Too much entertainment

My parents raised me to be frugal, especially when it comes to entertainment. I went to the movies twice during my K–12 education, and I still feel bad about paying $10 or more to watch a movie in the theaters. Another example is video games: I would only get a couple of new ones every year, so I played through them repeatedly—I have played through the original Halo campaigns too many times to count. I have always been in the position of having too much time and not enough entertainment, but that has changed during my past three and a half years at RPI.

Not having enough time is no longer the issue—the issue is that I have too much entertainment. I get four new games every month through Xbox Live Gold. Now, not all of them are ones that I would play, but there are interesting games that I got months ago and still have yet to touch. I buy more games during sales, even though I have games from the last sale that I still have not played, and then there is the issue of me going back to just play Overwatch instead of trying to get through all my other games. It is not that I enjoy Overwatch so much so that it is the only thing I want to play; it is that I feel like it is easier to just play a couple of matches than start a large, time-intensive game like Assassin’s Creed.

Another large source of entertainment is TV and movies. I have five TV series and seven movies on my list of things to watch, with even more coming on the horizon. The frustrating thing is that sometimes, I am bored and I just do not have any desire to watch anything on my list, but when I am busy, that is all I want to do. Having to force myself to watch something is not enjoyable, so I end up just refreshing Reddit too much and getting nothing accomplished.

I used to read two hours every day on the bus ride to and from school. I tore through books, but I have not read more than five during college. Books are the most time-intensive form of entertainment, in my opinion. Two hours for a movie versus a week for a book makes the inefficiency of reading, given my backlog of other entertainment, seem not worth it. I am somewhat sad that I have not read that much, so I am going to make it my goal to read on the bus trips when I go skiing.

Overall, it is a good problem to have.