I forgot to reset my time tracker at the end of this month, which means that the coming October stats are only going to be partial, if I keep them at all. I did however manage to grab the stats from the end of September in the usual fashion.
That’s pretty good I think, but as usual there are a few sites that the shakedown tour of my curated online experience has revealed need special treatment. You see that as you dig into the specifics:
Orcid is a research contribution registrar and as such it is well within the ‘work’ bracket. Similarly with link.springer.com (a journal site) and prisma.research.se (the Swedish research funding portal). Removing the stuff I don’t want to track brings the average across active days down to twelve and a half minutes. That makes it the second best month in Project Unplug 2022 with regards to how much I’ve frivolously used the Internet and less than half the level at which I think it would be ‘okay’. I think the blacklist approach is certainly as good as the whitelist approach was. It’s clear if I gave up on Facebook the same way I gave up on other social media sites that I could even get that down to a regular six or seven minutes a day.
As we head into October though I need to start thinking about the end stage of this project. I say to students as they put together their thesis structure, ‘describe what success looks like, and describe that early’. It’s part of making sure research work is honest. There’s a phenomenon called HARKing that drives me mad in academic work. It’s an acronym for ‘Hypothesis After Results Known’, and it means that you decide what you wanted to find after you’ve done the work. It all but guarantees ‘significance’ but it’s a hollow inauthenticity. It’s a problem in science, but I think it’s also a problem in self-improvement goals.
I looked back at my Facebook posts when I first began to think about this, and there were basically two strands to it. One was just curiosity – ‘can you live a life disconnected from the Internet?’. And for me the answer was ‘no’. Note that’s the answer for me not the answer for anyone else. Realistically given my job, lifestyle and interests it’s not possible to disconnect completely without essentially becoming a different person in a different city with a different job.
So the original question evolved into ‘How can I limit the use of the Internet to those things that bring me joy’.
This is what I wrote in March of 2021:
I’m pondering this as a challenge to myself in 2022 and I’m just not sure it can be done while also holding down a job like mine. I really want to do it though. I think my happiness is inversely proportional to my Internet usage. It just increasingly feels like the Internet is the modern equivalent of the lead in the water that drove the Romans mad[1] and I’d like to shed myself of it.
[1] I know that’s not what actually happened but it’s an expression I love.
So that puts a measure of ‘success’ that I can start thinking about. Have I been happier in 2022 having restricted my use of the Internet?
Realistically the answer there has to be ambiguous because there’s no control version of 2022 where I used the Internet as I normally do. And since I’m also going through the depth year stuff it’s all bound up in too many variables to isolate the cause. But there’s a nugget in there I need to unearth. At the end of December 2022 I need to be able to say ‘This was worth it’ or ‘this wasn’t worth it’. I never did unplug from the Internet in the end – a lot of Internet things I value were simply accepted as part of the background noise of living.
Mainly though, I have to get an answer to this because in 2023 this project is over and I need to think about if it has changed my life for the better and what I want to do with that information going forward. I’ve said before that when I think of the ideal future for me it is living on a remote island with no Internet access at all. But that can’t happen for quite some time, if ever. So I need to find a way to make my peace with Being Online without doing something extreme and unsustainable.
At the end of my first Depth Year I felt I had really broken the link between ‘wanting things’ and ‘buying things’ by having a more mindful middle step of ‘consider what you already have’. It led to a few new rules for myself, most significantly my ‘Three Out, One In’ rule for choosing to buy new video games and the ‘One in, One Out’ rule for my board games. What’s the equivalent going to be for my Internet time?
What I’m currently thinking is that in 2023 I will stop using the time tracker (since it will have served its diagnostic purpose) but I will keep using the time-budgeting Cold Turkey software. That’s probably been the best thing I’ve had access to through the year, since it has allowed for me to get access to things without over indulging in them.
But also what I think I will do occasionally is simply switch off my computer for, say, a weekend every month. I often think back to the 1st of January 2022 when my various blockers first came into effect and how much I enjoyed that first weekend of blissful isolation from the digital white noise. It was great. The novelty has worn off through the year, but I could perhaps get a little bit of the high back by occasionally doing ‘Switch Off Saturday/Sunday’.
Of course, given electricity prices it might be that I also do it because I can’t afford to do anything else.
Much to consider as we enter the tail-end of 2022.
Depth Year 2022
Similar thoughts attach themselves to the Depth Year project, but they’re a lot less contradictory because once again this has been a great experience. I think this might just be a thing I do every few years. While it does occasionally get a little bit annoying having to explain to people ‘No, I can’t watch that movie / play that game until 2023’ that’s a very small cost to what is otherwise an extremely enriching experience. It feels genuinely revolutionary to simply Bartleby the waves of consumerism that wash over us. To see someone say ‘You should buy This Thing’ and just reply ‘I’d prefer not to’.
As you already know, I have been using this year to sharpen my professional toolkit by burying myself in expanding my ‘game literacy’. The secondary subgoal of Depth Year 2022 turned out to be ‘complete one hundred games in a year’, which in itself was a subgoal of ‘Play games I own rather than buy new ones’. As of the end of September, I have completed 98 games, making hitting the 100 all but guaranteed in October. However, there are a few things worth noting on this accomplishment:
- Three of the games on the list are games I have ‘re-completed’, rather than new games. I never set myself a goal of completing 100 games for the first time so I don’t really mind that much but others may quirk an eyebrow.
- Three of the games have asterisks beside them because while I ‘completed’ them according to my criteria (saw everything the game had to offer, or hit a meaningful ending credits) I don’t feel good about it. For example, Fight Night Champion was a game where I got right to the very end boss. I saw everything the boss would do (which was a bunch of gimmicky, cheating bullshit) but never beat him. So that got an asterisk. I’d like to complete enough games that the asterisks don’t matter.
- Six of the games on the list are board-game adaptations that I played long enough to say ‘Yep, I saw everything here’. For that I put a minimum level of about eight hours of playing before I got to record it but it still feels a little cheap for some reason. I think I can fairly include them but if I played enough games that I didn’t need to rely on their entries I’d probably feel it was a more authentic accomplishment. That’s probably over-thinking things though – like people who insist you can’t count audiobooks in your ‘books read’ stats. Yes you can.
All this is to say that I think I need to hit 103, 106, or 112 games depending on how ‘pure’ the list needs to be. 103 will be the point I think I have clearly hit the target. 106 is the point where I can say they were all ‘new to me’ even if that was never part of the challenge. And 112 is where I can say they were all unquestionably video games, even though I think video game adaptations of board games are their own, genuine thing and still count. Thoughts?
The average length of the games I have completed is a touch under fourteen hours, and the median is ten hours. That’s a little less for both than I managed in 2020 (my ‘complete a game a week’ challenge) but also shows I didn’t stack the deck by playing a hundred games that were only an hour long. I have so far spent 1392 hours completing video games, and probably another 100 or so playing and then abandoning others. That’s… a lot. It’s an average of over 36 hours a week completing video games. It’s a full-time job of play.
As of the end of September, my abandon ratio is a pretty healthy 46% – as in, for every 100 games I complete I will have abandoned another 46. Abandon here being ‘Gave it an hour or two and decided it wasn’t for me’. In other words, for every game I abandon I have completed more than two others . Every so often I revisit a game on the abandon list because sometimes it was external factors that left it not clicking, so those stats tend to improve over time.
This though does tie into the discussion about Project Unplug because this ‘backlog breaking’ is a direct consequence of Depth Year 2019 and the categorisation exercise I undertook earlier this year. I now have seven games on my ‘backlog’ and the rest of my unplayed games are ones I have chosen not to count. They came my way via Humble Choice, or freebies, or whatever. I didn’t buy them with intent to play, they just came up with the rations. In 2023 I will begin with that most precious of things – a genuine clean slate with a clear conscience. And I will be starting it with at least 30 ‘credits’ from my Three Out, One In policy.
That said, perhaps I’ve played enough games for one lifetime at this point.
So, on to the wishlist. This is what it was at the end of the last update:
- Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
- The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
- Don’t Look Up (a movie)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (a game)
- A year in the Country (a book)
- Documental and Busted (Japanese game shows)
- Infernal Affairs (a movie)
- Jade City (book)
- Memory of Empire (book)
- Cochrane the Dauntless (book)
- The Pillars of the Earth (book)
And… it hasn’t changed at all. Nothing has gone on, nothing has gone off. But maybe that’s because I haven’t been recording the video games I’ll be spending my accumulated credits on. There are quite a lot of them but it doesn’t feel like an authentic ‘want’. Rather a case of ‘this is part of what it means to be someone working professionally in games’.
That said, there is one game that I have really, really wanted to get and I didn’t have it on this list because it got a specific exemption at the start of the year. Persona 5 Royal, which is finally coming to PC, is a game I don’t own purely because I never had the platform on which it was available. That’s coming out next month, and I will be getting it Day 0. Given it clocks in at about 100 hours of playtime, it will probably be my only game for several weeks after getting it.
That’s it for this month! Hopefully see you all next month!