Last Week, This Week: Off The Rails, April 26 – May 2

Imagine a world where time seems to go on forever. Imagine a world where days no longer have a distinction. Imagine a world where hours pass like minutes. And imagine a world where life went off the rails. This is not a philosophical deep dive into the impact of CoVid-19 on our lives. The topic of discussion is potentially much more sinister and dangerous.

This series, Last Week This Week, started as a Monday thru Friday look back at what I’d worn to work in the past week. With that part of my life soon ending, these posts have expanded to a full Sunday thru Saturday chronically, something like a diary. As such, for each day there is a brief description of my outfit or the photo as well as a detail or two about what happened.

Off the rails is how I’d best describe my experiences of the previous week. As such, today’s post will deviate a bit from the typical LWTW format. There are no OOTD photos and only a couple of other images. The week started off a bit oddly and most of the rest of it is a multi-colored blur of aligning brightly-hued candies. Hello, my name is Rena and I have a Candy Crush Saga addiction. I’d been proudly clean for several years and then I fell off the wagon.

Sunday

Even though I’d gotten a fairly decent night’s sleep, by late-morning I could barely keep my eyes open. I hadn’t even had breakfast yet but still, I decided that I would take a short nap first. I wasn’t even sure that I would fall asleep but I did … for three and a half hours. After having made dinner for the previous seven nights, I was tagged The Husband to take over for the evening. No OOTD photo.

Monday

The action that caused my week to go off the rails happened at approximately 12:30pm Monday afternoon. Perhaps it was boredom or feeling out of sorts sleep-wise.  I don’t quite remember why I decided to download the Candy Crush Saga app.  It wasn’t as though I didn’t have things to do like write a blog post or two, take photos for upcoming blog posts, create listings for Poshmark, exercise, etc.  Nevertheless, I was looking for a little harmless distraction and I went with an option that was familiar to me.

It’s not that I was ignorant of the lure of clicky app-based games.  Five years ago, I was regularly playing CCS as well as Words With Friends,  Scrabble, and a couple of others that I don’t specifically recall.  It is human nature to seek out boredom killers and to fill “slack time” with pleasurable activities. Slack time is that which doesn’t need to be spent doing anything productive and some people can have a considerate accumulated amount of it every day.  Whether it’s during a daily commute, bathroom breaks, or while eating alone, those minutes can add up to several hours in the course of a day.

Eventually, I made a clean break from all of those games. I deleted every single one of them. Thanks to modern technology, I can even tell you exactly when I did it and with that information, I can guess as to a contributing factor. Based on a Facebook post (see below), I went cold-turkey on those games on September 1, 2015. Made it official with a public declaration, in fact. That time period coincides with when I started this blog so it likely had occurred to me that I would have much less slack time. It wasn’t as hard to get by without those games as I feared it might be.

Tuesday

For those that may not be familiar with CCS, there’s a key feature of the game that strongly affects a person’s desire to continue playing. Once you’ve lost five times you have to wait a period of time until you get more “lives” which serves to reinforce the additive effect of a pleasurable response. The company behind the app (and others like it) make money by offering you a chance to buy more lives. I’m too cheap to do that so at first when I didn’t have any lives available, I’d return to more productive activities.

On this day, that productive activity was taking pictures for and writing my Garden Party – Magnificent 8 Collaboration post that was to publish Wednesday morning. Along with playing CCS as lives became available, I didn’t finish writing the post until about 3am.

Wednesday

My current restriction-free schedule allows me to sleep as late as I want so it was late morning when finally got up. Another feature of CCS are the daily rewards and opportunities to “win” more lives and other boosters that seem to help you win. At some point during my day’s play, I was rewarded with unlimited games for the next 24 hours. OMG, game changer! Without the restriction of waiting for the restoration of lives, I had complete control of how long I played.  In reality, I actually lost control of how long I played.

As I understand the psychology, the game hooks you by allowing you to win and pass levels with ease, giving a strong sense of satisfaction. These experiences release the neurochemical dopamine and taps into the same neuro-circuitry involved in addiction, which then reinforces pleasure associated with the action. Despite its reputation as a pleasure chemical, dopamine also plays a crucial role in learning, cementing behaviors, and training us to continue performing them.

Even though the game gets more complex as you progress, the difficulty of each level varies with some being quite easy and others being very difficult to master.  As essentially a game of luck,  success depends on the randomly generated playing board, the number of moves allowed, and the difficulty of a given level rather than your swiping skills. Because of this randomness, the reward schedule becomes unexpected with a player losing more often than winning. You never know when the next triumph will come. Rather than discouraging continued play, this strategy actually makes the game even more enticing than if won easily.

Now armed with unlimited lives for a limited amount of time, the need to master especially difficult levels became all-consuming quite quickly. I had to get that next win no matter how much time it took. There were a couple of levels that took over an hour to “win”. In a small burst of productivity, I managed to bake two loaves of banana bread in the evening (we had a lot of very ripe bananas). That night I didn’t put down my smartphone and go to sleep until 5:30am.

Blursday

I saw a meme on Facebook with a Blursday reference and that’s what I’d call the next couple of days. Most of my time was spent with my smartphone in hand, swiping to line up those candy shaped objects for however long it took to win the level. I was determined to make the most of the remaining hours of unlimited games. And then I was rewarded with another 24 hours of unlimited games. There is not much that I remember accomplishing in that part of the week after that.

In the early afternoon, we drove to our daughter’s house to drop off one of the banana bread loaves and then made a stop at Costco. I played CCS nearly the entire time we were in the car. The Husband was successful in getting me to walk out onto the beach with him to watch the sunset that evening. Connecting to service is spotty on the beach so no CCS while we were there. I was able to check on my blog stats and shared that the overall numbers for April were the second-best in the past year. The post with the most views was Drum Roll, Please which The Husband said was due to his “promotion” of it. Basically, he texted the link to nearly everyone we know. Since most of his career had been in sales and marketing, he then went onto say that the increase in stats was proof that he should be in charge of my marketing.

The conversation was light and silly in general. He and I have had this discussion before but he has different ideas about what the direction of my blog should be. I questioned his ability to market a blog when he has no social media presence (which I guess doesn’t matter as long as I do) and asked him if he even knew what a hashtag is. He said it’s that crossed line thingy and also a label on a dinner with corned beef (as in a tag on hash, cue the dad joke). He continued that he’d also have to take editorial control on topics, photos, and outfits. Now that was funny. I responded that maybe he should start his own blog … about his wife. End scene.

Frisatday

I managed to go to sleep at about 1am and then spent most of Friday in a CCS daze. By the time we sat down to dinner (The Husband cooked again), it’d seemed to me like very little time had passed since the previous night’s dinner. I didn’t yet have photos for my Saturday post and we managed to get those taken after dinner. Also, at some point during the day, I was yet again rewarded with 24 hours of unlimited play. As I sat at my computer Friday evening to write the Saturday post, the focus needed for that was in competition against the draw of the pleasure reward from playing CCS. I was up until past 3am and didn’t finish the blog post.

I had intentions of finishing and publishing the blog post later in the day Saturday but that didn’t happen. All that did happen was CCS as well as being rewarded with another 24 hours of unlimited games. I was not sure how or why this was happening and wondered if it was a glitch in the programming. Not that it mattered, I was happy to take advantage of it. As I was writing this, I did a google search and found out that King Digital Entertainment had started a promotion back in March that gave players of all of its games unlimited lives until April 5. Perhaps they extended the ending of the promotion but I was unaware of it at the time.

Saturday was the worst of it. My Fitbit only registered about 600 steps for the day. In fact, the total steps for the whole week was just over 10,000. Normally, I clock in between 30,000 and 40,000. One of the sources I used for background information lists four negative impacts digital games can have related to financial, social, psychological, and physiological aspects of one’s life. If the game is affecting any of these then it might be time to quit. By the time I finally put down my smartphone that night at 2am, I had reached level 605 in a matter of 5 days. I went to sleep with the resolve to delete the app first thing in the morning.

And there you have it, a look back on what I wore and/or did last week.  What’s your weekly routine? How do you decide what you wear every day?  No matter the other circumstances in life, it’s important to let your personal style shine in all that you’re doing or where that may happen.

Kind of left the story with a cliffhanger, didn’t I? Sorry, not sorry. You’ll just have to wait until next week to find out what happened Sunday morning. The outfit below is what I wore when we went to Costco and is the only photo-worthy OOTD from the whole week.

Be well and let’s connect! Subscribe, tweet, follow, friend, love, pin … all options are available and waiting for you. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Sources:
The Guardian – This is what Candy Crush Saga does to your brain
Observer – Candy Crush Addiction Is Real and Can Lead to Destructive Results
Time – Candy Crush Saga: The Science Behind Our Addiction