Over three months and nary a peep from me on here. That’s not to say that nothing’s happened since then—far from it. However, I’ve managed to keep myself busy doing stuff that’s been pretty inconsequential. I think things started going downhill when I found a new game for my phone that I found on the App Store.
Two things to note: It’s very rare for me to pay money for a game, either to get rid of ads or to get bonuses that help me advance in the game. It’s also very common for me to play a game on my phone to excess, which can enable me to advance just as well as people who are coughing up loads of cash to play.
That said, playing a game for hours per day takes a toll. I didn’t have as much time in the day to do things; I didn’t have much motivation to accomplish much more than what little I was doing. It’s much easier to see in retrospect that while I may have felt some level of accomplishment because of what I was doing, it wasn’t worth the time I was using to do so.
Putting aside that feeling of accomplishment, what did I actually accomplish? Not much. Any progress I made is stored in the app; if I never open it again, the progress is basically worthless. (Three times now, I’ve gone through the process of investing a lot of time and zero money into playing a game, then finally deciding that it’s not worth all of those hours per day. Given the level of progress I made, I don’t quite have the heart to delete it entirely, but I tuck the game into a folder several layers back on the second screen of my phone. Three apps that I haven’t opened since I finally decided to stop playing and regain all of that time I was using each day for what was essentially a distraction. Nothing to show for all of that time and effort outside of pixels on my phone screen.)
Spending several hours a day over a long period of time means there are many days, possibly weeks that I’ve invested into staring at my phone and tapping the screen over and over again with very little (if anything) to show for it. How much of that time can I get back? Zero. Zilch. Nada. None of it.
Could I have put that time to better use? Most likely. Is it too late to apply the time to said better use? Most definitely. So I have to shrug it off, accept my losses, and move forward. And part of that moving forward means doing a lot of writing in the next two days.
Why two days? Because on the third day, I’m rising from the dead. Wait… no, sorry, my bad. It’s because on the third day, I’m going back to the hospital for another visit with the neurosurgeon in the OR. Which means I have a lot of stories to tell and not much time to tell them before then, so distractions will be thoroughly unwelcome for the next few days. I like to think that the upside of avoiding distractions will be worth it.