Killing Time

After writing about gaming and Internet addiction in South Korea for an English paper, I started worrying how much I was addicted  to my computer.  The profile of one of my Steam 'friends' showed that he had played a game 140 hours in the last two weeks.  I knew I didn't play computer games for 10 hours a day, but I wondered how much I did spend.  As an experiment, I decided to record how much time I spent playing computer games or being online for entertainment over one week.

http://www.visualphotos.com/image/1x5698041/1200-113

Ouch.  The results of Monday, the first day, really startled me: 6 hours, spent on my computer for entertainment.  At my first glance, 1/4 of the day seemed pretty bad.  But it got worse; since during part of the day I was sound asleep, I actually spent about 3/8 of my time awake playing games or surfing the web.  On further examination, the way I spent my time changes even further; for about 4 more hours, I was at class and unable to access my computer.  This brings the total amount of time I spent on my computer for entertainment to around 1/2 the time available.

Although I thought I would spend less time on Tuesday after finding out how much time I spent, I actually ended up spending 7 hours on the computer!  Wednesday turned out to be even worse, at least in terms of what portion of the day I spent on the computer.  My record at the end of the day was 5 hours, which, because Wednesday is my busiest day, ends up being about 5/8 of the time available to use the computer for entertainment.

http://old.ifunny.ws/2012/03/funny-comic-life-goals-vs-internet.html#.UMizi4PoR8E

After realizing that, I started making an effort to spend less time on games and on unnecessary websites.  On Thursday, I only spent 1 hour on the computer, while the rest of the week I spent around 3 hours every day.  Overall, it was an interesting experiment with surprising results.  I had no idea that I was spending so much time on the computer for fun.  Now, I've been getting back into reading my favorite series, The Wheel of Time.  Hopefully, I won't return to my life almost revolving around electronic entertainment and will avoid the serious consequences of Internet addiction.