Sure, I try to be productive - if productivity has any meaning when you're retired - but it's not all reading great books, rewriting my final wishes, keeping an eye on the price-of-cherries war between Whole Foods and Roche Brothers. (Sorry, Roche Bros, love you guys but your cherries cost twice as much as those at Whole.)
Once in a while, I play online TaiPei. Or WordZap.
I do offline Sudoku, and crossword puzzles.
I'm certainly capable of sitting through two hours of House Hunters on HGTV, and especially love the Americans who want to enjoy a real Parisian city experience, only they want their flat to have an eat in kitchen, en suite bathrooms, a home office, and a media room. Plus outdoor space for the dog and/or the kiddos.
I like to doomscroll through Twitter.
I like to nap.
But most of my fritter-the-time-away time does involve using my brain just a teensy, tiny little ol' bit. Why, even House Hunters has me guessing which house the hunters are going to choose. And even when I'm napping there's always the possibility that I'm putting my mind to work dreaming.
Pure, 100% brainless time wasting isn't so much my jam.
Other than when I get something from Amazon cushioned in bubble wrap and I get to break up all those lovely bubbles. Even then, after a few, I do tend to lose interest in the manual pincer crush method and move on to the more efficient stomp 'em out process.
So I'm not all that sorry that I missed the One Million Checkboxes fad earlier this summer.
In case you missed out, too, back in its heyday (June/July), One Million Checkboxes, the brainchild of game developer Nolen Royalty who introduced it on Twitter, was a pretty rudimentary game - without any of the usual cool graphics and/or challenges and/or strategies and/or all the whatever that typically comes with even the most rudimentary of online games.
Rows of unchecked squares sat tantalizingly against a pale gray background, an unexplored Minesweeper field. A visitor to the page checked one box. Then another. Each time a person checked a box, it was instantly filled in on everybody else’s screens, like a kind of collaborative grocery list accessible to anyone with a phone or computer. (Source: NY Times)
The gamification aspect pretty much entailed pitting the checkers, racing to check off as many boxes as they could, against the uncheckers (those nihilists, those meanies!) who were hell bent on undoing the "work" of the checkers.
Within a few weeks, the 1,000,000 boxes had been filled in and the game was end-of-lifed. But not before Royalty intervened and put in some algo to keep the uncheckers from overwhelming the site and preventing the checkers from reaching the million box goal.
While it was the buzz, though, it attracted hundreds of thousands of users, and became something of a temporary "it thing" on the net.
Users on X describe the project as “strangely compelling” and “torture for people with OCD.” A Washington Post newsletter called it “the most pointless website on the planet” — which it seemed to mean as a compliment.
Some users went creative, and "began filling in boxes to illustrate hearts or, in more cases, crude drawings of male genitalia." (Duh-bros, anyone?) Others went tech, with bots furiously unchecking boxes. Many saw it as a metaphor for the possibilities of human collaboration.
Royalty claims no higher purpose.
“I just wanted to make a website that is fun and silly and useless.”
As for end-of-lifing, One Million Checkboxes is only kinda-sorta EOL'd. Last time I checked - hah! - it was still up and running, inviting the most time-wasting OCDers among us to "play alone if you'd like."
Oh, I checked a few boxes just to get a feel for it. Without the competition of a bot trying to uncheck my efforts, it was way too boring. Nowhere near as satisfying as pinching the air out of bubble wrap. And completely brainless. Plus you'd have to check 1,000 boxes a day for 1,000 days to fill in all those boxes. Blech to that.
Guess I like my time-wasting to have a bit more heft.
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