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I can't help but wonder how my life would be different if mindlessly staring at screens wasn't an option (lemm.ee)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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YouTube is my vice. I spend hours and hours and hours there watching videos every single day. I've recently however starting to resent the fact that apparently I seem to prefer watching other people do stuff rather than do that myself. Watching interesting videos feels like a leisure but doing interesting stuff has somehow in my mind turned into work.

Just few days ago I watched a Casey Neistat studio tour and I caught myself thinking how nice it would be to have a neatly organized space like that for making stuff. Well I have a space like that! I'm just never there because instead I'm in the house watching YouTube. I hate that. When I was younger I took apart solar lanterns to build a solar battery charger, I made a camera gimball stabilizer out of threaded rod, angle irons and plumbing pipe, I build a functioning submarine out of legos. Now I can't even remember when I last time build something just for fun.

While watching youtube is "fun" aswell however it's not memorable. I still remember my lego submarine from 20 years ago but I don't remember a single video I watched yesterday. I'm worried that if I keep doing this I'm basically just throwing my life away. There's always going to be another video to watch. I will never finish that project.

I guess I'm just venting. I'm sure there are people that can relate however. How do you guys deal with this?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I feel the same. There's a music video of the song Pursuit of Happiness (the megaforce version) where the guy keeps trying to get off the couch but somehow always finds himself back on it. That resonated hard with me.

I think it's because now we have 1,000 things competing for our time and attention. It's nowhere near as easy to not get distracted anymore, yet all people do is criticize (lazy, unmotivated, etc). It's real.

It's a pickle for sure, and how can we tell when YouTube is pulling us to watch more vs. when we genuinely just want to relax and watch some vids. And if you're doing something else SOLELY because you don't want to watch YT, well, it's still YT that's deciding what you're doing, not you.

I don't want to write a novel here, but this is something I've been thinking about on and off for a while.