My Daily War with Abundance
I wake up each morning to an antique.
You may be familiar. They were popular from the 1950s to the early aughts. They started analog, moved to digital, and eventually were gobbled by software, like so much else.
I slap my physical alarm clock each morning and pull myself out of bed. (You know a product category has been devoured by software when we start putting the word "physical" in front of it. Physical clock, physical flashlight, physical battery).
Why do I use a physical alarm clock, like a card-carrying AARP member? It's one of countless strategies I've employed in the ongoing war for my mind.
My personal mind war has raged for eleven years. I remember clearly where it first began: the family desktop computer, after school, junior year of high school. After running track my sophomore spring, I almost joined the cross country team the next fall. But I didn't. Instead, I climbed aboard a digital hamster wheel and started running in place. And eleven years later, I've yet to stop.
Here's what would happen: school got out at 2:10pm. I took the bus home, grabbed a snack, and sat down at the family desktop. Like a magnet, my hand was drawn to the mouse and keyboard of that clunky old Dell. Open a new browser. "SportsIllustrated.com". Enter. Scroll to the lefthand side. SI Hot Clicks. Click.
And so it began. My ongoing battle with Wasted Time.
Since I didn't play a sport that fall, I had little to occupy my afternoons. Sure, I had homework and dinner with the family. But I couldn't drive yet. I barely texted back then. And we had a rule: no TV on school nights. So instead, I dove into the internet.
S.I. Hot Clicks will be familiar to plenty of 20-something-year-old guys (or girls) in the US. It's not as dirty as it sounds. A daily rundown of sports articles, sports rumors, sports gossip, with some video clips thrown in for kicks. Foul ball splashes into Astros fan's beer. Did that Ball State punt seriously go BACKWARDS? Look what Derek Jeter said about dating Minka Kelly. Plus a picture of a beautiful actress or model thrown in at the end. Just those links. Day after day after day.
I couldn't get enough of it.
Each day I couldn't wait for the tasty digital candies that awaited on the family computer. Almost no one had iPhones way back in 2009. I had to wait til I was on the ol' desktop to see The gold suit Knowshown Moreno wore to the NFL draft and Rondo's SICK spin move and dish in the lane.
S.I. Hot Clicks was click bait before click bait was cool. As best I can tell, it's the original sports links aggregator of any consequence on the Internet. Its one-man creator, Jimmy Traina, basically invented the industry. You see plenty of poor man's imitations nowadays (Bleacher Report, USAToday FTW, whatever FoxSports is doing these days). But Hot Clicks started it all.
Both for the industry, and for me. I read Hot Clicks for less than two years, til the end of high school. When another site bought Jimmy out, Hot Clicks tanked. But as the local candy joint closed, a double-decker Candy Heaven opened down the block: The Rest of the Internet. I can chart my past 11 years of life by which furnaces have torched the most hours:
2009-2010: S.I. Hot Clicks
2010-2012: Yahoo News, Reddit, RealClearPolitics
2012-2014: Facebook, DC Sports Bog
2015-2017: Deadspin.com, WashingtonPost.com, DC Sports Bog
2017: Politico.com
2018: CNN.com, ESPN.com, Reddit
2019: RealClearPolitics, Deadspin (scab version, smh)
2020: CNN, ESPN, Twitter
From 2009 - 2017, I recorded my daily activities on paper monthly calendars. Not for planning...only in hindsight. I like to know what happened. Whenever I wasted time on the internet, I would write a big WT with a circle around it. Wasted Time. I would be terrified to know how many thousands of hours melted into oblivion while I browsed the latest headlines.
The timing of my personal War with Abundance seems especially hard: Facebook and iPhones arrived my freshman year of high school, Snapchat showed up my freshman year of college. Then again, anyone younger than me has the battles stacked even harder against them.
The War of Wasted Time hasn't been a one-sided fight. I've scrapped to rescue my time back, trying new tactics each year. Some of them work! I've been off Facebook for five years. I never made an Insta in the first place. I gave up Yahoo News for lent in 2012 and never returned. I gave quit CNN, ESPN, and Reddit cold-turkey on January 1st 2019, and I haven't been back on Reddit since. I even bought that alarm clock to reduce phone time.
You could draw parallels to smoking in the US. My high school years were the 1950s: delightful drinks of nicotine, unaware of the consequences. College was the 60s and 70s: I knew I had a problem, but I didn't (or couldn't) stop. Gobs and gobs of wasted time. 1980s, post college, some respectable improvements. 90s and 2000s, past few years, cleaned my act up quite a bit. This year, smoking rates are down to quite low. But 25% percent of the country still smokes, or whatever the number may be. Can I ever bring the quitters down to 0? Or even 5%?
Some important caveats: I love the Internet. I'm foolishly excited by this mundane miracle hiding in our pockets. I've given speeches about it, I've talked my friends' ears off about it, I even went on a podcast this week where our entire conversation beamed with wild enthusiasm for the Internet's potential. The Internet has expanded my mind, carved me a new career path, and catapulted me into the world of ideas.
But it hasn't been cheap. Thoreau tells us that "the cost of anything is the amount of life you exchange for that thing." I'll never know the exact bill for these past 11 years, but I know it's steep. I better find a discount in the future.