True Fact: I spend the vast majority of my life re-returning to things I’ve already experienced. Doing familiar things in the same way.
Of course I try new things every once in a while but for the most part, I’m a return shopper, expecially when it comes to entertainment. I re-read books I’ve read. I re-watch TV I’ve seen. I re-listen to music I’ve heard. I replay the same games I’ve finished. I go to the same five restaurants where I eat the same dishes. Over and over and over.
I am, in most practical definitions of the word, incredibly unimaginative. I am a man of habit. A creature of comfort. A one-track mind. And it freaks me out. Over and over and over.
For example I have, in the last month and a half, probably watched the entire run of How I Met Your Mother, five seasons long about 4 times. Like. Every episode. Every one. And it’s not like I’m doing anything else while I’m watching them. I JUST watch them. Sitting in bed. Or on a couch. Over and over and over.
And it’s weird, I enjoy them. I enjoy them a lot. When it comes to things I like, I don’t get bored quickly, I get bored slowly. And habit is so engrained that I’ll be completely unaware that I’ve become depressed due to the complete and total immersion in helpless boredom. Over and over and over.
The problem with this is two-fold. First of all it’s obvious, it eats time. It’s a fucking time sink. You find yourself with a free evening, you have a list of things you say you want to do, like write or sleep or exercise and immediately all that happens is the path of least resistance. Straight to the familiar. Suddenly it’s half one, you’ve got to go to sleep and you’ve done nothing. You feel entertained but in reality, your brain is asleep. Hypnotised and life is fucking boring. It’s bizarre, because with a laptop, it really doesn’t matter where in the world you are, you could be in the most interesting city on Earth* and it doesn’t matter cause you’re basically in the same place.
Now I’m won’t deny it’s comforting. But I feel like it’s a comfort that slowly eats your life, one bite at a time. I feel bored on a really helpless level. I feel zombified. I feel controlled. And that’s the second problem, it makes me feel consistently weak, like I fail in the one arena I desperately need to succeed. In my personal life. In shaping the nuances of my experience. Of being strong enough to identify what I want and make it happen. Even on the most incredibly trivial level. I have had three films on my computer for three months that I have not seen. And every time I want to watch something, and let’s face it as a screen addict that’s ALL the fucking time, I think “I should watch that”, but I don’t. Instead I watch four hours of TV I’ve already seen. Last night for example, I was up till 2 in the morning watching episodes of The Outer Limits that I’ve seen about a hundred times. And they were shit ones by the way, not the cool ones. The REALLY shit ones. So it’s not like I even have control over the content. I feel like I’m like a man sitting in a room full of all the music in the world, constantly listening to the theme tune from Star Trek. Now don’t get me wrong, if you had to pick a piece of music to listen to forever, that wouldn’t be a bad one, but it seems ridiculous that my enthusiasm and ambition are stymied on even the most basic of levels. It’s as if the whole
Anyways, the key element here is that for the next month, I shall not be listening to music I’ve seen. I will not be eating anywhere or anything more than once. I will not watch more than one episode of any one TV series. I’m also gonna be pushing myself to be off my laptop by half 9 at the latest every night. I’m gonna go read books in actual bars and watch movies in actual theatres. I realise however that I have said shit like this over and over and over.
I don’t care though. February is the month of the new. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like.
*I do.
