On Preempting Life
I’ve recently endeavored to reduce my usage of technology, especially addictive social media. I have not been greatly successful but I have made some meager progress. I have removed instagram from my phone and have installed one sec — an application that that forces a user to pause for a few seconds before accessing an app — to interrupt my penchant for unconsciously starting up YouTube or Reddit during even the smallest slivers of downtime.
I will not mount a great disquisition on the evils of algorithmic tech here. There are more than a few of these on substack, written by far more insightful people than I. I just want to share an observation that unsettled me and help push me along the path of partly unplugging.
The thing that sent me over the edge was the realization that watching YouTube for dozens of minutes on end was really a way of preempting life. I noticed the following pattern in myself: I would have the urge to continue reading the book I had begun, or to pick up my steam deck to make some headway in a daunting but largely rewarding video game — and then start YouTube. Seconds would become minutes, which would sometimes become hours.
Sometimes this would happen before actual work too — errands, challenging parts of designing a system, the tedious administrative labor of an adult life — which obviously made my life harder.
The trick that YouTube (or Reddit, or even substack!) would play would be to present itself as something outside of life, a non-action that could be squeezed in before the actual living occurred. YouTube shorts are especially amenable to this — they can be so quick that they feel as if they never happened, which mystifies their cost.
The truth is that doing almost anything rewarding requires attention and focus, two things that risk failure and boredom. Even something rewarding like reading Emma by Jane Austen, or progressing through a quest line in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, involves a degree of activity, of reiterated exertion and intentionality, that more passive experiences exempt us from.
Everything, everything that is worth doing in my life can be failed at, and asks far more from me than an Instagram reel does. Watching YouTube was a way of forestalling those moments, of avoiding the risk of not being stimulated, of negative emotions. But this is a lie — instead of being outside of life my overindulgence of passive forms of diversion were locking me into a catatonic un-life.
And so I have endeavored to make the choice of not choosing harder — of making access to these apps more frictional. I hope I am able to win some of my life back.