A week ago, I uninstalled my video games. Again. For the fifteenth time, give or take.
I'm not proud of the count. But I know what happens when Dota is one click away at 9pm on a Tuesday. So I nuked it. Chess.com too. No games. No quick dopamine. No "just one more."
And then I was bored.
The kind of bored where you reorganize drawers and clean baseboards. So I did something I hadn't done in years.
I picked up a fiction book.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The first book took two weeks. The second one took a day and a half. Audiobook in the car, e-book at night. The third? Same.
I couldn't put these books down. Turns out I'd forgotten what it felt like to want to know what happens next.
So I burned through my Audible credits.
Around book four, I went to grab another and realized I was out. Four credits, give or take. Eighty bucks.
Annoyed, I opened Libby. The library app I'd downloaded years ago and never used.
Every Red Rising book. Free. Audio included.
I could've listened to the whole series for nothing.
Here's the part that bugs me. I knew Libby existed. I'd recommended it to other people.
But somewhere in my head, I'd filed the library under "not for me." Libraries were for kids doing summer reading. For retirees. For people who didn't mind waiting six weeks for a bestseller.
I never tested that. I just kept feeding Audible $16 at a time and called it the cost of being an adult who reads.
This is the trap I keep walking into. The default isn't always the answer. It just feels like the answer.
I didn't switch to Libby because I got smart about money. I switched because I ran out of credits and got annoyed.
The lesson isn't "use the library." The lesson is that we almost never look for an alternative until something forces us to.
The fix isn't discipline. It's friction. In engineering, we say that constraints breed creativity.
Anyway, I’m three books deep on Libby now. Hold times: zero. Audio: identical. And every book I finish, I think about how long I would've kept paying if I hadn't run out of credits.
— Jake
P.S. I’ve been an audible subscriber since 2016 paying $16 each month and I get most of those books now for free.