Right before the pandemic, I was thinking about the time I invested in movies. I had calculated that I watched about 70 movies a year. At roughly two hours each, plus anime and movies I rewatched, I estimated around 200 hours of viewing a year (about four hours every week). I loved being transported into a new reality by a movie, but I kept asking what else I could do with those four hours.

At the time, I could still say, "Until today I do not watch shows." That sentence aged almost immediately.

Then the pandemic arrived, and I became a show person. My wife and I started watching shows together, then more shows, and the ritual became one of the things that helped us cope. The person who had avoided Game of Thrones because eight seasons looked like an 80-hour commitment was suddenly measuring the value differently. Those hours were not only being consumed by a screen. They were hours my wife and I spent together during a period when the world outside had become uncertain and very small.

That reversal made me reconsider a decision I had made more than 20 years earlier, when I started college and stopped wanting to play video games. Movies, shows, games, books, music, and now AI all consume time, but they do not consume it in the same way. The question I was really trying to answer was not, "Which media is good?" It was, "What does this medium ask me to give back, and is that the right exchange for this part of my life?"

Why I Quit Games but Kept Movies

When I was a kid, I was glued to the television after school and on most Saturday mornings. As I got older, I noticed that shows could hold me there long after I had intended to stop. The screen seemed to attract my eyes and not let them go. I began forcing myself not to start new shows. If someone told me about a favorite series, I would listen and ask questions, but I would try not to pick it up myself. That gave me time back for school.

I made an exception for a small selection of anime (usually mecha, science fiction, hackers, robots, and futuristic stories such as Ghost in the Shell). Those series tended to have one or two seasons, so I could wait for a season to finish and watch it as if it were one long movie. A feature film also had a visible boundary. However immersive it became, two hours later the story was usually over.

Console games did not have that boundary. A game required my eyes, my hands, and my decisions. It reacted to me, which made it harder to leave than a fixed story. Starting college, when an hour invested in learning could compound for decades, walking away from games was a good trade for me. It was not a judgment that games were worthless. I knew that I was especially vulnerable to the loop, so I changed the environment instead of depending on willpower.

Before the pandemic, I treated shows mostly as a time commitment. The pandemic showed what that calculation left out. The series itself followed a fixed path, but watching it with my wife was a shared experience. We talked, predicted, laughed, and had something waiting for us at the end of another strange day. The medium had not changed. The purpose and the company had.

Two Axes Instead of One Label

The word "active" can describe two different properties, so I find it more useful to draw two axes. The first is attention demand, from background-compatible to attention-exclusive. At the low end, I can do something else while listening. At the high end, the medium needs my full attention. A movie is active in this sense. I am glued to the screen and cannot meaningfully do something else.

The second axis is responsiveness, from fixed to interactive. A book or movie follows the same path regardless of what I do. A game reacts to my decisions, and an AI conversation responds to my input. This is separate from attention: a movie and a game can both demand my full attention even though only the game responds to me.

My rough map looks like this:

These numbers are not scientific scores. They change with the person, the content, and the situation. Music I know well can sit in the background while I work. A new audiobook may demand enough attention that I cannot safely pair it with anything complicated. Books and movies are attention-exclusive even though their content is fixed. Games are attention-exclusive and responsive.

This also explains why raw hours are incomplete. Ten hours of radio while driving are not equivalent to ten hours of reading. Four hours of movies are not equivalent to four hours of a game that keeps asking me to act. Time is one cost. Attention and responsiveness are two others.

There is another layer that the chart cannot capture. Fixed media can create a responsive human experience. A show watched with my wife generated conversation and connection. A multiplayer game may do the same among friends. The behavior of the medium is not necessarily the behavior of the whole experience.

AI Feels More Like a Game Than a Movie

AI sits in an interesting place on this map. It has the responsive loop that made games so engaging to me. I provide an input, receive a response, adjust, and try again. There is always one more prompt I could write or one more version I could improve. In that sense, AI can be addictive for the same reason a game can be: I am not merely receiving a finished sequence. I am participating in a system that reacts to me.

The distinction is that I usually expect the AI loop to produce something outside itself. At the end there may be code, a document, a plan, an image, or a decision I can use. A game may teach a skill, connect me with other people, or help me recover from stress, but often the experience itself is the intended outcome. AI work is easier for me to justify when it carries proof out of the loop.

That does not make AI automatically productive or games automatically unproductive. A long AI session can produce endless variations and no useful artifact. A game can provide real renewal. A systematic review of commercial video games found encouraging evidence for reducing stress and anxiety, while also noting that the research was varied and still limited. The controlled environment matters: the challenge is real enough to occupy the mind, but the consequences remain bounded.

There is also a reason I may return to games later in life. Recent reviews of game-based interventions in older adults report promising improvements in areas such as attention, processing speed, and executive function. That evidence should not be stretched into "playing any game prevents cognitive decline." A 2025 meta-analysis focused on older adults with mild cognitive impairment, included only five randomized trials, and called for larger studies and longer follow-up. Still, it supports a possibility I find interesting: the same demand for visual attention and quick response that made games expensive during college could make a carefully chosen game useful when keeping those systems engaged becomes a goal.

The Full Arc From College to Retirement

The value of a medium changes because the value of an hour changes. After high school and during college, I wanted hours to compound into education and a career. During the working and family years, uninterrupted attention became scarce, so a medium without an ending carried a higher opportunity cost. During the pandemic, connection and stress relief became more urgent, and shows with my wife earned their hours in a way my old spreadsheet could not measure.

Retirement may reverse the calculation again. For many people, retirement resembles a long vacation from the outside, but a good vacation is not simply an empty calendar filled with consumption. It includes rest, movement, conversation, curiosity, and enough structure to make the freedom meaningful. Retirement probably needs the same portfolio over a much longer period.

I can imagine music and audiobooks accompanying walks or hands-on work. Books and movies can provide the full-attention transportation I have always loved. Shows can remain a shared ritual. Games may return as a combination of challenge, social contact, visual engagement, and controlled stress. AI may remain the interactive medium that helps turn curiosity into artifacts. The balance should change as my body, responsibilities, relationships, and reasons for using media change.

The goal is not to drive consumption to zero. Even empty time has a purpose, as I explored in The Background Brain. Filling every gap with background-compatible audio can still prevent boredom and reflection. Likewise, demanding an external product from every attention-exclusive hour turns renewal into another job. Entertainment can be worthwhile because it restores me, connects me to someone, or simply gives me an experience I value.

More than 20 years ago, quitting video games gave me the attention I needed for college. During the pandemic, starting shows gave my wife and me a ritual we needed to cope. Later, returning to games may give me a kind of challenge I need to stay engaged. None of those choices has to become a permanent identity. As with the skills that move between effort and instinct in The Bicycle of the Mind, the right media changes with the work my mind and my life are asking me to do. I do not need one rule for every age. I need to know what the medium takes, what it returns, and why I am choosing it now.