Unfair Fight
Overall my productivity has been bad since I stopped working, but last week was particularly dire. One day I got sucked into Reddit. Two other days I got caught up in Twitter. I also fell for some Youtube videos by some libertarian doctor named Mike. Naturally I am grumpy, and the grey skies do not help.
On the one hand, it is totally my fault for visiting Reddit and Twitter and Youtube. I was unhappy and lonely and looking for dopamine hits. Almost everybody frames unproductivity as a personal failing, and there is a lot of truth in this perspective.
On the other hand, this is an unfair fight. On the one hand you have me, a depressive with poor self-control. On the other you have companies with staffs of the smartest people in the world, most of whom are employed to make their websites as "engaging" (read: addictive) as possible. Enormous resources are going into grabbing my attention and influencing my habits. When you pit my lack of self-control against their massive resources, why are you suprised that I lose? Why am I the one who has to shoulder all the blame here?