What the next one costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and most of it is paid at seven the next morning.

The sleep. Exelmans's finding was that frequent binge viewing went with poorer sleep, more fatigue and more insomnia, through a mind still running at bedtime, and that ordinary viewing didn't. Three cliffs and a lake at twenty to midnight is the pattern the study describes. The NHS says adults need seven to nine hours, and a screen off at twenty to midnight with an alarm at seven is under the bottom of that, before you've fallen asleep.

The morning. Flat, short with someone, a coffee more than you'd have had. The earlier book in this series on staying up late is about what a tired day costs, and I won't repeat it, except to say that the day is where the cost lands and the evening is where it's incurred, and the two never meet, which is why the habit survives.

The plan, broken nightly. Walton-Pattison's participants reported anticipated regret alongside their viewing. That's the feeling at the countdown of knowing you'll wish you hadn't, and watching anyway, and a plan broken every night with the breaking foreseen is a small daily lesson that your plans don't hold, and it generalises.

The guilt. Granow's finding was that watching which collided with other goals and produced guilt lowered wellbeing rather than raising it. The overrun collides with bed every night. The guilt is the morning's first feeling, before the tiredness, and it's attached to a thing that was meant to be rest.

The evenings that were one thing. Three episodes is the whole evening. There was no book, no bath, no conversation in the credits, no early night. The evening had one thing in it and the thing was chosen by a countdown.

The shows themselves. Three in a row blur. Ask yourself what happened in episode two of the thing you finished last month, and notice that you know what happened in the series and not what happened in the episode, because the episodes were watched as one long thing at the end of a day. Chapter 19 is about this, because it's the cost that's closest to what you wanted from the show, and the one the overrun takes most directly.

The remote. This sounds small and isn't. A person who's spent years not pressing stop against a countdown has practised, a thousand times, letting a default decide, and defaults are everywhere, and the practice generalises. The countdown is a small nightly lesson in not intervening, and it's been learned.

And the child, if there's one, who's learning how evenings end.