I am issuing a challenge to myself and anybody else who is interested: For one week, avoid all forms of entertainment based around recommendation algorithms. This is partially a follow-up to last week’s post, but I decided to make the rules quite a bit stricter and shorten the time frame after reading about The One Week Command Line Challenge. (Thanks, @focaccio for bringing that article to my attention.)

Why?

Originally, taking a break from algorithm-recommended content was simply a way to break my addiction to a contant drip of spoon-fed short-form content. I wanted to be come more okay with simply not being optimally entertained every waking second of my life. However, the second reason given for The Command Line Challenge really stuck with me:

I believe too few of us are concerned with living productive lives. This is not just about our productive use of technology. Many seem not to be concerned with being productive as human beings.

I often am concerned with how little of my life outside of work is anything close to productive. The article goes on to hit even closer to home:

Out of apathy, many of us are allowing ourselves to be nothing more than worker drones with little if any individuality, intellectual curiosity, or goals in life other than following the lemmings ahead of us in our swift race through life that leads ultimately only to our deaths.

I realized that my media habits have a second dark side: it’s very rare that I make an informed, independent decision about what I do with my free time. I will spend an entire Saturday drinking from the algorithm-powered firehoses of Youtube and Reddit and then wonder as I’m waiting to fall asleep why I didn’t choose to write a blog post or work on any of my personal projects. Now I’ve realized that the issue isn’t that I was choosing not to be productive, it’s that I wasn’t choosing anything at all! I spent the entire day stuffed so full of fresh content that there was no room left in my mind to make a conscious choice about anything.

Using only a command line on my computer and disabling every non-messaging app on my phone would definitley prevent me from binging short-form content. The problem is that the Command Line Challenge itself just isn’t appealing to me. Don’t get me wrong, I use a command line extensivley every day both at work and at home, and am reasonably competent at it, but the idea of checking my email and responding to code review comments through a terminal interface has absolutley zero appeal to me. Some things really are best done through a GUI.

So, my goal here is twofold: I want to leave a little more boredom in my day and I want to replace my habit of mindlessly consuming content with a habit of making a conscious choice about what content I consume and how I entertain myself.

I’m under no dilusion that I’ll be able to make every second of my life productive. Some lesure time and entertainment will always be necessary. However, I believe that if I can at least restore some real decisions to my daily routine I’ll choose to be productive more often.

Rules

There really is only one rule:

Decide what you want to do before you start doing it.

How you choose to implement this needs to be a personal decision, because everybody has different tastes in entertainment and different hobbies, and so will need to implement a different set of detailed rules. Here is my plan for living a bit more intentionally:

  1. Block feeds and recommendations on Reddit and Youtube. Those two sites are such indispensible repositories of useful information that totally excluding them from my Google search results would hamper my abliity to look up how to do anything. However, I can block the most insidious parts of both sites with uBlock Origin. (I’ll post a follow-up with the filters I end up using.)

  2. Avoid almost all traditional social media sites like the bird app and Instagram altogether.

  3. Limit my use of Mastodon to my home feed. I only recently started using Mastodon, so my follow list has not gotten too poluted. At this point every follow has been a distinct choice that still reflects my current preferences fairly well, so I don’t see anything wrong with reading posts from the peolpe I’ve subscribed to. Since I don’t follow too many people yet there are only so many posts to read every day. I will be keeping track of my usage and consider excluding Mastodon entireley in future iterations of the challenge if I sink too much time into it.

  4. Limit my consumption of traditional broadcast TV to live sports. I think my reasons for avoiding channel-surfing shows on traditional TV are pretty self explanatory, but I think it’s okay to make a carve-out for sports since the self-limiting factor of there only being so many games on I want to watch in any given week.

  5. Hide comments on Slashdot. I need some tech news, and Mastodon isn’t quite doing it for me. The articles on Slashdot’s front page are of highly-variable quality, but there are only so many of them every day, so it isn’t an endless content stream. The comments, however, are an oppurtunity to doomscroll I can do without.

  6. Avoid Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other subscription streaming sites. Theoretically I could still consume from these sites without violating the spirit of this challenge by just deciding what to watch before opening the site / app, but I spend too much time using them and figured this would be a good opportunity to explore other froms of entertainment.

Of course, you can’t break habits, only form new ones. I don’t have a super concrete plan for what I’m going to replace mindless content creation with, but here are some of my ideas:

  • Play the games that I already own. My entire Steam backlog is made up of hopeful conscious choices that I later ignored in favor of drinking from the algorithms’ teats for hours on end. Maybe I’ll make some progress trying out all those forlorn indie games I’ve got kicking around. (Not too hopeful for that one.)

  • Read the books I already own. Reasoning is the same as above.

  • Most importantly of all: create content. I’m not entireley sure what I’ll create. Maybe it’ll be more blog posts here. Maybe I’ll write a short story. I’ll probably make a few open source contributions as well, but my goal here really isn’t to force myself to code outside work.

If you’re considering this challenge, you should probably include “go outside” as part of your plan. My plan doesn’t include that because right now I can’t do much outside as I just had knee surgery.

What now?

I’ll annouce the start of my personal challenge on Mastodon, post daily updates there, and then write a conclusion article here. I want to go Monday to Sunday, so if nothing changes, I’ll start next Monday, Febuary 6th. I’ll be using #noalgorithmchallenge for all posts relating to this challenge, and I suggest you do the same if you’d like to take this challenge yourself and document your experience publicly.