We all know YouTube of old—grainy 720p videos with subdued lighting of unrehearsed, unscripted shenanigans. It was America’s Home Videos brought to your very hand via your smartphone. I really didn’t drown myself in YouTube back then, but around the mid-2010’s, I started realizing that a lot of YouTubers were posting really informative stuff, some really good long-form content.
Stuff like, how to do an oil change, how to plant an herb garden, how to start a small business. There were usually enough people posting that inevitably, you’d find the answer to almost any problem you ever thought to type into the search bar. Peruse enough videos, shuffle through the comments and use your common sense, and you’d inevitably find the correct answer.
The magic of YouTube was revealed to me. Cue the choir—Ahhhhhh!
And then TikTok went buck wild.
A then-15 second burst of the thoughts, prayers, dreams and machinations of millions of teens in rapid repetitive force was ready for human consumption and capitalistic manipulation. I remember my daughters and their dance friends all in the app, swiping in a fraction of a second through video after video. I remember thinking – how are they even processing what they are seeing fast enough to know to swipe up in that millisecond of time?
YouTube, not to be the one to FOMO this monetizing party, volleyed with YouTube Shorts. And I fell for it, hook, line and sink her. I became consumed with consuming.
At the height of my addiction, YouTube shorts was swallowing up about eight hours a day of my time. Dang! That’s a whole third of the day wasted on things that did nothing for me.
Didn’t inform me, feed me, nourish me, make me physically fit, make me feel happy (well, you gotta admit some of those animal ones can really put a smile on your face), etc. I mean, eight hours! Eight hours of a 24 hour day swiping! Include sleeping and eating and well, the whole day is pretty much a loss. Wowsers.
Shorts, and their predecessor were meant to be pithy. Pithy meaning “having substance and point: tersely cogent”, Merriam-Webster’s definition. Or, “very brief in statement or expression”. Also in Merriam-Webster’s definition webpage.
The good about pithy—it’s short. The bad, it has created doom scrolling as we know it. If all we are fed is short, punctuated nonsense, we sift through it, over and over again, knowing we will, in no length of time, hit paydirt with a video we would want to see. Instant gratification on crack, or opioids for the more unfortunately recent “in” drug.
I’m sure we’ve all read how addictive doom-scrolling is, and how destructive it is to our attention span, not to mention the youngest generation, whose minds are still growing, or not growing as much as they could be, due to doomscrolling.
Is doomscrolling really that bad?
I’m sure we’ve all read how addictive doomscrolling is, and how destructive it is to our attention span, not to mention the youngest generation, whose minds are still growing, or not growing as much as they could be, due to doomscrolling.
For instance, here’s just a few articles I’ve found off a simple Google search:
Harvard Health
www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/doomscrolling-dangers
NIH National Library of Medicine
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9580444/
Australia’s University of Adelaide
So much talk of mental health the past decade, but so little to combat the things that are outright destroying it. Let’s step back for a second and break it down a different way. Instead of mental health think of physical health. Let’s say you’ve been working out, religiously for months, years even. You have a nice body that reflects all your hard work. Then you stop working out. After a while, you feel differently. Your muscles feel strange, like it needs to move but it’s not. Tingly. That’s your muscles atrophying! Leave it that way long enough and then you’d literally see your muscles lose their form, their definition!
Now, imagine that, but thousands times worse, and for your most bestest of best muscle that’s not the heart? Okay, the brain is not a muscle, but still! That was me! My brain was theoretically atrophying, rotting away, smoothing out, the wrinkles were ripping open like popped threading.
Mind you, I had already lost my ability to do shorthand long ago, (points to you and your old self if you even know what that is), and don’t get me started on the disaster of what an unpracticed cursive hand looks like.
Something had to be done. Doomscrolling addiction was killing off my brain cells one scroll at a time, like it was a huge blunt of tobacco and weed mixed together. I had to rid myself of this. Doomscrolling must go.
Full circle, back to the point of this article—how did I defeat the odds? How did this old dog learn new tricks? How did I defy Satan and his doomscrolling death angels?
Step One – Are you the Subject or Object?
In any regular, simple English sentence there is a subject that does a verb and sometimes the subject will do a verb on an object.
The Subject does things. The Subject acts.
The Object is acted on.
In step one, you will need to acknowledge this and choose accordingly to which one you ascribe to. Are you the Subject or the Object in your life?
Step Two – Choose what you value more than doomscrolling
I went medieval. I went minimalist. I went to what I loved best about my time B.Y.S. Before YouTube Shorts.
My family. My passions, like writing and creating for Bookish Bovine. And reading.
I started deliberately spending more time, face to face, phone down time with my family. Going to ball games. Watching TV and conversing about it. Eating out. Museums, picnics, walks, etc.
Further, I wrote a list of goals, the top one being do something that will leave the legacy you want people to remember you by. I want to be remembered as contributing to the promotion of children’s literacy, especially children of color or socioeconomically disadvantaged means.
In the words of Tupac—How long will they mourn me?
So, for you, choose something or things that give you a similar dopamine rush. Things that inspire you. Things that make you happy. Things that can give you the same or better feeling you get when you see the fiftieth cat doing cat things montage.
And when you write these things down, you need to get all organic in them guts. You need to grab a pen, (not even a pencil), and cut-inducing paper, and sit down and write with your hand, all the things you want, nay, need to do. There’s something magical about literally writing things down, rather than typing it, or even fake typing on the cellphone keyboard. It unlocks a hidden, previously locked corridor in our brains and gives us access to the wonderfully crazy stuff we usually only dream about.
Step Three – Do it.
Or, due to concerns of Nike coming down on me, execute. Is it that easy? Yes. If you really wanted to, you would do it. It is simple as that.
But, is it really that easy?
Yes. It is. Because you define what you want in life. You define what you want to spend your time on. It’s not anyone else’s wish and want for you, it’s yours and yours alone. So own it.
Own your choices. Own your life.
But…but…but…#1—How do you “just do it”?
One way to do this is to actively choose ahead of time. For example, you come home, take your work clothes off, take a shower, whatever Mr. Rogers’ type of stuff you do to unwind after work.
What do you do if you had a really stressful day?
Would you normally be tempted to pick up the phone and doomscroll for a bit? Knowing that this might be a trigger, the time of day, or the result of a bad or exhausting work day, you should plan to do something else with your time. Tell it to yourself before you get home. Envision it, speak it to existence and then do it. Strike while the iron is hot.
But…but…but…#2—Have a list at hand
If it seems overwhelming or the thought of doing “X” tires you out, have a list at mental hand and go down it until you hit a task that you want to do. And do that instead. Don’t just commit to “I had a crappy day at work, but working out seems to be too much right now.” Skip the planned workout and do an easier one, a different one, or instead of running, try the row machine for your cardio day.
And if just the thought of working out after a cruddy day just cringes you out, then do something entirely different, but still on your list of want to-dos. Just keep going down your list and check things off if you have to.
Assert dominance over your life and don’t let things come to you. Choose to do things you truly want to do with your time before boredom or the standard routine of reaching for the phone and inevitably doomscrolling takes over.
Actively choose to do something ahead of time.
Conclusion
I’m not saying I never get on YouTube and its shorts. And every now and then I’ll jump into the doomscroll pool and wade around. But let me tell you, it’s nowhere near the amount of time I used to do it.
As I’ve stated before, my reading time is inversely related to my screen time. I can literally see on the Digital Wellbeing app of my phone, that every time I read so many hours or pages, the amount of time I’ve spent on YouTube goes down. It drops like it’s hot.
And the beauty of it though, the fruit from the healthy, well-fed, unpoisoned tree, is that with reading, it’s unlocking my brain. I can feel the wrinkles being stitched back in. I’m writing more. I’m moving more. I’m creating more. I’m spending truly present time with my loved ones more.
I’m doing more.
From one addict to another, I hope this helps at least one person. If not, I hope y’all find your own way to kick the Scroll Swiper to the curb, Swiper no swiping! Make Dora proud, gosh darn it.
Elongate your attention span. Take care of you.
And think of it this way – if a grown adult has trouble with doomscrolling their days away, just think how much harder it is for a child.
It is a battle. A war within ourselves that is hard to win because we cannot visually see that which attacks us. We can’t see and touch and feel with our fingers, no palpable wound we can direct our energies to to win. And yet, we must win.
“Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.”
— Beowulf, Seamus Heaney translation-