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?

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Interestingly I don’t personally remember TV being much of an issue for me growing up. Even back then I didn’t enjoy most of the stuff that was on. I think if instead of YouTube I only had Netflix I wouldn’t have this issue since it doesn’t really have the kind of content I’m interested in. I’ve never really been into movies and tv shows. 25 minute video of a youtuber woodworker building a kitchen table however? I’m in!

    It’s kind of funny how my friends “praise” me for not having a smartphone addiction and while I agree that watching 10 - 45 min YouTube videos is probably less bad for your brain that browsing TikTok, in the end we’re all still staring at screens for equal amounts of time.