Is Netflix ruining college for us?

Netflix is everybody’s favorite recent pastime. It’s the easiest thing to do, requiring little-to-no effort and boasts a variety of high-quality programs that can entertain for hours. It’s incredibly easy to become addicted — it’s an insidious process really. You set out trying to procrastinate for half an hour, and four hours later you wind up in a bevy of confusion wondering what happened to your Monday night and, more broadly, what you are doing with your life.

Netflix is a rather manipulative animal; it requires more effort to stop it than it does to just let the next episode play on. This is essentially like force-feeding an addict drugs until they have the gall to slap your hand away, or the equivalent of a bartender who refills an alcoholic’s drink every time they take a sip. Both are cruel and unusual, and this is no different. Cutting yourself off in the throes of a dark, deep Netflix binge is nearly impossible. It requires more human willpower than any one college student can muster. I propose that we institute a buddy-check system, or some sort of rehabilitation program that can offer support to the unfortunate students who are more heavily afflicted by this addiction.

Long gone are the days of students lounging around dorm rooms for hours, trying to find ways to entertain themselves. Nowadays, the instant a college student is bored, there are three million ways that they can distract themselves for hours. Whether it be Netflix or social media, the average student could easily spend their entire day between the two, making it difficult to accomplish anything of worth.

Netflix is so harmful because of its simplicity — it’s like a time vacuum that eats away at boredom. This may not seem like a problem at first: What’s wrong with students not being bored? But at its core, this is a deeper issue. Boredom breeds creativity. It leads to adventure. Most great stories are born out of individuals looking to assuage their boredom, searching for something to do. If Netflix can so readily stimulate everyone for days, think about how many great adventures are not being had and how many unparalleled experiences are being missed out on. While playing the “what if” game often proves fruitless, it’s hard not to ponder how many conversations, skills and experiences are lost to due to this simultaneously magical and destructive, time-stealing entity.

So how do we combat this serious problem, an issue that afflicts so many of our friends at school? It’s not difficult to tell when someone is addicted to Netflix: They’re usually pale with dark grocery bags beneath their eyes, and they won’t shut-up about the newest season of House of Cards that they finished in less than a day.

Start by closing their computer and taking them outside to smell the fresh air. Remind them of an age before Netflix existed, when TV was only good at certain times, when programming permitted it to be. Go for a walk, have an adventure, seek new experiences — whatever it takes to get them off their cemented crescent in the couch and back into the sensory world.

If this doesn’t work, drastic measures may need to be taken. While it’s not fun taking someone’s laptop and smashing it with the voracity of the printer-bashing scene in Office Space (just kidding, it is definitely fun), remember that you’re doing it for that person’s own good. You are pretty much a hero. If they ask for compensation for their destroyed machine, just give them a nice pat on the back and say, “You’re welcome.”