What I Don't Do Anymore

I used to play a lot of video games on the computer. I would sit down for hours at a time and play. The problem was two-fold: first, I didn't really have any control over when I would start playing. The computer would sit in the living room and basically call my name and beckon me to play, and for the most part I would sit down pretty often and answer that call. Now I knew that this was a problem, and so I told myself that I needed to play less often, and then I set up some rules like 'only play after dinner' or 'only play after chores are done' or 'only play after going outside' or 'only play after practicing piano for an hour.' But because I was immature, I would ignore the rules that I set for myself, no matter how many times I tried or how much I prayed about it or how angry I got with myself over it. The second problem was that once I started playing, I never wanted to stop. Even on weekdays, I would sometimes sit down at 9:00 PM and then play until after midnight. On weekends, I would play at maybe 10:00 AM, and then spend most of my day playing, maybe feel guilty about it around 3:00 PM and go outside for half an hour, but then I'd come right back and play again until 10:00 PM or midnight. Again, I would set rules for myself about only playing for thirty minutes at a time, or only playing up to an hour each day, but however many times I made the rules, I broke them that many times as well. So finally, I was faced with a decision: either stop making these arbitrary rules and just accept that I was born to play lots of computer in my life, or get rid of the computer games entirely. As a Christian, God would in no way allow me to waste my life playing computer. There is no way that He would look upon that and say, 'it is good.' So as a matter of fact, this was a question of whether or not I was going to choose God or Computer. That's why I decided to get rid of the temptation. Any game that I was tempted to play, I erased it from my computer. Starcraft, Lords of the Realm, all of the first person shooter games, Banished, Sim City... I just got rid of them all. Since then, I have not wasted ANY time playing computer games, and I am glad about that.

I used to spend a lot of time 'surfing the internet.' Nowadays, I call it 'scrolling the internet,' because most websites have a lot of pictures and text that you scroll through. I used to be really interested in reading other people's comments about the news and in trying to keep up with the daily news. But what I figured out was that, like playing computer games, scrolling through webpages and comment sections was also a waste of time. Reddit and Facebook and Google News was a waste of time. Watching loads of entertaining video clips and looking at pictures and comics was a waste of time. Not only that, but I started to feel like the internet was basically calling my name and beckoning me the same way that the computer games had before. It was like an empty space had been left by getting rid of the computer games, and the internet scrolling was the first thing to try and fill that space. But I didn't decide to stop wasting time on games so that I could start wasting time on something else. Rather than trying to make rules about when I could scroll and how much per day, I just decided that scrolling was out. Now, I had to make a distinction between using the internet to waste time and using the internet to do research and communicate with others: any time that I go online with a specific purpose, for example, finding new songs to sing with the choir or looking up information to answer a specific question; versus going online without really having a purpose to communicate about a specific problem or find answers to a specific question - that was what I considered 'scrolling the internet' and also a waste of time. I don't do those things anymore. I don't go online and scroll around old familiar websites.