Blog

What a way to start a new month.

Dead dictators. Middle East conflict. The plight of single men. Female skiers wearing see-through clothing. A mix of things polluting my YouTube page. The ultra addicting action of scrolling through Shorts tends to cost me some time every evening. Culprits in the age of Consumption we are living through at the moment.

The amount of entertainment we have at our fingertips are astounding. Apart from the fact that you can find almost anything online if you try hard enough there are as many people “living” online as there are living through real life events. The table below shows just how much.

The online world shows us what we want to see. It doesn’t show us reality. We are looking for “how to fix my car radiator in under two minutes” and we want to see “become a millionaire with three months” type content. Quickly. Fast. Improved. The best version of yourself. These clickbait type titles are what draws the views and pulls the clicks. You start looking for something not on Google but on different platforms. Social media giants act like drug lords, supplying to your every need and whim.

Apart from taking your mind and turning it into their personal playground where they dictate what you play on, what you buy, what you where and worst cast what your opinions are – they steal your time. Monetizing it to their own benefits.

The smaller dogs are getting in on the action.

Attention is money.

More people equals revenue. In the online community it pays to be seen. You see something from an advertiser related to your last four searches on Google and you decide to make a purchase. Win for the big tech giants.

Smaller platforms are moving to a similar approach. Feeding you what you want to see in an effort to keep you connected and thus generating revenue. There isn’t a truly neutral platform anymore. Thinking about it, we are all guilty of this (in a way). Perhaps not in as big a way as the super massive companies but in our own small way.

Why you and I do this is up to our personal choices. We want something from this. I won’t deep dive into personal reasons because just like each individual platform is complex so is each owner of said platform. What drives you, what motivates me, we often cannot understand the reasons because they are tied into our personalities. They were forged in our youths or perhaps in mid life and they are amalgamations of struggles, happiness, sadness and all other emotions.

This isn’t judgement.

At the crossroads – what next?

I work up this morning to probably one of the worst states of depression I’ve had in a long time.

As I finished the washing and sat drinking a cold cup of coffee I gave my life and my road ahead some thought. What, at this point, is adding and what is removing ‘value’. I don’t want to sound like a YouTuber life coach or a Hustle Bro trying to dissect each detail but often the small things we do (or don’t) cuts the deepest. Spending hours on a platform where you end up feeling worse about yourself is the big change you need to make. Spending time on a place where you just get hit in the face with how good everyone else is living (even if it is highlight reel stuff) is not a good thing to do.

First thing I did when I open YouTube (problem area right?) was to look at my “Watch Later” list. In the past year I started saving and shelving “interesting” videos to this corner. I’d save EVERYTHING vaguely interesting (IMO) and then I would keep adding. 536 videos later I had reached a point where I was just adding. I wasn’t evening consuming anymore I was now hoarding. Just like I hoard bookmarks in my browser.

These actions speak of my personality a little bit – I tend to procrastinate. Often to extremes. And when I find myself in a difficult situation I sink.

A decade ago I found a philosophy which shaped my life. This idea of focusing on myself first and leaving distractions at the door gave me a different outlook on life. One which tells me to focus on myself. To work on myself. To avoid the consumption and the distraction. It did have some controversial points (according to critics) but even modern medicine had / has critics.

During all this internal conflict and monologuing I decide to start cleaning that list. I didn’t decide to save or pick. I didn’t have any criteria for what I wanted to watch later.

I deleted without thought.

The list is now at 226. At the next opportunities I will keep whittling it down until it is zero.

My goal with this small exercise is to remove things from my life which adds nothing. Subscriptions. Actions. The endless staring at a screen. The endless thinking about how I can do this and that to make my life different instead of doing.

Doing more is probably the key takeaway.

tl;dr

Spend more time IRL. Do more things IRL. Don’t get stuck in ‘I-wish-I-had-this-life’ scenarios on YouTube. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Substack. Or wherever.

Do things to make myself feel better.

Thanks for reading: )