I hope it isn't too much of a leap to imagine that most of the people reading this have, at some point, been familiar with a computer that uses a hard drive. Every so often I see an article about how the younger generations are getting less computer literate, which feels like a terrible shame - even without that, though, hard disk drives are becoming a thing of the past for most consumer devices as solid state drives become cheaper and faster and more convenient¹. On one hand, there's nothing quite like having a spinning disc in your PC with enough storage capacity for your entire media collection and also Belgium; on the other hand, there's nothing quite like having a perfectly serviceable half terabyte of storage screwed directly to your motherboard, running orders of magnitude faster than a hard drive would.

Nevertheless, I feel like my general reader base² are both old enough and computer inclined enough that most will have been aware of their computer’s hard disk drive at least once in their lives. Which means they are probably familiar with that ancient spectre of computer performance debugging, defragmenting.

For those who may read this who aren’t familiar, defragmenting is the thing you do to your hard drive when the computer starts to run slowly. It was always presented to me as the Single Solution To All Slowdown Problems, and to its credit it helped sometimes, but sometimes I wished my parents would just listen and consider for a moment that there were Other Possible Problems.

Fragmenting is a thing that happens to hard drives, and it works kind of like this.

Say you have a shelf that you're filling up with all of your possessions, but because we're writing this in December, people keep coming along to give you wrapped boxes with things in them, and you put those on your shelf too. Eventually your shelf is all full, and it looks like this:

But then after Christmas, or your other chosen day of opening gifts, you don't need to keep all of those boxes on your shelf any more. You don't want to bother moving things, though, so you just end up with these weird gaps.

Eventually you decide that you'd like to keep some books on your shelf! Books are great, you can kind of shove them in anywhere, but once you do you realise your shelf is starting to get kind of messy and disorganised.

The shelf here represents your hard drive, and the objects on it represent various files you might need to find and look at. This is very bad news, because your hard drive works by physically moving a sensor to a different part of the disk where the data you want is, which is agonisingly slow on a computer scale. It’s like, you've set up your shelf and now you’re looking for a book, but you have to stand really close and move your head back and forth slowly to find things - if your books are all over the place, finding the one you want will take far longer than if they were all in one block together.

Your books may only take up a few small sections (red bars), but in order to search through all of them, you need to look over most of the length of the shelf (blue bar).

So you defragment; you take everything off your shelves, shuffle it around, and put it back so that the things that are part of the same group are all together. And then when you’re looking for something, you know where to look, and it’s only one spot instead of four. You might even find that squishing everything together removes all of the tiny gaps you’d left, and now you have enough room at the end of the shelf to add something new.

With all of the books pushed together, you have to look over a smaller area to find the one you're looking for, and pushing everything together has even given you a little bit of extra room (green bar)!

I tend to wake up properly at about 9am, though the last couple of weeks that’s been getting later because I’m resting for once. Making breakfast takes about ten minutes or so, getting dressed and otherwise ready to go to work is about the same - and then all of a sudden it’s 10:30, and I should probably be leaving soon. So I go to leave, and when I get on my bike and check my watch it’s about 11. Sometimes this series of events includes doing the dishes from the previous night, or showering, or putting clothes through the washing machine. None of these things change the time I end up leaving the house.

The problem here is immediately obvious on observation. There are always gaps - while the toaster is running, when I sit down to eat, when I’m done eating and I need to get up and do things again - and those gaps started out too small to do anything productive, so they got filled up by I filled them up with meaningless things that would divide up into blocks of a couple of minutes. But the problem is that those things tend to involve scrolling social media, and social media has a fun habit of keeping your attention for a bit longer than you really intended it to is exactly the kind of thing I am vulnerable to getting far too into.

For a long time it was Discord or Reddit, but for the last six months or so my main distraction from life has been Twitter (a very unfortunate state of existence, honestly). I don’t think the particular medium makes a difference, though, except in that Discord probably led to me having actual conversations with people more, and that was nice. Twitter has an annoying tendency to push more and more transphobia and stupid discourse over time (because I, like an idiot, keep looking at posts that aren’t really mentally healthy for me - I’m not really sure if this is an actual self harm thing or if I’m just stupid), which takes active pruning every now and then; it makes me miss Reddit’s decently strict topic focused communities, where I could typically avoid such things by sticking to groups that actually moderated against them. Twitter is a more aggressive content stream, and one that just feels so much worse to use.

So I have this thing that pours I end up pouring into all of the gaps in my time like water, because it's easy and simple and kind of addictive. And like water freezing into stone, it cracks and stretches and pushes out against its bounds, and ends up slowly breaking the structure of the rest of the day more and more. And the more dominant it becomes in my mind, the more it becomes I tend towards it as a default activity for the times when I actually have enough time to be doing something else meaningful, which feels even worse.

BUT I made a new friend recently because they found this blog, and it turns out we have a bunch of things in common - they also write blog posts about their thoughts and experiences of the world, and sometimes it feels like reading straight off of a mirror. But the great difference that jumps out to me is that she takes a more active approach to things; even when we write about the same topics, I write about my mental illness and how it affects me, but she goes on to talk about what she's fucking doing about it. Which is honestly really inspiring to me! It's like a moment of insight into the kind of person I could be, if I was more determined to make things better for myself rather than just surviving them. And the truth is that I could be that person; there is literally nothing stopping me other than myself. A friend told me last night that I complain about things which are under my control and sound like I don’t necessarily even want to fix them, which… isn’t true, I don’t think, but not believing I can fix them has a lot of the same harmful effects. And when I focus on it more I realise that this lack of power that I see in myself, this kind of passive assumed victimhood, fills my writing comes out in the things I write more than I really ever realised. And I don’t like that. So it’s time to move on.

I tend to credit my lack of agency in my own life to not really having any until I moved out. I need to move past what my parents did to me. I have actual control over who I am as a person and I fucking fought to rip it out of their hands so why the fuck do I still act like someone else is behind the wheel? I quit an actual paying job to go and make video games, the least I can do is fucking own it.

The way that I write is influenced by the way that I think, but it also influences it back. My words are not separate from the thoughts that guide them. So I need to take hold of my writing; rewrite my own internal and external narrative, stop being passive, start being active. Do things.

Wake up.

So what am I actually doing about my problematic Twitter usage?

As I see it there are two separate problems here. One is that I just have these weird little gaps in my day, and I let Twitter fill them I fill them up with social media because nothing else really fits there. The second is that I don’t have a great default action for when I actually have time to myself to do one, so I end up falling back to social media.

It was actually my partner who came up with a good solution to the first; a popup whenever I open Twitter (or the one mobile game that I play) on my phone, suggesting that I go write instead and offering links to Google Docs or my Notes app. Writing is something I struggle to meaningfully do in a couple of minutes, but the constant reminder that I could be doing something more productive has been genuinely helpful for keeping myself kind of disengaged and ready to go do something else instead; and on more than a few occasions, on the bus or waiting for soup to cook, I did end up switching to writing after all. I’ve been thinking of adding a line to the popup that just says “should you be doing something else right now”, but I think a part of the reason the current popup actually works on me is that it’s cutely worded by someone else, so I might have to ask her to do it instead. And so, I hope to I will pull out some of the small, useless blocks of time in my day, squish everything else forward to close up the gaps, and be left with a big chunk of free time at the end.

The second problem, of having no better default activity, I am working on solving as of last month. November is NaNoWriMo month, and while I don’t really have the space in my life for writing 50 thousand words right now, it was still a good push to focus on… actually writing anything at all? I tried to push into it as the thing I would do when I wasn’t doing anything else, and it I kind of faltered a lot but I got to the 5k words that I had actually been aiming for, and considering everything else we were doing at the time I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve also been learning 3D modelling with Blender, which has been an interesting experience; I don’t have much that I really want to share from that yet, but it’s been a lot of fun and I’m continuing with that for a while yet. NaNoWriMo felt like a good length, so I think that’s what I am aiming for right now; pick an interest that I want to engage in more, and make that my default activity for the month, when I’m not doing anything else. God knows I have enough weird hobbies, skills I want to try out, tools I’ve been meaning to look at, old projects that have sat unfinished for a year. I just need to start.

And so I am here; still using Twitter more than I would like, but honestly, I can feel myself pushing out of it over time. I think checking in every now and then is probably fine, but I need to do better than I am, for myself and also for the people around me who have to put up with my languishing.

I need to take control of my life.

And, as they say, there’s no time like the present.

Notes