Freelo_Is_Not_Free

On the subject of blocking things, I have been happy with this program someone wrote for managing the hosts file: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts If you choose to use this, and want to block Youtube, then you need to add it to the blacklist because it is not there by default. Youtube is really tough to quit. I catch myself typing the Youtube URL into my computer through muscle memory a lot, particularly when I am sleepy. So I definitely wouldn't be able to avoid wasting time on it without blocking it somehow.

Day 5 of Youtube/Reddit Detox: Good day for productivity. I spent most of the focusing on the MOOC's and doing assignments for them. I have been staying off youtube and Reddit, and am loving the approach where I keep my smart phone at my house. I did mess up my diet today, so that wasn't great. Had some fancy holiday season coffee shit instead of an iced Americano like I normally get, and also had some wings glazed with something that contained sugar. Oh well. Dietary Compliance: Failed today but succeeded yesterday, 4/7 for the week Going to gym: 2/3 for the week. Reading: About 40 pages MOOCs: Finished assignments for two classes.

Slept in until 4pm today and been feeling drowsy, so not a productive day. It might have something to do with my medication. Not much I can write about today though. Just did some reading.

Day 3 of Youtube/Reddit Detox: @JustTomI like to watch jeopardy during dinner, which definitely falls into the stupid video category, but I am ok with it. If I can limit my TV to 5 episodes of jeopardy per week, that's fine. Yesterday, after I finished my post I was able to finish the final 50 pages of the Polya book, but I only got four hours sleep and was not thinking quite as clearly today, but I did go to the gym. I read some journals in the forums here and am going to try the pomodoro technique out. For my diet, cravings for sweets seem to be at their worst during my drive home, but I have been able to ignore them so far. A few months back, I had a routine where I batch cooked three weeks worth of lunch in one afternoon. I lost a lot of weight during this time, and barely thought about food, but the routine fell apart after I went on a vacation and one of my family members tricked me into watching Great British Bakeoff. Everyone on that show seems so nice and British, but they are gains goblins, hellbent on my destruction. Going back to the no sugar diet. Dietary Compliance: Check, 3/7 for the week Going to gym: 2/3 for the week. Reading: Finished Polya's How to Solve It Coursera Courses: Watched week one of UCSD Learning How to Learn Udemy Programming courses: no progress

Day 2 of Youtube/Reddit Detox: Thanks for the reply, Samon! Overall, I suspect this will be an easier task than quitting playing the games was for me, because I don't have to abandon a network of online friends like I did when I quit League and Hearthstone. The real test is going to be when I google some technical question, and the top result is on Reddit. The end goal is for me to be able to use Reddit or Youtube in that scenario without falling into a pit of distraction, but in my current state, I think I am better off with having the sites blocked. There are plenty of sources of information on the internet that have less built in distraction mechanisms. I might do some experiments later with browser add-ons to see if I can change the interfaces of Reddit and Youtube in a way that makes them less distracting, but I am going to give my brain some time to "deprogram" before I start mucking around with that. Fortunately, filling the extra time is not an issue for me, because I have some MOOC's, as well as a long list of books that I was previously "too busy" to read. Today was a good day. It was mostly just caffeine and studying. I ended up unthinkingly navigating to Reddit on my smart phone when I picked it up, but didn't actually do any browsing. Smart phones are much more of a hassle to block sites on than computers. I am considering leaving my smart phone at home and treating it as a de-facto dumb phone, and only taking it out of the house when I need to navigate somewhere new. That should result in me spending less of my life being harassed by robots and scam artists, and if anyone has important stuff to say, I can check my voicemails. Goals: Dietary Compliance: check 2/7 this week Gym: 1 hour of running yesterday. 1/3 for the week Reading: 50 Pages of Polya's "How to solve it" with notes. Coursera MOOCs: Finished week 7 of Stanford Intro to Math Thinking. Udemy Programming courses: No progress.

Day 1 of Youtube/Reddit detox: This is my first journal entry. While I have been able to abstain from video games successfully for a while, stuff like Reddit and Youtube videos related to gaming are still eating up an unfortunate amount of my time. I've also been feeling a bit down lately. Birthdays and holidays tend to remind me of how I pissed away a fair chunk of my prime on League/Hearthstone, which doesn't feel great. Not much benefit to worrying about that now, but that doesn't really stop me from worrying about it. My current goal is to do a 90 day detox of Youtube and Reddit. Yesterday I blocked Reddit and Youtube on my computer via the hosts file. I reflexively typed those URLS into my browser a few times today, but they were blocked so it was no big deal. I hope that in the future, I won't even have the reflex of typing the names into the URL, but for now this is fine. If it turns out I do need to have those sites permanently blocked, my life would not be diminished in any meaningful way. Goals: Finish the Udemy programming courses I bought. Reestablish the high fat low carb diet that worked for me in the past. Go to gym 3 times per week. Finish reading the books I rented from the library.

I remember reading a joke about League of Legends players on Reddit. It went something like this: "Getting high elo in League of Legends is nothing to be proud of. Being good at League of Legends is like being good at being depressed." When I was at my highest elo, I was like a hikikomori. I would go weeks without talking to humans other than Domino's pizza employees. I had aspirations of breaking into the pro scene and turning League of Legends into my career. This dream did not seem completely delusional to me at the time, because I was challenger elo at one point. However, I was only good at Karthus, and even then I relied heavily on level one cheese to get into challenger, so my aspirations were pretty delusional. After trying in vain to bring my other champions up to par, I eventually quit League of Legends and decided to go back to school. I doubt I would have been able to avoid League of Legends at school through pure willpower, but my internet was shitty enough to make playing League unpalatable. I still wasted a shit-ton of time watching League VODs or playing Hearthstone, but I was able to complete my degree with decentish grades. The best quarter I had at school was the quarter I got annoyed by my roommate's TV watching habits. They would watch loud TV programs when I was trying to study, and it made it hard to concentrate. Because I was kind of spineless and afraid of conflict, I decided the best way to solve the problem was by spending all day in the library. Because it was a less distraction laden environment, I actually spent less time on Reddit and finished my homework quicker. I even had a semblance of a social life that quarter. After graduation however, I felt like complete shit for not getting more out of my education than I did. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I started grinding hearthstone. As my elo increased, my hygiene habits approached what they were at the zenith of my League career. The person that made me realize I needed to address my problems was the League of Legends streamer LS, of all people. I developed a morbid fascination with his op.gg reviews after he got onto the front page of Reddit with the infamous "snapping turtle" video. I felt I had an alarming amount in common with some of the disturbed individuals that would pay LS ten dollars to shit talk their op.gg profiles. While most of the time LS would just insult them, tell them to play Annie, and then collect the money, occasionally he would go all Dr. Phil on people. At one point, LS opened up about his own struggles with depression. I really appreciated his advice about finding therapists. Specifically, he said that it might take more than one try to find the right therapist because "any idiot can get a degree". This message really resonated with me, given that I had a degree. Before hearing this, I was reluctant to seek therapy because of a previous unpleasant experience with it. I have not played Hearthstone in over a year since then, and lost a lot of weight during that time. It has been a good year for me, and I have made a lot of progress, but lately I have been having difficulties. While I have not been playing video games, I have been wasting a ton of time watching VODs of Hearthstone and MTGA. (I even googled how to get MTGA working on Linux before I stopped and asked myself "WTF are you doing?"). I have also fallen off the wagon diet wise and gained back about 15 pounds of the 70 that I lost in that year. I plan on starting a journal here tomorrow and hope that the accountability will help me sort through my problems. Feeling shitty, but hopeful.