Addled

“I’m really concerned about you.”

This is how my wife started the conversation the other day, as she sat in the car.

I didn’t know how to proceed, but blood rushed to my face, unsure but embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“These videos you keep watching… You really need to stop. Go back to reading. You used to read. Go back to that. Do anything, but stop watching these videos.”

Ah.

See… while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to leave the house, I sat down and hit up YouTube to watch some Shorts. I’d been doing that a lot lately. Enough to know that the algorithm is irritating. Enough to not know that I need to stop.

This was an intervention.

“I know, I know. I need to stop. I’ve said it myself. The algorithm sucks too… It’s pinned me down and shows me only a few categories of videos. A few SNL shorts, specially the news ones. A few geeky shorts from a YouTube channel that focuses on DND and other table-top and online RPGs, and…”

That was my defense. It was clearly meant to deflect.

“That’s fine,” my wife countered, “but these videos suck you in. You can’t stop watching them. Trust me. I know. I watch them on Instagram. I know I need to stop too. But you definitely need to stop. This stuff addles your brain.”

“You’ve spent over thirty years,” she continued, “not getting addicted to any of this stuff. You read books. You read articles and blogs. You need to go back to those. We can’t all be addicts.”

She knows of my RSS feeds and Instapaper “habit”. I reckon a habit needs to be something you do regularly, but I don’t follow up on those often enough. Not anymore.

I thought for a second about how true her words are. My wife has been sucked into Instagram. It’s part true social network for her, with a constant line of communication with her girlfriends; it’s part addiction. Any time I see her phone, it’s open to Instagram.

My brother has been sucked into TikTok. He’s on it constantly. He sends me videos here and there. He is always mentioning it in our conversations. Taking decisions based on it. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber for him, though I wouldn’t be surprised. Clearly… something has clicked for him there, the way Instagram has for my wife and YouTube Shorts has for me.

I’ve struggled against algorithms all my Internet life. From the time life on the Internet became easier thanks to search engines and ludicrously plentiful email accounts and social networks that just felt like natural connections (till they didn’t), I’ve had to constantly feed the side of me that says “enough” to someone else deciding what I should be seeing and reading and consuming. It’s why I’ve maintained some RSS feed reader or other since 2012, when I bought my first RSS reader – Fever. I’ve also been paying for Instapaper since I gave myself an annual subscription as a birthday gift a half decade ago. But it’s a struggle to keep that hunger fed. I’ve often burned down my RSS subs (numbering to around 400) to the ground and rebuilt them, only to realize that if I don’t have the firehose pointed at me, I get bored of it. It’s a constant push and pull of having enough to read and having too much to read in every single blog post. (Hence, Instapaper.)

So when it became as easy as opening the YouTube app (an app that lives on my phone’s first page anyways, due to the myriad other uses of the service) and getting dropped into an algorithmic feed, the question didn’t even present itself. I was constantly on it, filling up time at first – the interstitial time of waiting for buses, waiting for other people, waiting for the microwave to finish its dance. Then, I was finding time for it – standing at the microwave longer than I should, stealing moments when I should have been paying attention to my family, being awake for hours in bed. All of these video platforms are excellent for revenge bedtime procrastination, I’ve learnt.

But it’s time to pull back.

We can’t be going into our 40s getting sucked into echo chambers and algorithmic escapes. That’s not the way to live a life.

Immediately after my wife pointed this out to me, I cut myself off completely. Cold turkey, as they say. Then, a week later, I found myself going back into the warm embrace of short form videos. It’s just too easy to switch off your brain for a minute, or thirty.

But it’s time to pull back.

Maybe this time it’ll not be cold turkey. I might keep going back to Shorts every few days, only to taper off my usage over the next few weeks or months. Or maybe this is what remission looks like and I just don’t know it yet.

We’ll have to wait and watch keep reading.