasonable estimate of how long it has taken me to clear my backlog… over 3200 hours of focused effort. That only counts the time spent completing games too rather than abandoning them. In my paper I estimate that this comes to around 24 hours a week, for the past three years, spent conquering the looming tower of my unplayed video games. That is a not-inconsiderable portion of a full time job. Given my real-life occupation, I have been thinking of this as basically ‘unpaid overtime’. It’s a shame I haven’t been getting time and a half for it, because I’d have doubled my salary.

It’s been worthwhile though. I have found some proper gems in the last three years that I wouldn’t have tried out. I feel more able to offer guidance or exemplars to students who want to explore weird outcroppings of game design. I feel l like I give games more of a chance to impress, and am more committed to seeing them through. That’s reflected in the abandon stats I have been tracking, it’s now the case that for every game I gave up on, I complete 2.39 others. I think that’s pretty good.

My philosophy surrounding the depth year has always been more about conquering consumerism than anything else – to rebuild my relationship with acquisition. In 2019 I feel like I did good work on myself – since then I haven’t bought things ‘reflexively’ at all. All my purchases (save for Humble Choice) since 2019 have been explicitly mindful. 2022 has thus been a trivial exercise as far as the depth year itself goes. I find it harder and harder to even want things. I haven’t wanted a board game in about three years. Most of the video games I plan to buy in 2023 are things that I wanted before 2019 – for example, Playstation games that have come to PC. Where that isn’t true, it’s because the game comes highly recommended by friends or is part of a series in which I have a long standing interest (for example, Return to Monkey Island). Or both. There is no idle desire here, there is only a delayed gratification in its most tightly curated form. That feels really good for someone who, four years ago, received what was essentially notice of an intervention from Amazon.

I know there’s still a month to go, but it’s not going to matter. This is just how I feel about buying things now. Maybe it’s good to do this every few years, but I honestly feel like this is just how my wiring fit together. No more buying things because I haven’t bought myself anything in a while. Decoupling myself from the social media hype cycle likewise means that I simply don’t get blown about by the temporary winds of want. If I don’t hear about a new TV show from someone I trust, I just don’t even know it’s an option. And if I don’t know it’s an option, I find by the time I do hear about it it’s already faded into cultural irrelevance. House of the Dragon; Rings of Power; Andor – all TV shows I would have jumped on in earlier years, and now I barely care that they’re around. They’ll get watched when – and only when – my internal hype cycle finds time for them.

I spoke last month about where my wishlist is – it hasn’t changed at all since then. Nothing new has gone on it, partially because of my next project to read fifty-two books from women authors and the wishlist was never aligned with that. I’ll be buying books to support that project, but I won’t be doing it as mindlessly as I have before. I’ll buy enough to tide me over and then work my way through them. In 2018 what I probably would have done would be buy all 52 books I thought I’d read, and then they’d languish on the shelf as my attention wandered towards other shiny baubles. I’ve fixed myself though, I think. I think those days are behind me.

I don’t think you get a ‘Four Years sober’ chip for conquering consumerism, but I honestly don’t think that’s the worst idea in the world.