Entertainment Is Your Enemy
Entertainment is no good. It’s far too absorbing these days to be considered manageable. But it’s not so easy to dismiss entertainment and move on with your life in productive ways. I recently discovered some things about entertainment in my own life that has helped me overcome it. Before these realizations I was spending very little time learning to code, but after them I began to spend an average of 5 hours a day learning.
There are times in our lives when we are hit with knowledge that makes a difference. The epiphany is a powerful teacher. I usually don’t make any progress in life unless I’ve had an epiphany. Typically, I don’t get anywhere from books and articles alone, or simple admonitions like “just do it.” Instead, it requires a lot of internal searching and prodding to discover what is holding us back. What has been holding me back all of my life? Entertainment.
Entertainment, distraction, diversion, fun, games, amusement, treat, leisure, whatever you want to call it is the process of receiving enjoyment. However, the joy from entertainment is hollow and destructive. It is vampiric. Just as sugar is pleasant but poisonous, so too is entertainment, especially when indulged in excessively. There is another word for the entertainment seeker that I will use here: Hedonist.
Hedonism is the philosophical idea that pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain is how we ought to live. All my life I scoffed at hedonists and never would have believed I was one until my epiphany came to me: I am a hedonist, through and through. I looked back on my life and thought, “what else could I be? I did nothing but pursue pleasure all my life.”
Self-examination is a necessary requirement to overcome the enemy that is entertainment. Think about how you’ve lived your life and go all the way back to childhood. I will go ahead and relay some things from my own life that will help illustrate this point.
- My escapist fantasies involved things like having enough money so I could play video games or read books or watch TV without any interruptions or anxiety of needing to be provided finances. The fantasies were fleeting, not anything I hung on to, but if I had your typical lottery-winner fantasy I couldn’t come up with anything more interesting than binge on entertainment for the rest of my life.
- As a child, playing with toys was my ultimate goal. Even as a kid I hoped that I could play with all the Legos I wanted to in heaven, and to be able to hover over them!
- As I grew older my play swapped to video games, which became a highly addictive source of escape.
- And then as I aged more TV became more interesting, then movies, then catching up on all the stuff I missed.
- Then came books. Then came the internet and social media (because by this time I had access to high-speed internet at home).
In all of my life, entertainment was ultimately my highest value I pursued. There’s this self-help guru term ‘minimum effective dose’. I used that philosophy without realizing it. I used it for school and work, only doing the minimum required to pass or not get yelled at by my boss. This was so I could spend as much of my time as possible being entertained, even though I didn’t realize the implications of what I was doing. I thought everyone behaved like this, and after all, things were entertaining, I was growing up in one of the most entertaining times in human history.
Also, a brief aside here, I was blinded to the negative effects of hedonism because I assumed I would be successful because I was smart. School taught me that. It taught me I could do well with hardly any effort, surely that would continue on in the rest of my life and I’d have a high-paying job to help me continue pursuing pleasure, right?
Decades later I wondered why I was having so much trouble putting in the work I knew I needed to do to be successful. It had nothing to do with strategies, life hacks, a purpose, motivation, luck or opportunity. It was always about my strongest value: pleasure. I traced it back to the beginning and, like my bullet-points, figured out it was the central theme of my life. I compared myself to my successful friends. They weren’t much different from me in health or intelligence, but they seemed to be doing well. Why? All I could see was that they put in the work. We still live in a society where if you put in the work you can get something out of it.
My friends were willing to delay pleasure, in fact, they were willing to disregard it altogether, sometimes for days at a time, or for months, years even. I had a friend who lived with a strict budget for years to pay off all his debts. He tracked everything and lived frugally. Even though he had a good paying job he still worked hard to keep his money tight and live frugally. It was for a good reason, though, he had student debts and had to take care of a large family in an expensive part of the country, and his solution worked, it paid off.
Without getting into too many details of my own and others’ lives, it became clear to me that entertainment was the bane of my existence. It had brought me nothing, not even good memories. That’s why I liken it to a vampire. It doesn’t provide joy, it takes it from you. Like porn, you are watching others have a good time, not you. Some forms of entertainment are particularly insidious. We all know video games and Youtube are obviously going to interfere with success, but social media is just as damaging.
Social media is insidious because you can easily trick yourself into thinking you are spending your time wisely. You’re informing yourself, you’re using your brain, you’re engaging in dialogue, you’re staying on top of things, you aren’t missing out on all the important things going on in the world. But it’s all distraction. I wrote a post on how to stop doomscrolling, and that post changed my life. Social media was the last form of entertainment that had a firm grip on my life. I was willfully blind to how damaging it was, how worthless it was. I didn’t want to quit, I was having the time of my life engaging in debate, trolling, speaking my mind, having conversations and whipping up my and other’s emotions. But I couldn’t moderate social media with learning to code. I would end up spending hours on social media websites and 15 minutes coding. That’s not a recipe to learn, and even if I did learn, how would I concentrate in an actual job?
I learned entertainment was the enemy, and I had to destroy it. I modified for myself my post on killing your past. I had to kill entertainment in my life. I had to stop caring about all those fun things. It was time to put away the child and become the man. Only by killing entertainment could I overcome it. I had to acknowledge that literally all forms of entertainment are distractions. When I killed off social media I immediately felt the ADHD disappear. I felt normal again, like I could concentrate on something difficult for once.
Like I said earlier, I spent an average of 5 hours a day on learning to code, and in a few weeks I’ve finished a beginner Python course, a beginner C course, I’m halfway through Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, I’ve watched a lot of coding videos and I’ve started an Intermediate Python course. Because I know I’ll put in the time now, I have mapped out for myself a big of a self-taught program and I have goals and ideas of where I want to be months from now so I can be closer to becoming employable. One day I hope to write a post on how I learned to code and got a job.
This is significant. I knew I should learn to code decades ago when I was a kid. Then again when I was in college, I knew I should major in computer science, and I did! BUT! I failed because I couldn’t focus on the difficult work, and so I dropped out of the program and spent my free time owning noobs in online games. Then a decade later when I had a ton of free time I knew I should learn to code and I started but I quickly dropped out once the going got hard. Then during the pandemic I rediscovered this need to code, to gain a marketable skill that wasn’t a physical trade and once again I started. I worked my way through the easiest stuff, HTML and CSS, but stalled out at Javascript and then struggled for years to focus for more than 15 minutes. Only now am I crushing it.
When you are focused on a difficult goal, distractions will come at you hard and fast, and you’ll be strangely addicted to them. For instance, one time I found myself addicted to chess out of the blue. I played all day long for days and watched loads of videos. Another time I became addicted to an old MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) game I played as a kid, a text-based Dungeons and Dragons style game. I played so much I reached the final level my character could gain, but I cheated since literally no one, admin or player, still played the game, saving me thousands of hours. I gained total closure over the game and haven’t gone back since. Then I devoured books. Then I binged Star Trek: the Next Generation, then I deep dived into conspiracy theories and on and on the wheel turned.
Entertainment has always been a distraction, an escape, for me. It may be the same for you. It’s not your fault, you weren’t equipped to handle it. Some people seem to be able to moderate their usage and they aren’t that interested, they find greater pleasure in work. A lot of us consume the things those people make. If those people were also addicted to entertainment and couldn’t focus on putting in the work, we wouldn’t have so much to consume. If you’ve identified yourself as a closet Hedonist, come on out of it then kill it. Because for you, entertainment will always get in the way of success. One simply cannot be successful in life if they are always looking for distractions, even subconsciously, or out of habit.
I’ve read Atomic Habits and deeply believed rewiring my habits was how I was going to learn to code. It didn’t work until I defined my prime directive habit: seek entertainment/distraction to escape from the difficulties of life. Once I knew what my biggest obstacle was, and I killed it, the change was immediate. I taught myself to despise entertainment, to stop caring for it, to hold contempt for it. I deleted and removed things from my life. There was a lot of emotional pain involved in this destruction, which I resolved by journaling about it. I highly recommend journaling as medicine for emotional pain.
Maybe you are already successful, or you can already control yourself and moderate your consumption. If so, that’s a blessing and you should be proud. But if you can trace entertainment through your life and identify how it has kept you from success, then you know what to do, you have to get rid of it. ALL OF IT! I only indulge in entertainment now at the end of the day after I’ve put in a long and difficult day of slogging through code and computer systems. And even then, only some forms of entertainment, like watching a show or reading a book, not video games or social media.
Lastly, a mantra to keep, to remind yourself of: “Entertainment is the enemy.”
