How I spent my final year: Netflix
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| Credit: Flickr//SaGaR PuRo |
Welcome back to my blog. You probably forgot it existed; I don't blame you. So did I for a while. Turns out that revising, essay-writing and crying bitter, bitter tears can take up the best part of nine months.
I am pleased to report that I have passed through the dark tunnel that is final year. I have gained my 2.1 and I will soon put on a black robe and walk on stage to fetch it as my parents and hundreds of people who don't give a shit about me clap. Before I write anything about proper adult life, which I've been told is coming for me whether I like it or not, there are some aspects of my final year of university that took up enough of my time and emotional energy to merit a few paragraphs on the internet. Seeing as I have not updated my blog once in 2015, it seemed an appropriate time for a series of posts about how I spent my final year.
Anyone who knows me will know that a common theme in my life is not doing what I'm supposed to be doing and final year was not the year I turned over a new leaf (despite what I told myself in August 2014). I will be the first to admit that I have wasted a very high proportion of my precious, finite minutes on this earth. The ways in which I choose to do so vary. I learnt to name every UN-recognised country in the world with the help of sporcle.com. I have almost every Sims game ever released. There was the time I spontaneously bought a Bop-It and the time I spent three solid weeks playing Pokemon Blue because I discovered you could download GameBoy emulators onto your computer. After twenty-two years of life, about eighteen of which have been spent faffing about, there is one fact in which I have absolutely no doubt: gaining access to a Netflix subscription was the worst thing I've ever done for my productive life.
Netflix has increased my laziness in two ways. First of all, it has given me more motivation to indulge in the laziest form of time-wasting. At least with playing a game or memorising a pointless list some level of concentration is involved. Video, to me, is by far the easiest medium to consume; in fact, you can consume it without really consuming it. What I call 'watching a video' is, in reality, being vaguely aware of some noises and movement while thinking about something completely different. It entertains me in a way that half-concentrating on reading a book or looking at a picture never could. Those activities require my full attention for me to gain anything from them; I can turn off a half-watched video and feel like I've enjoyed myself. Netflix has given me a huge high-definition library of things to not-quite-focus on. Not only that but I no longer have to deal with the mildly annoying obstacle of sifting through bust link after bust link on streaming websites. It may not sound like much, but every twenty minutes I was forced to choose between completing my important daily tasks and trawling the internet for a working episode of Archer. It was like a little 'you're wasting your life' reminder.
Netflix gives you no such reminder. Netflix is a faff enabler. Instead of forcing me to work for the next episode by finding it myself (which I think may now be the only way I'm applying the research skills my CV claims I gained at university) Netflix serves it up on the right hand corner of the screen. Worst of all, you don't even have to click anything for it to play. You know your sedentary lifestyle is becoming problematic when you choose to wait fourteen seconds instead of moving your finger to click "play now" on Netflix. This is the second, and possibly most insidious, way in which Netflix has encouraged my slothitude*. Not only am I lazy more frequently; I have reached new depths of laziness. I can pretty much lie still and motionlessly, thoughtlessly, mindlessly consume for hours and hours on end, the only energy I use being the two or three calories it takes to lift a Jaffa Cake from the packet and into my mouth.
During the really bad periods I lost entire days to Netflix. I have sat with the essay I was supposed to be writing minimised in my start bar for over eight hours, watching episode after episode of a programme I wasn't 100% sure I was enjoying. It was a way of distracting myself from the stresses of exams, coursework, and trying to find a job; a form of entertainment that gave my brain time to shut off and relax after a hard day of stress and over-stimulation.
I spent this year convinced that university made me less intellectual and leaving has confirmed it. When your main day-to-day responsibility is based around learning it becomes a chore. As a result, you become more drawn to mindless entertainment than intellectually nourishing activities because you associate learning with worktime, not downtime. This was especially true for me with reading. When I was at school I was an avid reader but doing a literature-centric degree left me reluctant to pick up a book that wasn't on a set-list unless I knew it would be short, easy, and funny. Since leaving university I've started taking pleasure in reading again, partly because I know that I can put a book that I'm not enjoying down without fear of not being able to write 3000 words about it later. As the list of activities I deem my frazzled brain capable of coping with grows, the lure of Netflix is weakening. It's still a useful service, obviously, but I now find myself using it more for purposes such as watching a film with friends than background noise for lying around in a semi-vegetative state.
I'm not blaming Netflix for my poor life choices. I take full responsibility for the lost days spent doing nothing more taxing than simply existing with the full use of my ears and eyes. If it hadn't been Netflix it would have been something else, and it's probably been better for my housemates and next-door neighbours that I didn't take to the Bop-It with the same enthusiasm and dedication. Perhaps, in time, my first choice of leisure activity will be to create something, or to play beautiful music, or to read one of the great novels that understanding French and Italian has opened up to me. Or perhaps an entire season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will have just been released. Only time will tell.
*Not currently a real word.
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