watch less
I just finished reading two books after not reading any book at all for nearly a year. Two very different books at that: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. The one linking factor between the two is that they’re both, in some sense, about the internet.
I read both of these books in a matter of hours. I read like I did when I was in middle and elementary school. Voraciously, starving, tearing into the stories and words for something I lacked: stimuli.
I blocked both Reddit and YouTube from my phone the day prior to reading Rejection. Despite deleting all social media, I was suddenly racking up average screen times in the range of 9-12 hours a day. It made no sense to me, how do you fall into this again?
I think people are reluctant to view YouTube as a social media because it’s videos and sometimes those videos have value in a way that would not be found on other social media sites and their respective video cultures. But YouTube may be the most addictive site I’ve ever used, and I’ve been addicted to it since I was 9 years old.
My screen time was grotesque at face value— what the hell am I even doing? and it hit me that I was no better than my many TikTok addicted peers. I don’t remember what I watch. I play videos for the sake of having something playing, to hear something or someone. Something to fill the space in my mind reserved for thought.
Rarely are these videos of great value or revolutionary in de-and-reconstructing my worldview. They’re horror game playthroughs I stop after 9 minutes, random Minecraft videos, video essays about a subject I don’t care about but in a bad way. And despite the many hours spent here, I cannot recall what was said or done in these videos outside of what can be deduced from their title and thumbnail.
I recalled a video I watched from this girl who quit YouTube for 30 days and how it affected her, and a point she had made was that our generation tends to use YouTube as a sort of “third place” to get our social engagement from. Yet, that it left her exhausted despite her Pavlovian impulse to open the app when she wanted rest after her daily obligations. And I completely clicked with that.
I get home from work to lay in bed and wind down and end up awake late into the night and wake up tired again, even if I allow myself to sleep in.
So I blocked YouTube from my phone. And suddenly my brain was desperate for stimuli of some sort. So when Rejection was recommended to me by a friend, I downloaded it that night and finished it the next morning. The next day I finished No One Is Talking About This. And now I continue my desperate conquest of books, but it amazes me that what it took for me to get back my love for reading was giving up my favorite website and the faux comfort it’s provided for over a decade.
I guess, if you want to start reading, watch less videos.