Record achieved.
(The Scary of Sixty-First only tied the record, actually, but I couldn't resist the tie-in between the movie title and the accomplishment.)
People like breaking personal records, usually. It's the main reason we play Candy Crush and other similar games on our phones. It's the main reason I'm still playing a little game that's a variation on Tetris which came as an Easter Egg within the flash animation advent calendar I got for my kids this year. I'm obsessed with this game and I'll still be playing it in April, I imagine, as long as the advent calendar app hasn't succumbed to a pre-programmed obsolescence by that point.
I don't like breaking this record though. It suggests bad things.
I already explored the reasons why I might smash my personal viewing record this year in my year-end post, and I'm okay with the logic behind them. The record will fall, significantly, even though I don't feel as though I made a particular effort to accumulate new viewings in 2021. It felt like business as usual, even less so.
One thing I didn't touch on was that not only did a bunch of movies still come out in the theater -- when theaters were open in Australia, that is -- but movies are becoming even more of a competitive landscape among streaming services. Sure, every streaming service can have original TV shows -- but original movies? That's some sort of absolute proof of your prestige, isn't it?
Not all my viewings were strictly of my own choosing, either. I had to keep a review website going almost single-handedly in 2021. Had to keep feeding the beast, even when it involved watching movies I might have skipped in other years.
So there are reasons. But I still don't like it.
It's times like this that we are confronted with how we are spending our lives.
I don't normally have occasion to doubt the choice I'm making. I have hobbies. I read. I run, in addition to playing a handful of sports. I listen to podcasts and I still make mixes of my favorite new music.
But I also watch an untold number of movies. That's a lot of our finite hours on this planet.
Could I be reading more? Undoubtedly. I'm still working on finishing Dune, which I started in October.
Could I be doing more hobbies? Undoubtedly. It's been months since my wife and I did our last puzzle.
Could I be running more? It would be impossible to be running less. I've been on a break for a number of months, due to a conscious decision not to injure myself prior to our move. (Or that's what I've told myself, anyway.)
You get the idea.
I ultimately do consider my life to be in good balance. Don't forget, I also have kids, which means I do things with them, and when I'm done with them for the night, it can be the best way to unwind to watch a movie rather than something more strenuous.
But it's not just myself I have to convince. When I release my rankings on January 17th, or perhaps early in the hours of January 18th, I'll be telling the world that I watched 160-some movies in 2021 -- and those are just the movies that came out in 2021. If they already shook their head at my obsessiveness, they might need a chiropractor now.
Also I think the key to breaking records is not to break them by a lot. Even this record could be something satisfying to break, as long as I broke it narrowly. The cautionary tale of Lexulous practice mode applies here.
Before this Tetris-like game in the Jacquie Lawson Christmas in London advent calendar app, the last game I was this obsessed with was a timed ten-minute version of Lexulous, which is the Scrabble variant I play with friends. In this practice version, you play all the turns as your rack keeps getting filled with all the letters in the game. Your goal is to clear all the letters in ten minutes -- or whatever time limit you choose -- and see if your final score is a personal record. I become so obsessed with it that I recorded my scores in an Excel spreadsheet.
Then one day, after many repeated attempts to beat my previous record, I smashed it, getting a score that was so high, I had no reason to believe I could ever achieve it again.
And so I stopped trying, then and there. Obsession over.
I don't think smashing my personal viewing record will end my obsession with movies. It'd take a lot more than that.
But it definitely will set a standard that I never want to beat again.
After all, my life decisions are under scrutiny here.
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