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"The challenge is to get more people to pick up an instrument, work on a new project, learn something new in their free time instead of starting at a television." This is indeed an interesting challenge and one I've tackled for myself over the past year or so. For me the primary distractions are games and Reddit (although I've definitely gotten quite a bit of education and professional insights from Reddit so its not all bad). As a huge gamer growing up, I didn't think anything about unwinding by playing video games. I never in a million years thought I'd see a day where they lost a lot of their appeal, but the F2P shift has definitely accelerated that. I think it stems from the fact that I'm now significantly aware of the various hooks that go into a game to extract more money or keep me playing longer. It just killed some of the appeal. Of course, I still sunk 3-4 hours into Mount & Blade: Warband multiplayer last night, and find that round-based multiplayer games without microtransactions still hold great appeal to me. Ultimately though, as I grow older I find myself saying "it's ok if I want to play a game now to relax, but I need to be aware that it is a conscious tradeoff between doing something fun and mindless, and doing something less fun and productive." Trying to teach myself how to code is hard work, and so it is a real mental battle for me to make myself do that sometimes, but will pay dividends down the line as I develop a new skill and gain more technical knowledge. At the end of the day, the only one who can make me spend time doing something is myself, and once you realize your battle is with yourself and not with gaming, or TV, or any other distraction/vice, that is the first step to improvement. |