How Do You Budget Your Entertainment Time?
How do you decide what you’re going to watch (or read, or listen to, or play) and when you’re going to do it? When I was young it was simple — when I had time to watch TV, I’d sit down and watch whatever was on one of the two or three channels I liked, or if there was a specific show I liked to watch, I’d make sure I was watching TV when it aired. Streaming, obviously, has made that irrelevant. If I’m not home, or not in the mood to watch something, during its initial airing, I can pull it up on streaming or OnDemand the next day to catch up. Plus, streaming provides not only an endless library of older titles to watch or rewatch, but new series and seasons dropped on a single day that all demand simultaneous instant attention if you want to remain pop culturally literate and relevant. It can feel overwhelming.
How do I handle it? Well, lists help. It’s probably no surprise that I absolutely adore lists. I’ve got scraps of paper on my desk with a list of all the TV I want to watch, or with all the ideas I have for this newsletter. I have lists in my phone or email of books I want to read. How often do I fully get through the lists? Not often. But I try, by god do I try.
For me, the list-keeping started back in 2010 or 2011, when I had just started getting back into reading real books. I was trying to remember a book I had read back in middle school, one which I was way too young to be reading (It wasn’t for adults — I think it was for high schoolers — but it definitely introduced me to a few things), but the few details I could remember weren’t going to help me find it again. I never wanted that to happen again, so I started keeping a list of every novel I read so I’d always be able to remember them all. A couple of years ago, I discovered that a good friend of mine kept a list of all the media he consumed, and it was an idea that immediately spoke to me, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Yes, there’s a Google Doc on my drive of every TV show, comic book, graphic novel, novel, new album, movie, podcast, web original, magazine, video game, or play I take in. I’m that kind of nerd.
That list serves as an important reminder of what I’ve actually watched in the last year, because I watch and read so much that sometimes they can crowd my brain. Sometimes I do think the sheer amount of media available isn’t good for us. When I first started collecting comics, fresh out of high school and working my first job, I only collected a couple of books each month. I’d sit eagerly turning the story over in my head and wondering what would happen next until the next issue arrived. Nowadays I read so many that sometimes I forget what even happened in the last issue. Recap pages are invaluable (yet only Marvel provides them consistently!), but if I find myself struggling too much to remember what happened or who characters are in a particular series, that usually means it’s time to cull it from my list. As much as I keep watching or reading new things because there’s just so much good content out there and I want to experience it all, I do sometimes long for the days of my youth when I’d just keep watching the same three or four seasons of Degrassi on repeat. It’s been a while since I’ve really known something so thoroughly as those old books and series I’d obsessively reread or rewatch over and over, when so many other new things weren’t vying for my time and money.
But this list doesn’t help me decide what I should watch next. Even when I have lists of every TV show I want to watch it doesn’t always help, and certainly doesn’t mean I’ll be able to keep up with the influx of media demanding my attention. The list on my desk has been begging me for months and months to catch up on new seasons of TV shows I legitimately love, like Runaways or Sex Education, as instead I decided to attempt to watch all of Community while on lockdown, or rewatched Avatar: The Last Airbender or Parks and Recreation for the gazillionth time. What can I say? While home on lockdown during the Covid pandemic, I’ve been trying not to force myself to do anything I don’t want to, and to just follow my whim. It makes spending so much time at home feel a lot more fulfilling, eliminating some stress in a stressful time. I think I needed big projects like some of those massive rewatches to give me some sort of structure besides working out once a day. To be honest, writing this newsletter has been a massive help with that as well.
The last month of my lockdown was actually dominated by watching through all of Doom Patrol, not necessarily because it was the show I felt most like watching in that particular moment (though I loved it and highly recommend it), but simply because my year-long subscription to the DC Universe streaming app was running out, and with all its new content moving over to HBO Max in the future, I wanted to catch up on everything I wanted to watch on it before deciding if I was going to renew or not. Even that didn’t fully go as planned, as my binge of Doom Patrol got derailed when I discovered a YouTube series about defunct amusement park rides that hijacked my full attention span for a few weeks. Even a rewatch with an actual, concrete time limit can be overcome by a powerful enough whim.
Last week I went back to work after being furloughed for six months. Don’t worry, I’m the only person working in my building so there’s no Covid risk, and the extra $600 in unemployment benefits that ran through the end of July has actually left me in a far better financial situation than I was before the pandemic began, though with that running out I was getting to the point where I needed to go back to work anyway. All in all I’ve been one of the fortunate ones (I’m still trying to find new work, though, cause my current job just isn’t supporting me the way I need it to), but going back to work has taken a huge chunk of time away from me every day. Getting back into the swing of things has been a challenge, which is why there was no newsletter last week, and why this week’s installment is, well, this, rather than the idea I’ve been wanting to do for the last few weeks.
I don’t mean that to degrade this particular installment. Going back to work has simply had me pondering the way I budget my entertainment time now that I need to budget it again. For example, back in 2013 I started writing for the website Retcon Punch, and that assignment of writing a few articles every week led to me essentially playing no video games for years, as my writing took over the time in my schedule that had previously been set aside for games. That’s always been interesting to me, because I never intentionally decided not to play or buy video games, that was just the hobby that naturally fell to the wayside as time got tighter. Now that I’m working but also devoting at least a little bit of time every day to doing my daily tasks in Animal Crossing, though, I’m seeing video games again eating up time that I had put towards other hobbies over the last few years. One’s not better or worse than the other, but it’s interesting to me to see the way my obligations and priorities have changed the way I choose to entertain myself over the years, and I’m sure many of you have experienced the same thing.
Before the pandemic I’d always known that working full-time made it exhausting to keep up with things I actually enjoyed, but returning to work has driven that point home for me more than ever. After work, working out, and dinner, most nights it’s 8PM before I have any time to myself. If it’s a Monday and I watch American Ninja Warrior, that runs till 10, and the night’s mostly over. Maybe I can read a little or watch one more episode of something, but that’s assuming getting ready for the next morning or catching up with messages from friends doesn’t consume the rest of the night. And I certainly can’t stay up until 4 or 5 AM finishing writing an edition of this newsletter the way I had been the past few months. It’s time for me to once again rethink the way I’m doling out my time.
I love writing this newsletter, it’s an important outlet for me, and it will absolutely soldier on. But if I miss a week here or there in the future, I hope you’ll understand why. We’re all adjusting to a difficult time in our own ways.
CHECK OUT
Defunctland. The YouTube channel that originally began as short videos about various defunct theme park rides — with the goal of assembling them all in a fictional, online theme park — has transformed into one of the most fascinating and well-done documentary series around. Season Two managed to highlight a different defunct amusement in every video, yet use them all as a whole to tell the story of the rise and fall of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, a character the channel initially approached with nothing but hostility but eventually, though its own videos, found sympathy for. It’s been a fascinating evolution, and every video is informative, well-edited, and full of sly, dry humor. They’re also affectionate towards the rides, parks, and companies they cover, but fully aware of their flaws and willing to discuss them, which is a tough, but important balance to strike.
A great video to start with would be the one covering Action Park, New Jersey’s deadliest amusement attraction.
But my favorite might be The War for Disney’s America, a look into Disney’s attempt at creating an American history themed park near Washington D.C. and the controversy that ensued.
Sadly, there’s yet to be a Defunctland about my favorite theme park, Hersheypark, but I’m taking that as a good sign that they know what rides their fans like and are able to keep them running.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!