Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively consider reducing your addiction to television/movies and stop worrying about where your next fix is coming from. In the golden era of piracy I used to be a huge media pack rat spending hours a day obtaining more media to stash away. One day my ZFS array puked and I lost almost everything. I wasn't even upset. It was a blessing in disguise to be liberated from caring about hoarding media. Never seeing your favorite television/movies again is going to have almost zero impact on your life. It's not worth wasting much of your time and money on.

View on HN

I have terabytes of movies and series. I've spent like 1 hour in the past 12 months adding some stuff to my collection. HDD space is extremely cheap and keeping a local copy is such low effort that I don't see why I should get rid of my collection. Some of it is also so rare as to be impossible to find unless you're a member of some private sharing sites (try finding a complete archive of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show).

I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.

If you're able to horde in a healthy way it's no problem. I just think for a lot of people it tends to become an unhealthy obsession of relying on obtaining media to self medicate. Chasing the dragon trying to obtain more and more media. Then ultimately facing the disappointment when it doesn't provide the dopamine fix or childhood nostalgia you're hoping for. I vividly remember the terrible feeling of opening up Plex with countless terabytes of data and realizing nothing here is going to actually make me feel better. Media is a powerful stimulant and I've reached the conclusion for myself at least it has to be used in moderation.

There's a difference between moderation and abstinence, no? If I notice there's nothing I want to watch in my collection or online, I start to ask myself why that is and what unfulfilled needs might be the cause. Then I know I need to deal with that somehow instead of trying to distract myself with a movie.

Our brains prioritize looking for fixes more than enjoying them. It's the same for most collections, or modding Skyrim.

>One day my ZFS array puked

How does that happen? No redundancy?

Totally self inflicted. I was using a beta version of OpenZFS on a beta version of OSX. Begging for problems and I finally found one. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for an off-ramp of the burden of managing my horde of data. All my personal data was backed up so I just restored that and let the media horde go.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com