10/01/2025

The blog is up. It took no time at all, but this is more of a personal project than I've completed in years.

09/30/2025 | Inaugural Post

I'm writing this before I officially have a blog, just notes in a text file. But after planning to blog for ages, I figure starting with something is a great first step in place of endlessly researching technical details. So here I am, and if a single person reads this, that's pretty neat.

I have some motivations for blogging. I've spent years of my life cycling between procrastination, game/reddit/youtube binges, journaling about improving my life, and then falling back in to it all. There's notable irony that this blog is just journaling, but I'm hoping a more public admission will help, and it's only natural that I create a bit of content given how much I've consumed.

I can't say my life plan hasn't worked out; I've definitely been successful academically and in my career. But I don't feel that success inwardly, and there are also major outward gaps like lack of meaningful relationships. Do I want to die alone? No. But do I want to watch Outdoor Boys surviving in an ice dugout in Alaska? Yes, at least in the moment.

For long periods, I manage to kick my habits. I'll go a month without doomscrolling or half a year without gaming, but I often focus on removing negatives without expanding anything positive, so my life remains similar, just less enjoyable. Then a desire to get high, eat pizza, and binge horror stories on youtube hits me and it's game over. And I can't deny the binge is more engaging than the time I've spent disciplined.

Writing it out makes my failures so obvious. Have I really been expecting to replace consuming habits with an internet schedule, a stack of books, and a vacuum cleaner? Will setting my phone to gray scale and blocking reddit compete with beating FTL? No way. I live alone, and while I have friends I visit frequently, I'm talking about replacing a lifestyle. Anki cannot fill the social void I browse reddit to numb. These addictions have become my ersatz life.

So what am I doing differently? Becoming serious about my life and building the new alongside cutting out the old. I have focused too much on things to get rid of, but then I fill the empty space by sleeping or watching TV. No shit it doesn't work out. I do not get high for days at a time solely to entertain myself. There's an obvious layer of self-hatred and avoidance mixed in, too.

Think about this for a second: you're discussing wasting a decade of your life in a miserable cycle of games, drugs, and social media. That's a pretty serious issue. But would you go see a therapist? No, that's too much work. More realistically, it makes you too anxious, and that's why you're avoiding it. But juxtapose this with work or school, where you'll jump through plenty of hoops to get things done. You are fundamentally unserious about your life, and I do not want to be expressing the same thoughts well into my 30s.

It reminds me a lot of this post by Cate Hall. And then I think of blog posts like the following:

  1. https://www.sophiajt.com/youtube-addiction/
  2. https://guzey.com/personal/my-journal/

Reading these gives me hope. I relate to them to a large degree. And I love reading followup posts where the authors are doing better. I hope this post can do the same for me, that someone may check it down the road when I'm doing better. I want to see a timestamp on this post that reads "5 years ago" and remember this admonition as my turning point. A turning point does not just happen, you make it happen.

So let me get to the point. I'm going to follow a familiar road, but hopefully I've changed up enough that I actually travel it. It's not for a month, not for a year, I'm done with reddit and youtube. Sure, a friend will link me to a video, or I'll check reddit while researching a product, but I'm done using these sites for entertainment. There is almost nothing worthwhile about them that cannot be found elsewhere, especially reddit. I want to say I'm done with gaming, but I don't have it in me. Games offer unparalleled escapism, where I can be so engaged in a fight that I forget all else. This is an amazing feeling. But online, competitive gaming consumes me, and I'm done with it.

I don't enjoy these habits. They numb me more than anything. When I get off work, look at the clock, and realize I have 5 hours of free time, this entertainment is convenient. It has prevented my growth, so 5 hours of gaming on discord sounds a hell of a lot better than 5 hours of sitting alone confronting emotions I've pushed down. But I can't numb the lows without also numbing the highs, and an actually fulfilling life is hidden behind these habits. I cannot reach it without changing them.

These cannot be idle words. My perception of who I am must change. And I need to start building new habits. I can't just sleep or watch TV. Tomorrow I am going to play pinball. And research therapists. I'll document some of this journey, and I will post a 30-day follow up. I am becoming serious about life.