Reflection on Four Weeks without YouTube
About a month ago, I lost a couple days to YouTube - just getting caught on the cycle of checking and watching content. I was very frustrated, so when I was feeling better, I posted the litany against YouTube to my mastodon.
I must not open YouTube. YouTube is the mind-killer. YouTube is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my desire to watch YouTube. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it's path. Where the desire to watch YouTube has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
I went a couple days without opening YouTube at all, so I decided to keep track - I added a little counter to my mastodon profile that counts up each day I went without opening YouTube. I've now made it to 28 days. (with a technical exception: I watched one video, but it was my band's submission to NPR's tiny desk contest; I was *in* that one) It's been a long time since I went this long without watching a YouTube video. I have watched a couple videos from other sources - a trivia game show on dropout, an NBA game, and a twitch stream of Hollow Knight. But I've mostly been reading or doing projects. And playing a LOT of solitaire.
Did it unlock my latent productive potential? Am I a productivity getting-things-done monster now? Well, no. I played a lot of solitaire. But, I did achieve some things - I've started reading Learn You a Haskell, I read a couple books, I aced my midterms, I started setting up an automated backups system. The thing I notice is not that I'm infinitely productive, but rather that my distractions aren't infinite anymore. My Mastodon and Tumblr feeds are pretty small, and the only other website I'm really on is lobste.rs, which doesn't update often; I find it doesn't take me long to go through my feeds now, and very few of them point me to even more content algorithmically. I end up bored sooner. And that's when the magic happens. I still have issues with getting started on stuff, but now that my feeds leave me bored sooner, I have more opportunities to start.
It's worth noting that this came on the heels of me intentionally reducing the number of channels I was checking in on. I have long used YouTube in private browsing mode, so logged out with no cookies. by the time I started this streak, I was only regularly checking 3 channels; One hadn't posted in several months, one hadn't posted in 2 months, and the other is a hardware news site I could replace with text media. During the month, there was really only one major temptation: I realized I completely missed Games Done Quick, which I love watching. But, of course, those videos will be there whenever I decide to come back.
On that subject, I know I want to wait a few more days, at least - make it a full 31 days. But after that, who knows? I don't really want to go back to what I was doing (wasting the occasional whole day, which is what got me fed up and starting this whole thing). Maybe I need to see if I'm capable of using it in a more balanced way? Or, maybe, I just don't even bother. Let the videos rot, I've got plenty of books to read. Maybe I take up gaming again, or watching TV shows so that I can chat with the people around me about them.