How Piracy Degraded My Life
Looking at piracy beyond morality.
If I remove morality and fear of that Goddamned God who will burn me in the seventh hell for stealing digital contents, would piracy hold any real problem then?
First of all, what’s piracy?
Online piracy is the practice of illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted content without permission, such as music, movies, games, or softwares.
After pirating myself for a long time, and contemplating the issue beyond moral norms of “Thou shall not steal” and not supporting the content creator, does piracy truly harm me in any way?
My logical mind says, “I am not stealing, just copying” and, “Neither could I afford, nor should I care because I can download it for free by adding ‘crack version download’ and ‘download for free’ and ‘pirate bays’ and all the like.”
So what’s the truth?
With curiosity about these questions and conclusions nagging within, I started observing and being mindful of how piracy affects my life.
And here goes my realizations :
Piracy taking away my freedom.
The piracy mindset exposed me to infinite distractions.
All the movies, games, courses, books, advertisements, everything would ignite my desire to possess; as anyway I don’t have to pay for it, so I would not think in terms of finance. I would try to get my hands on everything that excited me and came my way. It was like reaching a fairy castle, made of chocolate with an eternally hungry stomach. This robbed me of the freedom to make time to do what I truly care about.
Paradox of Choices
Piracy binds me in the limbo of the paradox of choices. The principle of the paradox of choice states that the more choices we have, the less happy it makes us about our decisions.
So, pirating thousands of ebooks on one go would paralyze me, and made me regret and be unsatisfied with their choice. I would rather purchase some books and get satisfaction and contentment.
The same goes for movies, games, music, courses, softwares, services, etc. A purchase from given choices would provide more satisfaction than pirating from thousands of sites and millions of choices.
The problem with free stuff
The human mind never values free stuff. Only when we provide any value in return, either in form of time, money, experience, energy, or cause; do we care about them.
All of the piracy stuff except entertainment- like ebooks, educational courses, podcasts, softwares; I threw them away without ever using them. Not because they didn’t have any value, but because I didn’t see any in them. Inevitably, it’ll never come to use as with no value attached, my mind didn’t take it seriously and give the necessary dedication and commitment it required.
Leading to procrastination
Now interestingly even if piracy didn’t help me in personal growth, it never failed to deliver quality entertainment through movies and games. And that could be a plus sign for pirating, but that’s the biggest distraction for me. It made me procrastinate.
Not restraining from piracy, gave me access to trillions of entertainment of a billion categories. This robbed of my productivity and motivation to act. It drowned me in the infinite digital web of instant self-gratification.
Faking success and addiction
Now piracy went toxic by taking the form of addiction, to cope oneself with failure.
When I had no real success, I pretended by getting possessed by the desire to possess more and more and more. In its addiction, one desires to owe everything from the web because of habitual patterns. I had 100’s of Gigabits of piracy content which I absolutely didn’t need but was there to cope up with the idea that ‘I owe something’.
Disorganized and messy life
Exposing to infinite corrupted softwares, piracy websites, viruses, malwares, searching for hours to find the right content- it took up all of the mental relaxations and exerts the mind to complete exhaustion from doing anything.
As a disturbed mind finds expression outside, similarly, the more of this messy environment on the desktop and web disturbed my mental health completely. Most of the time I would think, “It’s easier to simply pay for any service and use it, than doing all these hocus pocus dramas on the web — to steal the content and exposing to viruses, malware, cracking this-that, surfing and searching, taking an emotional ride and wasting a lot of time.”
The feeding of Guilt.
Every time I thought to quit piracy, my mind would reason that “Well, I’ll leave piracy forever but, what if I need this one software once in a while”, “You know like Adobe, no one buys it, it’s too costly, everyone just downloads the cracked copy, and there’s no harm in just doing once.“
But, I realized by pirating, I was paying a much bigger price than what was intended for it, in the form of guilt. The guilt of stealing and not helping the content creator.
‘Guilt’ made me distance myself from the enthusiasm in life. Guilt is a form of self-torture and self-hate, it made me lonely even from myself. It robbed me of motivation, confidence, and a sense of beauty in everything. I concluded guild is not worth subscribing to, even at the cost of all luxury, as it makes me less of a human in my own eyes.
Now concluding, what could be the potential solution?
Anyway, it’s not only up to individual choice to leave piracy or not. Legally, it’s an offensive crime in most of the world. I would recommend anyone not wait for any legal enforcement to stop you from pirating. If you are into it, it’s better to observe and see how it negatively impacts your life.
Saying bye to piracy forever helped me in gaining back :
- Freedom of time.
- Being satisfied with my choices.
- Valuing what I owe.
- A distraction-free life.
- Freedom from momentary self-gratification.
- Organized and minimalist surroundings and state of mind.
- And guilt-free life.
On the contrary distancing from it, motivated me to strive for success. As, at the end of the day, whatever price anything has, it’s just an exchange of values. And I concluded, that if I can’t pay for something, it simply means I don’t have any value to provide in return to the world.
So, the best way to deal with it is to strive for what you want. The striving itself becomes the driving force for creating value and success.
Note- This story was originally published here.
