After enduring a long day of school and finishing all of my homework, I find myself with extra time on my hands. I could either try to catch a random episode on TV or watch the episode that I missed on Hulu. If you’re like me, watching the newest episode of a show on TV was a part of your childhood that you have long since abandoned for a streaming service like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime.

Since streaming services like Netflix first enabled people to pull an all nighter watching a show that you genuinely enjoyed watching, cable TV subscriptions have been declining. This has caused cable companies to raise their prices for users, while keeping the same or sometimes worse show content.

I remember one summer night, back in the days when my all time favorite show was “Spongebob Squarepants,” I was trying to pull an all-nighter watching TV, but there wasn’t anything on that I wanted to watch at 2 a.m., as you can imagine. This has become a thing of the past with video streaming services.

I never run out of things to watch on Netflix, I more often run out of time to watch everything on my list. If you do run out of content, you have way too much time on your hands and you need to do something with your life. This is one of the problems that these streaming services have created; people are starting to choose the next episode of “Dexter” over doing more important things like homework and having a real life.

This is a big hole that I have sunken myself into: a Netflix addiction. It’s gotten to the point where I have to time myself so that I finish everything I need to do before 8 so that I can watch something before I go to sleep. My parents have really gotten on to me about it, saying that it’s a bad habit to get into and that it negatively affects grades.

Luckily, my fixation with Netflix doesn’t make me put it before doing homework, but it serves as motivation for finishing earlier. I find Netflix to be 45 minutes of disconnecting myself from the world, and immersing myself into another person’s life. Hearing what they hear and seeing what they see takes my mind off of stressful things and just lets me think about if Dexter’s going to get caught, if Leslie will ever find a way to turn the pit into a park or if you ever actually found out how Ted met these kids’ mom.