we don't consume things, we do the activity of watching, reading, listening, or eating. that is what you are doing, and for the most part its not a big part of your life. it doesn't mean much to do these things. they aren't embedded into your connections with other people, they're probably just manufactured desires and habits by google and meta. thats all they are. the hype and excitement might be real but its something another group of people manufactured for themselves, to extract profit from your time. not always, there can be media that is a geniune connection between the creator and audience, but even then its not entirely wholesome. maybe a person made really impactful things before, but once it is their job its most likely not for you. its for them. its so they can feed their family or whatever, not for fans to be happy. its so fans can be put into a hypnotic state of "entertained" which just means distracted in a positive way. And even though it is positive, its probably not valuable in the long run. for your time off work or trying to chill out, yes its the perfect thing you could ask for. I don't wanna say its inherently bad or evil or something, its obviously not. If it was it wouldn't be successful. But what I want to talk about is the slippery slope of enjoying it during time off work, and then getting really invested into something that is not real to your life. things like youtube or celebrity drama, political brainrot that fuels you to be some psuedo-activist, or things that cross the line from being harmless entertainment and now just pervasive brainwashing. Lets get to business shall we okay: heres a guide to have more freedom and ownership over your media and habits surrounding consumerism. first lets do the internet or the ALTERNATIVE MEDIA to youtube, spotify, instagram, tiktok, etc. reminder: this is me yelling at myself but then it just ends up in cyberspace so take everything with a grain of salt. my advice works for me and no one else is identical to me so following this 100% is almost guaranteed to be a retarded decision by you. firstly, short form shorts/tiktok can just be dropped. this goes for insta as well. none of it is like good, and if its so good then you will see it via your friends or seomthing. the cost of putting your brain into this enviornment that is against your wellbeing and prioritizes you being unhappy is not worth the 2 or 3 funny videos that you find in an hour. they are good but having 20 plus hours of screen time per week isn't worth that little fun. thats the thing its not actually that fun lol like ill explain more later but being the producer or more geniune type consumer is always more fun. its like fasting before dinner and the dinner somehow tastes good. and guess what? the fact you didn't eat any food all day was more healthy than any type of food that you could've ate during that fasted period. so away with shorts, now lets take care of youtube and music. podcasts, videos, songs, albums, educational content, memes, random shit, etc. TL;DR: we make these offline. get an rss feed or pause your watch history on youtube to only really find videos from people you subscribe to. the goal is to only watch stuff you actively decided to download and wait more than 2-5 minutes to watch. I'm not saying go balls deep and delete your youtube account or something, but consume the youtube content not through its application or UI. That UI and stuff is engineered to hijack your attention, like its a literal virus that sucks away time from you. I guarantee the buffer of downloading will still be significantly less time spent overall compared to using the homepage or recommended. - and a short caveat: when doing stuff educational or actually valuable, the recommended system is your best friend. that is when I think its good to explore new ideas and perspective on things. A good rule of thumb would to be making sure your taking notes and noticing what you are learning that is actually related to why you got there in the first place. don't keep reading with no direction for too long, realize when its becoming its own thing so you can download/categorize it. but if you are looking for turn your brain off slop, using recommended is dangerous from how addictive it is. - also: i recognise the weird hypocrisy in all of this. its retarded. the line of when to do this is arbitrary, but what im trying to say is that: the more buffer room you have between stuff that is like GOON state with no intentionality, the more your life kind of becomes categorically worse. your desires aren't from a mixture of somewhat natural causes, but highly manipulated interests from corporations or someone trying to suck money/time out of you. also, it takes away your ability to be like normal, it sucks away your default human state of liking other people and spending time with them. when you do these weird boring tasks, our brain processes emotions so that the subconsciouss can really understand what is going on. (also im not just bullshitting listen to psychiatrists on emotional processing, when you're stimulated by media it pauses something that we used to do for 16 hours a day.) thats why we get really rampant thoughts and feelings right before bed, is because we aren't processing and just sitting in silence or walking. this isn't like a "beneficial" life hack or some shit, its how our brain was adapted to function. doing these autist offline linux esque things are the only way I find to mesh our fast paced tech based world with our stone-age minds. im gonna rant even more offtopic LETS GO - we can only do 6ish hours of intense mental work each day, and thats on the high end. most people can only do 4 hours, and that would be an insanely productive day. when someone sits and edits for 12 hours a day, thats not 12 hours of quality. they aren't getting up regularly, they aren't exercising to deplete stress of its resources that its been buliding up, and most certainly they aren't interacting with other people meaningfully. no emotional connection, no walking, probably a shit diet, and probably a constant feed of stimulation and
