"I've paid for it, I should use it"

The subscription is fourteen pounds a month, and it's fourteen pounds whether you watch one episode or thirty, and there's a feeling that stopping at one is leaving money on the table.

Two things. The first is that the subscription is paid whether or not you watch, so the marginal episode costs nothing in money and something in sleep. Watching more to justify the fee is spending the morning to feel better about the fourteen pounds, and the fourteen pounds doesn't notice.

The second is that the catalogue can't be finished. There is more on the service than you could watch in a lifetime, and more added every week, and the sense that you should use it is a sense with no satisfaction available. A person who watches three a night to get value from the subscription is a person who'll watch three a night for ever, because the value is never got. The catalogue is designed to be inexhaustible, and treating it as a thing to be used up is treating a tap as a bucket.

Using it well means something else. It means watching what you chose, at a pace you set, and enjoying it, and chapter 19 is about how the pace changes the enjoying. A subscription used for one good episode a night, remembered, is a subscription used. A subscription used for three a night, blurred, is a subscription that's using you.

There's a version of this that's about the chosen binge, and I want to defend it before chapter 24 does. A wet Sunday with nothing on and a series you've been saving, four episodes back to back with a pot of tea, is a fine thing to do with a subscription, and nothing in this book is against it. The difference is that it was decided at lunchtime, on purpose, as an occasion, and the countdown had nothing to do with it. The subscription is for that. It isn't for twenty to midnight on a Tuesday.