6 reasons why you should consider deleting YouTube immediately
It might free up hours of your time and leave you happier
Am I the only one who is getting really sick of YouTube amidst the strange times that covid-19 has brought on? It can’t be only me, surely?
I think a lot of us have probably spent more time on the platform over the past 6 months, especially if we are working from home or have been laid off. In the past few weeks particularly, it has dawned on me that watching YouTube doesn’t really make me happier in the long-term and so here are five reasons why:
1. 1984-esque triple adverts
Clicking through three sets of intensely-annoying adverts for products that I have no intention of ever purchasing in order to watch a three-minute video that I never even really wanted to watch in the first place.This is not a recipe for fulfillment methinks.
2. Meaningless twaddle from talking heads
OK, this is a bit harsh, I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? Sometimes when I’ve been watching recently, I have this kind of out-of-body experience where I see myself from behind my computer, just one little homo sapien watching another little homo sapien on a screen yack away at the camera, sharing their insipid opinions about issue-x. Who cares? Surely it’s significantly better to have these kind of interactions two-way, in real life.
3. Dopamine rushes
You must know this feeling: Your favourite channel has just released a new video or you see a clip with a particularly juicy title that you know you’re going to enjoy. As you click on it, you feel a kind of WHOOSH as dopamine mainlines into your brain. You sit down with your favourite snack/drink and click play. Nirvana. But it’s instant-gratification with long-term dissatisfaction. And the more you watch, the less often those feelings come, and the more fleeting they are.
4. Horrible click-bait titles
“This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever talked about”. This kind of titling strikes me as downright unethical. If I ever see this kind of blatant, lowest-common-denominator editing, the channel is getting an instant ‘never recommend’. Yet no matter how much I try, they sometimes seem to creep back in to my suggested list.
5. YouTube spirals
Everyone knows by now that the algorithms are designed to get you clicking, clicking clicking. Before you know it, you’ve spent an hour of your time and you can’t even remember how or why. An hour down the drain that could have been spent reading a book, finishing a video game, playing an instrument, writing on medium, you name it :)
6. It’s giving you a false sense of reality
Be it watching highly-edited montages of lives that are unattainable & realistic for the vast majority of people or videos of amazingly-skilled furniture restorations, it just feels like this a process of making the viewer gradually more and more out of touch with reality. The former seems likely to make you dissatisfied with your average life and the latter could give you a false sense of accomplishment which stops you from completing actual projects.
OK, but what do you mean, “delete YouTube”
Note that I didn’t say stop watching YouTube. I’m not saying that. Just delete it and try to limit use of it.
Delete the app from your smartphone or iPad. Simply removing the notifications is not enough. Next, install some kind of website-blocker on your main internet browser so that you can’t access or refresh the front page easily. That’s it, you’re done.
I still watch lectures, guides, reviews etc. on YouTube, I just only do it through links or when there’s something I specifically want to watch. On smart devices, you can just use a web-browser app and on a PC, you can just a different browser (in my case, Firefox) so that you only spend time on YouTube when you specifically intend to.
I hope this piece doesn’t come across as holier-than-thou. YouTube has some fantastic content and there are some amazing creators. Some of whom have undoubtedly enriched my life and increased my knowledge. I watch YouTube all the time. In fact, I watch it too much. That’s why I wrote this. The pull towards over-consumption just seems so strong and so intentional, that I think we have to find ways to protect our valuable time.
So why don’t you try this? It might give you an extra 30 minutes per day to spend time on the things that really matter to you.
