My Not-So-Strange Addiction

To call what I refer to as an "addiction" in this essay brings to mind images of scars, trauma, and fateful compulsion: withdrawals which are as painful to watch as they are to experience physically, and tormenting cries from the body for years after usage stops. It may be more accurate to call this thing "dependence", but I'll leave that up to interpretation. Judging by the title picture for this post, you may have already inferred this to be an electronic addiction. While I believe the image shows a Netflix search screen, I'm talking about Youtube.

Youtube and I go way back. We first met on my family's whiny old desktop, on which my dad and I used to watch Vevo music videos for popular songs. We were later more personally acquainted on my mom's second generation iPad. My tastes became more individualized, as I followed RayWilliamJohnson and Smosh avidly. It became a compulsion for me to spend hours staring at that screen, watching video after video. Importantly, I started rewatching videos during this stage, for reasons I will analyze later in this essay.

When we got a laptop for the family, my Youtube addiction followed. The school bus dropping me off across the street would start a short timer within which I'd run inside, wash up, and use the muscle-memory in my hands to start up the video-machine. At this point, I think I was watching Nigahiga and Good Mythical Morning. I need hardly tell you that this curse followed me to my first iPhone and my first personal computer.

These days, my hands are so locked into the pattern of opening Youtube that I will, at any moment in time, be compelled to open a new tab (Ctrl + T), and type in the "you" faster than humanly possible, clicking "enter" before I even ascertain my new reality. Many minutes are spent scrolling through the homepage, trying to find appealing content. I used to gain the dopamine rush by clicking on a random video and watching it through. Now, it takes me ten to fifteen minutes just to find what I want to watch… likely something I've already seen.

At times, I've tried to cut this habit out of my life. I've tracked how much time I spend watching Youtube by adding up video lengths at the end of the day, striving to lower it each week. That solution worked for a time, but it doesn't seem to stick. Working a 9-5 job has proven to be uniquely effective. Given that I don't want to watch Youtube on my work computer, and am usually too busy to do so anyway, I am cut off from that luxurious font of dopamine.

Oh, but if it were only so easy. Can't have that dopaminergic catalyst completely ripped away, right? So I've replaced it with short form content - even more toxic. These days, I can lose chunks of time scrolling through the endless void of Instagram Reels or Youtube shorts. I've imposed time limits on my phone for Instagram, but it doesn't provide too much resistance when I can just click "Ignore for Today" to make it disappear. And of course, when I'm not at work and should be spending time reading or writing, I'm pulled towards that old demon once more, my muscle memory opening Youtube yet again.

I'm not wholly unproductive, but Youtube has been the biggest thorn in my side for over a decade with regards to productivity. I have also tried installing something which blocks the site from my computer, but again, the usefulness diminishes when I can go into the extension and unblock whenever I want. Coupled with the ease of use for short form content, the neurological pathways for easy addiction are deepening with every instance in which I resort to these cheap thrills.

That word, "thrills", discomforts me for being too strong. Like I said, I spend the majority of my time watching videos I've already seen. Why? To the best of my knowledge, my brain attempts to replicate the rush it got when I first watched the video. Just like an addict chasing that first high, I'm chasing the first laugh. I have moments of horrible self-reflection when I realize I'm staring at my screen, eyes glazed with a half-cocked smile frozen on my face, watching the colors move in some vaguely titillating manner. Dystopian.

Youtube can be a powerful tool, which makes it more difficult to remove from my life. Much of my old school test prep was done on Youtube; shoutout to Flipping Physics and all the other educational content creators for getting me through AP classes in high school. I've learned everything I know about health and fitness from Youtube. When I seek to further my understanding of a psychological or philosophical concept, I first turn to Youtube. In fact, Youtube helped initiate my journey into philosophy in the first place. Not to mention all of the sports highlights which are available in their truest form on that platform alone.

Of course, I don't experience physical withdrawal symptoms when quitting Youtube, at least judging by the few times I've tried - hence why I hesitate to call it an "addiction", but the dependence causes an itch in my mind. If I haven't watched a video in a while, my brain drifts to the "new tab" button or shortcut, and my hands are ever-ready to press the aforementioned "you".

I often find myself, particularly in those "dystopian" moments of self-awareness, wondering just how much I could have gotten done had I stopped watching four videos ago. Viktor Frankl's words spring to mind, "Live as though you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now." I picture myself watching my actions in a ghostly form, shaking my head as the limited time I have on the earth unravels into watching the same people do the same thing on camera for the tenth time. The mental image spooks me into doing something productive, at least for a minute or two…

I'm also reminded of Nietzsche's postulate on eternal recurrence. Nietzsche pondered the idea that the universe could be in an eternal loop, and that we are therefore set to repeat the same action over and over again, forever. While this may at first seem a condemning theory, it can be incredibly affirming. If every action I took were to be repeated infinite times, would I be happy with the way I have lived my life, or with the action I am about to take? Nietzsche's point surpasses that which I have explained in this little paragraph, but I find it a useful tool to put a check on my fruitless endeavors. One of Nietzsche's unpublished notes reads, "My doctrine says: the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again - you will anyway!" In essence, treat every moment as though it will be enshrined in the fabric of your life for eternity, and that at the end of your life, when you're about to go through the rigmarole again, you can smile and say, "Yes! I will gladly live that existence once more!"

This essay has no particularly wholesome message at the end such as those I have tried to imbue into my more recent work. Truth be told, I don't know where this addiction will lead. Fortunately, Youtube will never have me coughing up a lung huddling for warmth beside a trashcan fire (at least, so I hope), but it may lead to the withering of my potential and the ceasing of my aspirations.  Alright, I think this post has gone on long enough… Let me see if I can find an old Daily Show clip I want to watch.