I just want to preface this piece and say that what follows isn't advice, so if you take it, don't blame me if it doesn't work for you. This is just my rambling thoughts for a while. I've been thinking a lot about binge-watching lately. Netflix et al are trying to paint it as a good thing, something to aspire to. Binge-watching television is great, they say. You no longer have to spend a half hour or an hour a week over the course of nine months to watch all of the new episodes of your current favorite series. You can watch them all now, whenever you want, all in a row! Netflix even tried to coin a new term for watching the entire season of a show (something like 13 hours' worth) in the first 24 hours it was made available to you. They call it 'binge-racing'. They say that it's super-awesome that you can be the first one to be caught up on whatever show so that you can be the most knowledgeable the quickest. Or something like that. I remember seeing commercials on television late last year to that effect, as well as a billion articles (give or take) that talked it up. How it's "an achievement to brag about" (https://media.netflix.com/en/press-releases/ready-set-binge-more-than-8-million-viewers-binge-race-their-favorite-series). I'm not going to say that I've never binge-watched anything, I have. I've also binge-video-gamed, binge-read books, binge-trawled through a website's archived content, and binge-read long comment threads on the Internet. I should probably set some ground rules. I think that the common concepion of 'binge-watching' assumes that you watch four or more episodes of a thing in one sitting. That's kind of misleading since some shows are an hour, some are a half-hour, some are fifteen minutes, and some are movies that are two hours or more. I'm going to define 'binging' in all forms as doing something for four or more hours at a time. Two to three hours might be 'pre-binging', and less than two hours and under might be the 'normal' range (but, really, when you're getting close to that two hour mark and your butt starts to fall asleep, it might be getting close to time to turn off the whatever and take a break). I remember the first time I binge-watched a television show. It was in the early 2000s and I got cable broadband Internet service, but no cable (it couldn't be installed right away for some reason that I forget now), and antenna service was out of the question due to the way the trees and the landscape worked around that area. I was trying out my new broadband and found that Cartoon Network was showing a bunch of Dragonball Z episodes on their streaming service. I spent an entire day, from morning until dusk, watching them. I remember looking up after I had watched 'just one more' and discovering that the sun was setting. The day had disappeared, I had gotten nothing really done, and I was shocked. Not shocked enough to do anything, of course. I finished the series up the next day and then didn't really think about that for a long time. A few years and a few moves later, 2007, I was finally roommate free. I could do whatever I wanted in whatever room I wanted and that was... not as exciting as I thought it might be. Immediately prior, I had lived in a place that geographically was in a horrible location to get antenna reception, and my roommate didn't have a cable subscription, so I was just coming off of a nine-month stint where I didn't have ready access to any form of television. I could pirate some stuff if I wanted to, but that was too big of a hassle, so after a while I just didn't do it. Oh, it was also illegal, I guess, so there was that. So, when I finally got back to a place where I could make my own decisions about that kind of thing, and didn't have to split the bill with anyone, I got cable again for the first time in a year or so. When I got it, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. Channels that had been programmed with interesting lineups were shifting to a format where they would show a bunch of episodes of a show in a row instead of doing one or two per weekday. This was great, at first. I had gone without television for a while, and this was a chance to catch up on a lot of the stuff that I had missed. I had a TV Tuner in my computer at the time, and it let me pop up whatever mini-marathon I wanted while I played whatever video game I was into at the time (hello, Dungeon Runners!). But I noticed a curious thing: when I was playing games with the television show in the background, I would frequently lose track of what was going on in the show, or the video game. I would be sitting there playing the game and realize that I had heard the dialog being spoken for the last 20 minutes, but I couldn't remember anything that anyone had actually said. Or the opposite would happen. I would be listening to the dialog and reading through quest text or whatever, and then realize that I had no idea what I just read. It was about that time that I realized that I was fooling myself into thinking I was doing both things at once. Shortly afterward, I stopped binging on shows being shown on television, but I didn't stop binging. I dropped my cable subscription after about a year, but, like a lot of people who cancel their cable subscription, I picked up a Netflix account. I didn't watch much on it for the first couple of months I had it, but that all changed once I got food poisoning. I didn't go to work and I could barely move, except when I had to move, very quickly to the bathroom to deal with the effects of eating tainted whatever it was that I ate. I started binging some show or other, mostly because I couldn't do much else other than kind of stare off into space while the toxins in my body ran their course. But once they were done, I did finish up the series over the next few days. And a few months later when I got sick with a bad cold and was housebound for an entire weekend, I did it again with a different series. Other than than that, though I didn't watch Netflix all that much, so I canceled my subscription and moved to Hulu. I watched a couple of shorter series there, again, sometimes when I was home sick for whatever reason, but sometimes when I was perfectly healthy. But all told, I didn't watch much, and the interval between starting up my Hulu account and then canceling it was even shorter than when I started and canceled Netflix. It was about this time that I did start noticing some inconsistencies in my own behavior. If you ask me if I've seen , the answer is generally, "No." I have nothing against movies, and I do go to the theater a couple of times a year to watch one, but my issue with them is that they're such a large time investment, an hour and a half or so, that I just hate blocking out that much time to sitting around and staring at a screen very often, but I wouldn't think twice about watching four or five episodes of a show in an evening, which would take the same amount of time, or even longer. I also started to notice that I had chores and other things piling up around the house and I wasn't getting some things done that I had wanted to get done. I started to make an actual effort to minimize any binge-watching that I did, and I wasn't immediately as successful as I would have liked to have been. However, I didn't want to be surprised to see the sun go down while I was watching the entire series run of whatever, so I kept at it (and continue to keep at it). But what I didn't expect was that this might transfer to other areas, too. I used to binge video games a lot. As a kid I'd spend the night somewhere and we frequently would play video games until the wee hours as our slumber party activity, but that didn't happen often. What happened more often was that I'd get a couple of dollars in my pocket and I'd be able to rent some game for a day. When I rented a game, I had around 24 hours to wring as much of the experience out of it as I could to make sure that I got my two bucks' worth. I couldn't just rent it again the next night if I wasn't done with it, it had to go back to the rental store the next day when the movies the rest of the family rented had to go back. Nobody was going to make two trips to the video store on my account (and I certainly didn't have another two bucks to extend the rental anyway). So it became imperative for me to spend as much time with the game as possible to (hopefully) get through it in the severely limited time I had with it. Since I rented games so much instead of buying them, I kind of got into this mindset that I had to rocket through the game as fast as possible, and it's only recently that I've (mostly) grown out of it. One of the first times I can remember really binge-playing was around 1993 when I rented E.V.O Search for Eden. I had gone to Target and had a few bucks' worth of spending money from who knows where that I used to get two family-sized bags of Doritos and a case of Mt. Dew. I holed up in my room literally all weekend, only coming up for air when I had to use the restroom. Afterward, I felt awful, not because I spent all that time playing the game, but because eating nothing but chips and drinking nothing but soda for two days makes you feel really bad. Probably something about malnutrition. During Christmas break that year, I got my hands on Secret of Mana, which I burned through in the week I was off of school (I would end up playing it a lot more times in the months that followed, too, I just wouldn't stay up all night to do it). I had several episodes of binge-playing games after that, but most of them don't really stand out as much. I'd get a new game, and I'd play it obsessively for a while, then move on to something else, then get another new game once I could scrape up the money for it, and lather, rinse, repeat (most games were shorter back then, so it was a bit easier to see everything a game had to offer in 10-12 hours). But, as I get older, the intervals between games that I binge-play keeps getting longer and longer. The last game I really remember binging was Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008. On release day I remember playing it for over ten hours, skipping meals and everything else. I remember getting into a 'zone' where everything else started to fade. Hunger was gone, drowsiness abated, I was focused, singularly, on the game in a way that I had been so many times before, but this time was different. I came out the other side of it realizing that I had completed the main goal of the game, but I hadn't done much else that weekend. That in a blink of an eye, I had left work on Friday, done nothing, and then had to go to work again on Monday. It was about that time that my backlog of video games started to grow, mostly because I wasn't putting in the amount of time I did when I was younger, but I still bought them with the same (or even greater) frequency since I had some actual disposable income. I struggled with figuring out why that was happening, and I was convinced for a while that I just grew out of the hobby, but now I think I'm finally starting to see something resembling the real reason making its way over the horizon. It's not because I felt rotten during and after just about all of my binging sessions, either. I've had binging sessions of all kinds where I felt fine, I just wanted to finish reading a book/play Civilization for just one more turn/get to the end of the comment thread I'm reading that was a lot longer than I thought, and so on. Once I started making an effort to extricate myself from the binging cycle, I started to realize how frequently I was being encouraged to binge. It was happening all the time in ways that were so subtle that I didn't realize it. Some examples: Infinite scroll on websites encourage me to binge because I can literally almost never reach the bottom of the page. (See also: related articles) Putting a new show on television between two older established shows (or showing a rerun or two of a show immediately before showing a new episode) encourages me to binge all of them at once because who's going to turn off the TV or change the channel for a half hour or so when that middle show comes on? YouTube and Netflix and Hulu, and et cetera all have some variation of autoplay that plays the next video or episode or something without me having to do anything, encouraging me to watch just one more since it already started and the controller/remote is all the way over there. Video games encourage binging by having longer more narrative-driven experiences and spacing out places where you can save your progress further and further apart (or after a 30 minute cutscene). But that still doesn't really address why I kept binging in the first place. And after a lot of consideration, I decided that I kept binging for two reasons: because binging is easy, and discovery is fun. In my case, I discovered that as binging got easier, I was binging on the things that were easiest to binge on. It didn't matter what I was consuming, as long as I was consuming something. Anything! What that thing was was of little importance. Every time I scroll the page down a little bit on one of those infinite scroll websites, I get a little bit more new information. I like new information! If I don't stop the autoplay, a new video will pop up, but I don't know what it's going to be about. Even if I have autoplay turned off, if I haven't seen the next episode before, it's just a button click away and I can find out what it's about. Excitement! If I can get through all of the cool stuff in this game, then I can go to another game and check out even more cool stuff. I like cool stuff! This comic has their entire archive online, and I can read them all for free. I like free stuff! And I can click 'next' 10,000 more times before I run out of new strips. Double-score! Once I started to realize all of these things, I started trying to do something about it, including taking a hiatus from social media (which is one of my worst offenders), but what I found was that for a while I was substituting one binging habit that I didn't want with another one that I also didn't want. I stopped using Facebook, and then I hyper-focused on twitter. I stopped delving into comment threads that were hundreds of comments long and instead cranked up the refresh rate on my newsreader to give me new content every 15 minutes so that by the time I reached the end of my feed I would already have new stuff ready to open. I stopped watching most weekly shows on regular television since I had made a deal with myself that I would only continue watching the shows I was already watching until they ended their runs, but I wouldn't start any new ones. It turns out that most of the series I was watching were never going to end, so I just stopped watching them entirely, but then I would go watch another channel that showed mini-marathons of shows that I had already seen before, and I knew that I liked. And so on. I had gotten so accustomed to having something fresh and novel in front of my face all the time that when I didn't have it, I felt like I had to find something, anything, to put there. Now, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with any of these activities, exactly. Everyone relieves stress or decompresses or just wants to be entertained every once in a while in different ways and by different things. Clearly lots of people enjoy scrolling around on some social media site forever or watching all of the back episodes of some long-running television show or watching everything that a certain film director ever did or listening to every album that some band ever released or whatever. They clearly derive some value from that, and that's great for them. But what I am saying is that obsessively doing any voluntary activity for hours and hours (and hours) is no longer something that I want to do regularly, especially if that activity occurs to the exclusion of all else. Which brings me back to binge-racing. I don't mind Netflix advertising that they want people to watch their new show. I do, however, mind that they are trying to spin it as something you absolutely have to do. That it's some kind of social imperative that you have to watch as fast as you can because if you don't, you won't have anything to talk about with your friends, all of whom have already watched it. If you don't watch it all right now, you might accidentally run into a spoiler on some website where someone else has watched an episode that you haven't, which will ruin the whole series for you. Or if you finish the series before everyone else you know does, you get to flout your achievement as some kind of badge of honor. And I know it seems like I'm picking on Netflix here, but that's only because I am. However, they're not the only ones encouraging people to binge-entertain themselves, they're just particularly brazen about trying to push my psychological buttons and coerce me into doing what they want. Other companies do it, too, but in less overt ways. As much as I'd like to wrap this all up in a bow, I don't really have a good solution yet. Breaking the cycle for me has been a good start (and I'm still not done, but progress is progress), and the next step is probably going to be cultivating new habits that rely less on the mindless treadmill of consumption, and more of doing the things that I really want to do instead of doing the things that I've been told I should want to do. I think I owe myself that much.