Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

Author:Manoush Zomorodi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Make Your Own Warning Label

Meet David Joerg. Although he’s a dad of two little girls, he’s the one with a curfew (though his is set by an algorithm, not a parent). See, David has a problem with video games. Especially at night.

The poison of choice for this software developer is StarCraft (created by the same company responsible for World of Warcraft). David’s story might sound familiar by now. After putting the kids to bed, he loved to unwind with his favorite game and “sometimes I get a tub of Nutella, some crackers, maybe a bottle of port. Maybe one of the three, or maybe all of them. And then it’s time to party!”

Sounds fun, but as the night sped by and his wife went to sleep hours before he did, StarCraft turned more into a compulsion than a pastime. By 1:30 A.M., David was looking at the clock, thinking, This is ridiculous. But all too often, if he hadn’t won a game yet, he couldn’t bear to go to sleep without winning just one. So 1:30 A.M. turned into 2 A.M. in the blink of an eye, and by this point, he knew he was going to be exhausted anyway, so he might as well play again. Finally at 3 A.M., David put the game down and went to sleep for a whopping three and a half hours before he had to get up at 6:30 A.M. “There are some people who only need that much sleep, and I am not one of them,” he said. “I would be destroyed the next day and limping through like a zombie.”

If this were a once-in-a-while Nutella, port, and StarCraft all-nightlong party, that would be one thing, but David’s binges went on for a few years, despite the fact that he made many attempts to give them up. Forget about setting a timer. “I tried a calendar reminder, with an appointment to go to bed every night at 10 P.M.,” he said. “I tried to have rules for myself and wrote down my excuses when I broke them so I could see how lame they were. I tried to write what I wanted to accomplish the next day and establish a bedtime routine. I got a sleep tracker.” They all worked—for about two weeks, and then David would relapse.

Finally, when he was about to crack from lack of sleep, David turned to the software developer within to create “a system that would beat me.”

Here’s what he did:

• He linked his sleep tracker to his computer and set it to keep him out after curfew time at 10 P.M.

• Once curfew time hits, his computer browsers—including his video games—shut down until 6 A.M. the following morning.

• He denied himself administrator access to his computer, because, he says, “If I had the root password, I could just override the system.”

• Instead, he saved a new, ridiculously long password on five pieces of paper and put them in places difficult to get to late at night,

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