Infinite scroll!

I am putty in YouTube’s hands.

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I’m addicted to YouTube Shorts. For those who don’t know, YouTube Shorts are short videos (anything from ten seconds to three minutes long) on YouTube that can be created and published by anyone with internet access. Because of this, some of the videos in my feed include but are not limited to: a series in which a young man (who doesn’t show his face) designs and 3D prints something new every day for a year; another young man of South Korean heritage showing off Korean cuisine, documenting the process of different sauces and preserves as they ferment over months; various young people buying fixer-upper houses and fixering-uppering them; scenes from superhero movies with new music inexplicably superimposed on top of the existing soundtrack of the film, often accompanied by vaguely related quotations; competitive cheerleading, though I can’t fathom why; pets being pets; children being funny; and excerpts from stand-up comedy acts, which ping-pong between boring and offensive. If this doesn’t sound interesting to you, these videos have been judged to be especially addictive for me specifically by some system of algorithms buried deep in a secret server farm at Google. Many of the short video platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels) work in the same way. The longer you use the platform, the more advertisements you can be shown, which incentivises the platform of your choice to keep you using their app for as long as possible, increasing their revenue. To that effect, each of these companies sinks millions of dollars annually into whichever strategies or, indeed, algorithms, might get you to promise yourself that you’ll “only keep watching, like, five more minutes.”

I find that telling myself that I’ll stop in five minutes essentially never works. I’ve switched to an only three more videos strategy in the past with a slight increase in success, but I often flub that boundary, too. I sit on the bench at the gym, I stand in the train, I sit on the toilet, just scrolling through YouTube Shorts. I enjoy some of the videos, but I think I am drawn to the platform more than I am to the content on it. I find the same is true of the cinema. Occasionally, I find myself going to the cinema because I want to watch a particular film, something I did with two friends last week—The Fantastic Four: First Steps was great! Sometimes, though, I’m just in the mood to go to the movies; it doesn’t really matter what I see, as long as I see it on the big screen while I munch on some dangerously over-flavoured salt and vinegar popcorn. The operative difference being, I suppose, that the cinema experience hasn’t been expertly constructed to flood my brain with so much dopamine that I seek to fill essentially every waking moment with popcorn-riddled activities.

I think that’s what makes this an addiction and not a habit. I have unhealthy habits. Most evenings after dinner, I think to myself that, having eaten my vegetables, I now deserve a block of chocolate (or four). I love sweet treats, but I can recognise that at a certain point, my indulgence becomes overindulgence, and I can alter my habit without much fuss. A maximum of one treat a day, for example. Just recently, I have undertaken a change in my caffeine consumption habits. In the last month or two, I’ve regularly been having two coffees a day instead of one. However, my body becomes quite caffeine dependent, getting headaches when I miss my daily cup of joe, in my case, and I don’t want to be beholden to a bean. So I’ve intentionally dialled back to a single pull of espresso a day. I like consuming coffee and sugar so much that I sometimes consume too much, and then I have to remind myself to slow down.

Contrary to caffeine and sucrose, I don’t enjoy the actual process of consuming YouTube Shorts. Each time I consume YouTube Shorts, it is without the feeling of restraint or control, and it feels impossible to adjust my desire to engage. Any resolution to spend less time scrolling through Shorts lasts less than a day. I don’t especially connect with the videos. Yet I find myself craving the activity. I have genuinely been on the way to the toilet at work and then turned around to grab my phone from my desk so that I could watch Shorts while I sat. Whenever I watch Shorts, I am unaware of time passing. I will invest whole evenings into making Google more ad revenue and emerge from my hypnosis some hours later, only to be nauseous at the realisation that it’s time for bed and I never actually got to relax or even realise that I’d arrived home from work. It is ridiculous to be so reliant, so incapable of experiencing interstitial time (time in between stuff, like waiting for your kettle to boil) without the accompaniment of my intravenous dopamine. So if I don’t like it, it’s not good for me, it takes all my time, and I just keep coming back, it’s an addiction, right? The crazy thing is, even after writing all this, I can’t even bring myself to delete my account. Even though I want to stop, I don’t really want to stop enough…

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In Germany, they serve nachos at the movies! Can you believe it? And absolutely no slushies in sight. My uncle would always get the largest slushy he could when we went to the cinema together. I think it was a one-litre cup! If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.