One major decision I recently made is to try to minimize the time I spend consuming internet- and video-game-based entertainment. I realized that I consider almost all of the time I spend on those things to be effectively completely wasted. It doesn't make me happier, it doesn't get any of my schoolwork done, it doesn't each me anything, and it doesn't facilitate any social interaction (unless it's a video-game played at a LAN party or something, which I'd consider differently). I have observed that both I and most of my friends waste almost all of our free time on such things, and we could spend that free time either being productive or doing something that is slightly higher-effort but much more rewarding (like reading books, playing piano, playing a board game or talking with friends, going for a hike or otherwise exploring the outdoors, etc).
I've spent the last couple years trying to spend more of my time on those worthwhile things: trying to prioritize my classes, piano, outdoors, exercise, reading, etc. But I've finally realized that the core problem is my (and pretty much all of my peers') obsession with/addiction to low-effort activities and low-effort entertainment. I just need to judiciously avoid stupid low-effort wastes of time, and I'll much more easily find other more productive things to do during that time instead. It's working out well so far.
I think my parents had a better college experience than any of my friends or I am currently having. They made better friends and did more memorable things with them. I blame the internet for stealing our time. If we didn't always have such easy access to stupid low-effort entertainment, we'd be motivated to find more worthwhile ways to entertain ourselves.
Generally speaking, low-effort things suck, the easiest thing to do at any given time is never actually worth doing, and the worth/productivity/happiness/reward gotten out of any activity is generally proportional to how difficult it was. Kind of like Reddit: it sucks now compared to five years ago because almost all of the content and discussion is much lower-effort now compared to five years ago.
I don't want to waste the bulk of my college years neither learning nor making/doing something cool nor going out and actually doing things with my friends. And the way I plan to start to do that is by avoiding the single foremost thief of my time: the stupid internet.
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(Copypasta from a comment I just wrote; thought it might get more useful feedback and discussion here.)
The Internet is what you make of it.
I first met "the Internet" when it was ARPANet. Everyone who was anyone in my home town had an acoustic coupling device to talk to the Crays at work. However, kids didn't get to play with that. We visited my aunt, though, who had the exact same acoustic coupler and dot-matrix pistachio'n'white wormstrip printer and you could use it to play DUNGEN (aka Zork) on the university computer. That was eight.
I didn't see "The Internet" again until Freshman year, when my university had 20 2400baud and 2 9600baud modems you could use to dial into their DEC PDP-11s. Laptops were monochrome. Windows 3.11 was state-of-the-art.
My sophomore year NCSA Mosaic was replaced by Netscape and PINE was slowly supplanted by Eudora. My junior year they started stringing CAT5 cable in the dorms and Fraunhaufer leaked the MP3 codec. My senior year professors started asking us for our email addresses. Not a one of them used them for anything, though.
By the time Youtube came out I'd been out of college more than half a decade.
I mention this only to say that people like me - and it's a very narrow band - are the only ones who have really seen the world with "the internet" and the world without. So while you can say "the Internet is wasting our lives" I don't think you fully understand what your life would be like without.
Imagine picking your music by perusing a catalog and looking at album covers, then waiting a week for your tapes to come in.
Imagine playing multiplayer games via the post office.
Imagine going to the library whenever you need facts.
Finally, imagine a massive underground black market in SLP VHS tapes of low-budget pornography, of 3-year-old Penthouse and Hustler magazines hoarded and coveted by pimply-faced teenagers, of flipping back and forth every three seconds to see that brief half-second flash of clarity on the Playboy Channel or Skinemax where the decoder and the filter align for a brief, shining moment.
So allow me to make a few observations of you and your peers, from my lofty position of growing up as the Internet did, rather than stumbling upon it fully formed:
- You use it as an excuse. There are amazing wonders on the Internet but you don't use it for that.
- You use it as a crutch. I have more empathy than you. I am more eloquent than you. I handle social situations better than you. This is because so many of your interactions happen in a context-free text-based environment where you have no subtext to work with. Consequently I can out-argue you 99 times out of 100 because my Gymkhana was more stringent.
I would not be mixing television in Hollywood if it were not for the Internet. I've optioned two screenplays because of friends I made over the Internet. And I find the Internet to be absolutely spectacular at finding things for me to do in the real world. I ride one of twelve Benelli Tre Ks in the Western Hemisphere. If it weren't for an exceedingly friendly online community I never would take the risk. As it is, any problem I encounter I have immediate help from Scotland to Adelaide.
In 1993 I had to make a long distance call to Australia to look up a block number on a Chevy V6 because I thought it was a Holden (turns out it was a Mercruiser). Nowadays you just feed that string into Google and it'll tell you.
* * *
My generation wasted time, too. All generations did. The collective GPA of all quarter-based schools from 1994 to 2001 is probably a few points lower because TBS always ran Bond marathons during finals week. WoW wasn't a thing but f'ing DOOM sure was. Ridiculous amounts of time on Saturday nights were spent trying to beat EVO or Pilot Wings. And just like you, we drank too much cheap crap, smoked too much cheap weed and kicked ourselves for time wasted.
The difference is we didn't blame the Internet, we blamed the Nintendo. Or the television.
You're wasting time because you're a time waster, not because you have access to the wonders of the world. If you have time management issues, I could lock you in a racquetball court with a physics textbook and a Rubik's Cube and you'd know no more about Netwon's laws than you do now. Before people stared at television in the evening they stared at the fire.
If you aren't enjoying your life, look in the mirror. Be the change you want to see in the world.
