Killing Time

All of us have things we'd describe as "guilty pleasures," even if the term feels disingenuous. If you're not hurting anyone, why call ithat? But often, at the heart of calling an activity or interest a "guilty pleasure" is because you're the one who feels guilt over spending time with it. You should be doing something else, perhaps. But what is that other else?

For Rob, that "guilty pleasure" has become Balatro, which is a very good game. But it's also easy to lose a lot of time to Balatro, and it's easy to use Balatro as an excuse for pissing away an entire hour instead of, say, 10 minutes. But you were on a good run, so who's really at fault here?

Below, Rob and Patrick work through comforting routines, and when it's time to look at them as a distraction from something more valuable.

Rob: A couple weeks ago I was talking about how I’ve fallen back down a Balatro rabbit hole and frankly if anything it’s gotten a bit worse since then. After months of being stymied by the sudden spike in points requirements for Ante 11, I broke through and am now… mostly stymied by the points requirements for Ante 12, though I did hit Ante 13 on one blessed run. You haven’t lived until you play a couple cards and some length of time later your hand totals up to something like 100 billion.

The thing is, Balatro has become yet another activity that’s almost reflexive for me. In a way that I don’t really love. If I find myself with a few idle minutes at my desk, I’m very likely to open the game up and start a run. The next thing I know it’s 45 minutes later and now I’m behind on everything I intended to do. I’m endlessly fascinated by the card combination that surface, the way you learn to cobble a viable strategy out of a bad set of jokers, only to face the problem of either trying to pivot to a better strategy as the game goes along, or to try and complete a run with a build that will never scale very well. Balatro is addictive the way a lot of great games are addictive and I don’t think my relationship with it is about Balatro so much as it’s about how I utilize time now.

In the time I put into Balatro in the last month I probably could have gotten a good portion of the way through Expedition 33. Likewise, in the time I’ve spent reading a bunch of crummy sci-fi on my phone, I could have sat down with a book I actually want to read… but for some reason sitting down with a book is something I’ll talk myself out of doing. “I don’t have time for that,” I’ll think, and then I’ll spend an hour skimming a C-tier Warhammer books leaning against my kitchen counter. My wife and I have been watching an unusual amount of TV lately with Andor and The Studio in the midst of their seasons, but those shows broke a months-long streak where we were mostly putting on a YouTube video here and there and back-burnering shows we both agreed we were enjoying.

I am not sure I have a thought-out point here, but it’s been on my mind because so often I feel like I tricked myself into investing time into something that did not feel like it required time or focus. That more and more of my time is spent bouncing between “work” and “distraction” that never quite falls into the category of leisure, hobbies, or interests. It’s like every piece of electronics in the house is a vending machine for snacks or cigarettes, or maybe it’s just that a busy, overbooked life feels like you only have time for quick bites but never a meal.

Do you encounter this at all? I know you have to be a bit more considered about how you allocate your time with kids’ schedules, but I’m curious if you also feel like you get pulled toward easy stuff you can enjoy without giving it much attention.

Patrick: Your version of Balatro is my version of scrolling through social media, be it the walking corpse of Twitter, Bluesky, TikTok—whatever. Time is, as you predicted, the defining factor but in letting time become the defining factor, it’s also influenced what I do when time isn’t always so.

Take sitting around while we’re watching TV, for example. Is it really worth my time to boot up something on my Steam Deck while the kids are finishing up 15 minutes of a television show? I could tell myself that time is better spent cleaning up a few emails, but more than likely I’m going to flip open my phone and mindlessly scroll–not even doomscroll, mind you. Just scroll.

I can feel this impulse—or addiction, if you’re being less charitable—when the kids are asleep. Now, suddenly, my wife and I have time to do something but we don't want to do anything. Even putting on a short show like The Studio requires a level of attention neither of us have. Instead, we’ll spend 20 minutes scrolling in the presence of one another, before inevitably she tells me that she’s feeling tired and heads to sleep. Then, I muster the energy to turn on a video game.

(I will greatly miss the dynamic of an NBA playoff game + my Steam Deck in the near future.)

I don’t beat myself over those moments. It’s fine to merely be in the presence of your partner and waste some idle time. We spend so much energy maximizing our minutes that having a few to piss away feels not just like a luxury but a goddamn necessity. It’s okay to be time wasteful!!!!