“my therapist just told me that the NYT word games app is becoming a problem for many of her patients, including me … she asked me how long i spent every day doing them and i LIED”
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I feel guilty for any time I spend during the day browsing Reddit, or responding to blog posts like this one, but the crossword feels like a moral obligation and I feel no guilt for working on it every day (I swear this has nothing to do with not wanting to break my now 215 day streak)
Me too. The idea that it could be a problem was startling. But then I think back on the times when I was spending like 2 hours a day on the Spelling Bee…
I did give away Spelling Bee when that compulsion to find every word chewed up an hour of my day. And for a couple of months I sunk into the psychopathy of Semantle.
But I still like Wordle, and in the last year Coffee Golf (until the day is gold), and perhaps especially newcomer Strands, playing for the triple-perfect (no hints, no non-theme words, spangram first — not so hard as it sounds, you just play the opening in your head).
It's only 15 minutes of one's morning. Any therapist who says that's wrong is a grifter problematizing little pleasures for bucks.
Amen. Don't milkshake duck my crossword TherapyTok
Couldn't be me obsessing over my crossword and wordle streaks (and playing connections/strands as well; oh, and my Good Sudoku streak too)
That said, my weekly m-f crossword time is sub 10 minutes, and wordle and sudoku add another 5-10 minutes or so, so my compulsion doesn't rise to the level of pathological (since it's not very life-interfering), but boy, if for some reason it started taking an hour or more altogether, I'd probably start sacrificing other things in my life, which might be problematic.
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