My current daily routine looks like this:
- 8:00~9:00 – Getting ready for work
- 9:00–13:00 – Work
- 13:00–14:00 – Lunch + YouTube
- 14:00–18:00 – Work
- 18:00–20:00 – Break from work + Dinner + YouTube
- 20:00~1:00 – YouTube, gaming, occasional events, personal projects, or sports. Lately, I’ve noticed my screen time during this period has increased a lot, and I’ve been feeling lazy to do anything productive—mostly just doomscrolling or watching videos
What’s your routine like? How do you manage your time, maintain social connections, avoid digital distractions, and stay on track with your goals and learning?
What it comes down to is not having belief in what you do, so you do other things. You might feel trapped, so you pass the time with stuff like YouTube because that is the most compelling thing available to you. A man will walk on broken glass with a smile if he truly believes in what it will accomplish.
When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.
When there is a rare game or youtube topic that really obsessively catches your attention, like Factorio, pay attention to it! It helps show you what drives you, and you can try to leverage that into things you find healthier.
Also, it might be worth it to look into ADHD testing if this has been a persistent pattern your entire life.
I'm really really tired of people throwing solutions at my problems while one of the problems is that I'm fundamentally profoundly tired of trying and failing.
For many tho, what I said is a revelation and it can save them from yet another ineffective pomodoro exercise. Many are not middle aged people stuck in a hard place and this advice helps them.
Well do I have a game for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest
"One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."
And it worked.
The css for yt looks like this:
It's been 6 months and it's still working."It was a day like this when Marco Polo left for China. What are your plans for today ?"
https://github.com/mikker/sprinkles.app
https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
The way I got over it is that I have started realizing, confronting, communicating these issues. I "sat down with myself" daily just to think for 15 minutes, without any distraction like youtube. Communicated what I though were my problems to my partner, friends, parents, therapist, forums, LLM.
Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.
I also picked up hobbies that nurture the specific parts that I was lacking. For example, I had a very hard time to persistently care about living things. But after a leap of faith I successfully kept a plant alive, and I slowly build a hobby around this.
Funnily enough, youtube helped in this, because I also shaped that so that the helpful videos remained. While doing chores, self-care and other such things, I listened to a lot of mental health, lifestyle, introspective, hobby content, and these were wonderful sources of inspiration.
In a way, having a bluetooth headphone also helped a lot. It helped to bridge the gap between the digital world, which was my only comfort zone, and the "irl", which was like the cold, hard, overwhelming rest of the world that I didn't really want to deal with.
> Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.
Could you give some examples of those patterns?
For example, my plants were always dying. I hated that, and I hated facing my inability every time I interacted with them (granted, there weren't many in the first place). I hated to touch soil and the general mess that happens when maintaining them. I was really disgusted by the way a rotten stem felt, how the soil stank after watering, and I was confused about where to put them, what to do with growth, browning leaves, etc. It was an overwhelming ball of negative emotions.
One time after multiple of them really died, I gave them new soil and vowed that this time I will really water regularly. I did, and they actually came back to life. I was very happy about it, and it inspired me to look up more information about them. That inspired me to have more plants, which in turn meant more work with them. I found youtubers I really liked who kept a lot of houseplants, and watching them normalized the chores for me, and helped me get an idea on how things actually look, and what it all takes. I began to have ideas about where I want to go with this. I dared things like repotting, buying different species, growing them from a small cutting. I went a little into interior design. I bought a plant nursery lamp. And the plants loved it!
The negative emotions all but went away, and positive ones gained traction - or I should rather say destructive and constructive. Behind hate and disgust I realized sadness and fear, and overcoming that I realized curiosity, stability, a warm pride toward myself and my creations.
I had a similar evolution in most other parts of my life, like relationships with people, relationship with animals, relationship with self.
Turned out from this all, the ingredient that I sorely missed was a courage to put myself out there. To find out what I am actually like, and to represent that genuinely in the different situations of life. This same pattern, fear of expressing myself, and repressing parts of me that I dislike or doubt, served as a foundation for many of my seemingly actual problems, like the inability to keep a little green thing alive, and so many more.
I am cautious if anybody uses the word "healthy" outside of the context of actual diseases like pleurisy and conjunctivitis. I am aware of a below-the-radar societal battle over way of life, and proper conduct, and the battleground is haunted by specters of ideas like sin and saintliness. It's these fraught issues that cause "media addictions". The nature of the "addiction" is doubt and unhappiness over the thing you want to do, where the saintly walking-over-broken-glass things you imagine you ought to want are set against a reactionary avoidance of them, and the meaning of "want" is lost in the turmoil.
I haven't watched Youtube for ten years, but I will do other unproductive things "endlessly". (If anybody cares, I can report that the Backrooms mod on C:DDA has a layer of soil above the main level, and it's possible to break out into the open air and build a car up there. That's mostly what I did over the last two weeks.) I would like to be so firm in my convictions that I can say "and I don't care", but sadly I keep coming back to the idea that I should make some games, or write, or do art. Those are prestigious, pious things to do. It might turn out that my feelings are correct, and I might return to a project and complete it. But I might also be wrong about these self-aggrandizing ideas. I might keep coming back to appearing to be creative only as a kind of defense against appearing unworthy. I might actually idle my days away in a farty, unproductive manner unto death, and that might be what I should do. Whose moral standard is it here? Mine, yours, society's? "Do what you like", if you can wholeheartedly figure out what that means - that's the problem.
Just a digression: The word "healthy" comes from the root "hel", meaning "whole". So you can substitute it for "wholesome", and then we're not only dealing with bacteria and viruses, but the entire human experience.
On Android for YT, I've installed the NewPipe app which can be configured to show no suggestions. I just have a list of app level subscribed channels, no yt account required
Regarding Shorts, I have no YouTube history, but I still get Shorts. I hate them. You must be doing something else to disable them.
Redirect: *youtube.com/shorts/* to: $1youtube.com/watch?v=$2
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I'm finding the blank youtube page incredibly soothing already!
Addiction is like a weed in the ground. Cutting off its head just makes it regrow faster and angrier, with deeper roots to boot.
Addictions love nothing more than superficial attempts to stop them! The only way to _manage_ addictions is to get them at their roots.
Before you begin, take some time to outline the tasks you need to complete. Now when you return to the home office, you are only there for one reason.
If problems persist, you may need to find more interesting projects.
I never had energy for side projects with a full-time job. Just because some do doesn't mean it's for everyone.
Maybe there are higher value ways to relax than doom scrolling but I don't think being "unproductive" beyond 8 hrs/day is a bad thing.
Hopefully you can also find work that is stimulating and gives that sense of accomplishment.
Just like having junk food in the house means that I will tend to eat junk food (but I won't go buy junk food on impulse)...
* Remove the time-wasting capabilities from your devices (e.g., uninstall apps, set up uBlock Origin blocking rules for anything TikTok-like, block HN for a week).
* Make dedicated distraction devices hard to access (e.g., unplug gaming rig/console and store it away for a week/month, same with the living room TV/screen, sell that handheld gaming device).
Also, once you get some momentum on a better activity, it's easier to stay doing it. You might have to lock away all your distractions for a few days before you can get immersed in that coding side project (or writing that novella, or that new workout routine). But then it can become a go-to activity that you do automatically, and maybe even think about at other times, rather than defaulting to doomscrolling.
(I don't claim to always do this myself, but when I do, it works.)