If you have never had a problem with this, skip this post as it is kind of embarrasing. If you have keep reading.
I started watching Youtube videos when I was 12. The first ones I ran into were people building decks of Magic The Gathering cards or music videos for songs my parents liked. By now I think I have watched several thousand hours of Youtube. I think this might even be a conservative estimate?
(However this is pretty average and sometimes even on the low end for many young people my age. Substitute Youtube for TikTok Instagram or Twitter and you’ve got pretty much every young adult I know.)
Now when you’ve been consuming content on the same platform for the majority of the time you can remember, it starts to get a little old, and you start to understand it might not be that good for you, and you might start to figure out a way to stop.
For me that has taken many forms. I think I have tried pretty much every method you can think over the past few years, including app limits, not consuming certain kinds of content, grayscale phone, dumbphone, not bringing it with me, etc.
However, none of these have really worked.
They were either annoying, or didn’t really work. Like it’s all well and good to restrict yourself to certain behaviors, but it’s difficult to sit down and plan for every little bit of a routine.
The final solution came to me sort of without knowing. I just can’t care about things that are not directly happening to me. If you just don’t care, not even one bit about what’s happening on your phone, you will have no phone problem. You have to make it a mental habit though. It’s like drugs, you’ll reach for it to do something, but you should just remember you do not care.
For a little experiment, try remembering the wonder and enormity and improbability of your own existence or even the fact that anything exists (or subsitute with anything sufficiently visceral or awe inspiring idk), and then try and look at Hacker News and care one bit. Very hard.
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