I would be interested hearing more details about your experiences around exceptions. My inner simulator is confused about how to categorize this particular example.

On the one hand, "no Reddit at home" is a fairly clear rule that I wouldn't anticipate too much trouble implementing. On the other hand, if the goal is to break the dopamine cycle associated with Reddit, it might be better training for your brain to stop entirely rather than "teasing" it with exceptions?

So, first of all, like Peter says, I'm not advocating a permanent ban, but a temporary reprieve, for several reasons. I think it's common to have a lot of addictive and escapist behaviors around fiction (in a way that I think is less common with friendships). I think people are basically on board with this idea as it applies to TV and video games but I would extend it to books as well. My addictive and escapist behaviors over the last 5 years were pretty evenly distributed between video games, anime, manga, and fantasy / sci-fi novels. (And this wasn't true when I was in college; it all started when I entered grad school and became a lot more socially isolated.)

(It irks me the way e.g. Tumblr has built up this whole memeplex around reading being this wholesome pure thing when it feels to me only slightly less bad than other forms of fictional escapism. People used to worry in the old days about people reading too many novels or comics and I think we should update at least slightly in their direction.)

(The goal of this is not to produce shame in anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism; I don't want to deny anyone their useful and important coping behaviors. This is for anyone who engages in a lot of fictional escapism and doesn't know it.)

More broadly, I worry about fiction as a source of bad training data; it is not reality, it systematically differs from reality in many ways, and I think people who grew up absorbing a lot of fiction generally get screwed by it in subtle ways (for example, I've been posting on Facebook recently about ways in which I feel like my approaches to romantic relationships were screwed up by the TV and movies I watched growing up).

I also worry about fiction as pica, also like Peter says. A friend of mine recently told me about how he watched Avatar: The Last Airbender explicitly at a point in his life where he had no friends, so the characters were his friends instead. Giving up fiction can bring things like this into stark relief; if you notice that when you give up fiction all you do is stare blankly at the walls of your room because your life doesn't put you into regular contact with other humans by default, that's a valuable thing you've learned about your life / a valuable opportunity to confront the thing if you knew about it already but had been avoiding thinking about it.

A particular kind of fiction-as-pica that I don't think people talk about enough is using video games as pica for personal growth / skill development (the only piece I've seen come close is Pixel Poppers on Fake Achievement, which is what first opened my eyes to this sort of thing). I notice that a lot of enjoyment I get out of playing, say, RPGs is enjoying the experience of my characters getting stronger and more capable of handling the challenges of the game. This is entirely pica; what I actually want is for me to get stronger, not my Pokemon.

I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).

I've been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it's hard to stop.

When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems to be connected to desires around intellectual exploration, a sense of wonder/excitement, and some sort of displaced social desire around "camaraderie in service of large-scale goals". This makes me think it's a pica, and that I would be better served by using that energy to get more of those things in the real world.

So, all of the above, at least in my case.