I haven’t written anything in a long time, so even putting my thoughts into words feels a little clumsy now.
Nine years ago, it was an advertising email that pulled me into Dahua 3 for two full years.
This June, another ad email sent me back into it, and I ended up playing for three months.
This time I was playing the free version, which sounds harmless enough because there’s no card fee to pay. But “free” can be even more of a trap. Since time itself doesn’t cost money, it’s hard to gather a team with a single account, so I had to build my own team and run it myself. In the end, I spent more than 2K, which was actually more than what the point-card version would have cost.
The first month was genuinely fun. The background music from years ago was still there, unchanged. I did daily quests every day, and every now and then I’d even make it onto the in-game broadcast, which gave me a small sense of achievement. I was spending huge amounts of time inside the game, and that inevitably started affecting real life. If I skipped logging in for three days, it already felt like I had fallen far behind.
Luckily, I hadn’t gone all the way into it. I made the decision to uninstall it, and the moment I clicked confirm, I felt a huge sense of relief.
If all that energy had gone into work instead, would that have been called focus?
I copied a passage from Douban:
Addiction: you watch a great movie, a TV series, a novel, or a game, and it takes over completely. You forget to eat and sleep. You lose track of time and only want to keep going. That is addiction.
Focus: you shut out other distractions and put all your attention on the task in front of you. You do that one thing during that one stretch of time. When it’s time to eat, you eat. When work is over, you put it aside. That is focus. It mainly shows up at work. @Douban qiufeng