Bonus Post: Self-Improvement
Right now I have two major things that are deeply affecting my mental health and dragging me down. Those two things are YouTube and my crappy sleep schedule. I am quite clearly addicted to YouTube, and I spend hours watching or listening to YouTube and end up getting exactly nothing out of it. Occasionally I will watch some videos that I really, truly enjoy, and then I’ll spiral down the rabbit hole, following the algorithm all the way to the eventual demise of my day. Also, I have sleep problems that mean I have great trouble keeping any sort of consistent schedule and I’m almost always up in the middle of the night. I have a theory that these two problems are connected.
The most significant effect of these is that I am not writing nearly as much as I would like to be. I wake up at strange hours of the night and come up to my computer with every intention of writing, but then I notice that someone I like posted a YouTube video and the spiral begins anew.
I am committing right now to change that. For the next ten days I will quit YouTube cold turkey just to see what kind of effect it has on my life. From there I hope to come to some sort of healthier relationship with the platform so that I can still watch the videos I enjoy from people like Etho, Veritasium, and Eoin Reardon, but so that I don’t keep going further than that and wasting hours of my life on absolutely useless things.
In the last week my YouTube addled brain wrote approximately five-thousand words which falls vastly short of my two-thousand words per day goal. I am committing here, so that I have a public account (that nobody really sees anyway, but still) of my commitment to reevaluating my mental health. I hope that as an additional side effect of cutting YouTube my sleep is able to level out and I can reach a point of consistency, even if it’s not an ideal sleep schedule.
So, check back here on the 8th of July to see the update to this spontaneous post and I’ll do my best to cut YouTube. Just now I’ve installed an app that blocks the site from my browser, so that’s an additional barrier to entry, and hopefully this post is the rest of the accountability I’ll need to make this work.
