Depressing! You Cumulatively Spend Three Days a Year Playing a Game You Enjoy

Ugh, O.K., I hope you’re ready for some depressing news, because this one is a doozy. You know that silly game you like to play every day which brings you a small amount of joy but does nothing to help make the world a better place or to boost my meagre social-media following? Well, it may seem like you’re spending only a few minutes on it, but those minutes add up to almost three days a year. That’s right—three entire days spent doing something just because you enjoy doing it. It’s nauseating, isn’t it?

Just think about how many better ways you could be spending that time—like by doing something you hate. But, no, you would rather waste it on a game that might seem like a harmless distraction but is actually the reason that your career has stalled out, you don’t spend enough time with your loved ones, and my TikTok fan base isn’t large enough to get me a lucrative development deal, I assume.

It really is easy to miss how quickly all the time can add up, you know? You think you’re just giving yourself a brief respite from all the problems and stresses that make up the rest of your day, but, at the end of the year, you look back and, whoops, there went three whole days that you could have spent worrying about broad structural issues you have little to no control over! And, sure, you still spent the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year doing that, but is it really enough? All those broad structural issues are still here, after all, and, though we can’t definitively prove that they’d be solved if you had worried about them instead of playing your silly game, it seems like a pretty safe bet.

To be fair, this isn’t entirely your fault. These gaming companies are desperate for your time, and that’s why they’ve invested millions of dollars to mastermind ways to make these games as addictive as possible, such as coming out with them once a day instead of just, you know, once. Oh, man, if I ever meet the evil genius who came up with the idea of giving people more of a thing that they like—he’d better watch out!

So, how do we deal with this problem? It’s probably best to start out small: just spend one day not playing the game and see how you feel. Amazing, right? You definitely didn’t waste the day away, wondering what the answer to the game you didn’t play was, and being too distracted by that to get much of anything else done, right? You invented a new clean-energy source instead, right? I knew it! And that was after just one day! Imagine how many new clean-energy sources you’ll come up with if you don’t play it tomorrow, either!

Anyway, look, I’m really sorry to be the bearer of bad news here. I’m not trying to ruin everything you like to do—that just happens to be a side effect of this particular revelation. And, sure, you probably spend more time per year eating, sleeping, and liking my social-media posts than you do playing this game, but those are all things you have to do—and, with the last one, arguably need to spend even more time doing—so cutting down on them isn’t a very good option for optimizing the efficiency of your life. For optimization to happen, unfortunately, you’re going to have to move on from this game.

Oh, and, by the way, I finished it in two tries and three minutes with no mistakes today. Pretty impressive, right? Tell your friends to follow me for tips! ♦