At the beginning of this year, I started an experiment. I stopped watching TV and movies, and I stopped playing video games.

Some background is needed here.

About 10 years ago, I realized that TV was controlling a large part of my life. I would come home, get some food, and sit down and watch TV for hours. It didn’t matter what was on, I would simply channel surf. Sometimes the surfing itself would even take hours. After going through a full cycle of stations and not finding anything to hold my interest, I would simply start another cycle, thinking “well, maybe something new has started”.

At the same time, video games were controlling another large part of my life. When not watching TV, I would choose some game at random and play for a while, usually aimlessly, similar to channel surfing.

Together, this accounted for maybe 90% of my free time. It didn’t feel like a problem to me, mainly because I still kept somewhat active socially. If people invited me somewhere, I would drop what I was doing and go out. But I wasn’t so active in seeking out other people. Also, I kept on top of my studies and work, so my priorities were straight.

You could make the argument that this isn’t really a problem, it is just a particular lifestyle choice. And to everyone out there who chooses to spend their free time this way, all power to you.

The key word there is “choice”.

I felt that I wasn’t choosing this, but that it had kind of crept up on me. So I tried something out.

I still wanted to play video games, and I still wanted to watch TV. But I didn’t want to be controlled by it, and I didn’t want to waste valuable time watching random stuff which may not have been really interesting to me at all. I wanted to maximize the fun factor per hour spent, and I wanted to be in control.

So I shut off my TV connection completely. Note, I didn’t shut off my TV set, I simply disconnected it from any signal. I stopped watching broadcast TV cold turkey. Instead, I started to choose beforehand what TV shows I wanted to watch, and eventually made a list. I did the same for video games, I chose a handful I wanted to focus on (they tended to be RPGs) and also made a list.

My TV/game browsing was definitely an addiction. I beat it. But I installed something which I am more addicted to instead.

Projects

Lists which pull me forward endlessly are like crack to me. I now have the following lists screaming for my attention:

  • 200+ RPGs to play
  • 100+ TV series to follow
  • 4000+ movies to watch

It was super motivating and exciting for me, but also exhausting. This situation went on for a long time, 8 years or so. The profile was very similar as before, work and life first, I had a family in the meantime so free time took a nosedive. But the percentage of my free time spent on my projects was similar to before, ca 90%.

Again. This is just a lifestyle choice. Nothing inherently wrong here. In fact I felt it was a great improvement from before, I was motivated during my free time, and really enjoying myself. However, I came to realize that for me, this was just another example of being controlled by something else.

So I decided to stop, cold turkey.

Important note here. This has nothing to do with TV, movies, or video games. Any all-consuming hobby would have brought me to the same conclusion. The realization was that I had no space. My whole consciousness was engaged, all the time.

The immediate urge I had to resist was then to not fill that new space with other projects. This was not a resolution to “stop watching so much TV so that maybe I can read more, or go out and meet more people.” This was a resolution to pull things off my agenda without replacing them with anything, and then see what fills it.

The Bad

I am almost 4 months in now. This has been hard. 

My projects still call for me. I am still driven by them, even though I’ve paused them. I think about them a lot. And I find myself spending time on “project-adjacent” topics. One example is that I am now playing around with setting up a database around my lists instead of maintaining them in excel. I will likely force myself to stop this, as it is starting to feel like a backdoor.

New projects. Immediately after starting this, I found that I would start thinking about what else to spend my time on. Learning German, studying business, reading, writing. I had to really fight to not simply replace my other projects with new ones.

As boredom sets in, the urge to fill time with small useless things gets even stronger. For example sitting down and browsing aimlessly.

The hardest of all however is that once you have time to think, you actually start to think. About everything. This is surprisingly stressful. There are apparently a lot of things I would prefer not to think about.

The Good

Although it was initially tough, having the brain-space to actually think about things deeply for longer than 5 minutes at once has led me to a better place. It’s a very concrete, somewhat profound improvement to my life.

I realized that I was constantly looking forward to “my time”, when I could continue on my projects. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, having a driving hobby or passion can be healthy. But I noticed it in the small things, especially having to do with my 2 year old daughter. When putting her to bed in the evenings, if it took a little bit longer than usual, I would get a bit frustrated. It never manifested itself as “damn I’m frustrated that I can’t watch as much TV this evening”. It only manifested itself as unfocused frustration, maybe towards less “me” time. Which, by proxy means “I don’t want to be here”.

When that really hit home, it was a shock. Here I was, putting my daughter to sleep, and I actually would have preferred being in front of my computer playing a video game.

And so I changed it. That was actually the easy part. The hard part was all the thinking, and clearing of space to allow for the thinking.

It’s a cliche, but now I truly try to cherish every moment with my daughter, no matter how frustrating she is being, no matter how long it takes for her to go to sleep, no matter how little free time I get. These moments will never come back. Usually it takes a tragic event for people to truly realized this. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to figure this out simply by freeing up some space.