I’ve stuck to no fiction. (I unthinkingly read a few paragraphs of a short story that came across my Twitter, but otherwise have been consistent.)
It’s mostly been fairly easy. It’s really obvious now that it’s a social pica. I think some of the time I would have spent on it has been going to increased use of LessWrong and Facebook, which are also social picas, but those are both more genuinely social, and harder to lose 8 hours at a time to.
There was at least one night where I was pretty unhappy, and didn’t have access to any actual friends to spend time with, and really wanted to lose myself in a book. I probably think that ordinarily it would have been an ok thing to do as a coping mechanism, but it was useful to observe how badly I needed the coping mechanism. That makes it obvious how much I need the real thing.
There are also a couple things I’m genuinely looking forward to reading when Lent is over. (Murphy’s Quest, for one.) But I’d say those things are probably ~1/4 or less the amount of fiction I would have read this month without Lent.
This has been an especially exciting/productive/momentum-filled month for me. This probably makes it easier than normal to not read fiction. Though maybe there’s some causality the other direction as well?
I’ve stuck to no fiction. (I unthinkingly read a few paragraphs of a short story that came across my Twitter, but otherwise have been consistent.)
It’s mostly been fairly easy. It’s really obvious now that it’s a social pica. I think some of the time I would have spent on it has been going to increased use of LessWrong and Facebook, which are also social picas, but those are both more genuinely social, and harder to lose 8 hours at a time to.
There was at least one night where I was pretty unhappy, and didn’t have access to any actual friends to spend time with, and really wanted to lose myself in a book. I probably think that ordinarily it would have been an ok thing to do as a coping mechanism, but it was useful to observe how badly I needed the coping mechanism. That makes it obvious how much I need the real thing.
There are also a couple things I’m genuinely looking forward to reading when Lent is over. (Murphy’s Quest, for one.) But I’d say those things are probably ~1/4 or less the amount of fiction I would have read this month without Lent.
This has been an especially exciting/productive/momentum-filled month for me. This probably makes it easier than normal to not read fiction. Though maybe there’s some causality the other direction as well?