I Stopped Being A Person For 12 Hours This Weekend: The Overwhelming Allure Of The YouTube Dissociation Hole

    Okay, this post has a long and dramatic title only because I wanted to make a long and dramatic title. But it's still true. I had a hard week last week and I knew I'd need to take some time to relax on the weekend. I did have some things to do, but I had a mental health episode the night before and didn't take time to schedule the next day on a calendar. Also, because of the mental health episode, I'd gone to bed at 3 am. So I wasn't exactly in an excellent state for being productive and resisting urges. 

    Now we introduce the second character: the YouTube dissociation hole. The YouTube dissociation hole has plagued me pretty much since I started seriously watching YouTube as a teenager. I don't think it happens to everyone, but for me, watching YouTube while simultaneously playing a mobile game hits a perfect level of stimulation that lets me have no thoughts and be entirely occupied, while also not feeling overwhelmed. That means it's very easy to just start watching YouTube in order to escape my problems and end up there for hours, occasionally vaguely wishing I could do something else but not able to stop either. Me having a dissociative disorder probably makes it worse. The YouTube dissociation hole generally only stops if my feelings of anxiety or self loathing get so intense that I can overcome it, which is unfortunate (why can't good feelings be enough to get me out of a bad habit for once?) 

    Anyway, on Saturday morning I woke up, realized I had nothing technically planned, and immediately started watching YouTube. I did eat and stuff, but it was still all while I was on YouTube. That's not super weird, I used to have a lot of days like that before I started deciding to work on these issues. But what struck me this particular time is how much it felt like I stopped existing that day. I do live with my family so I ate dinner with them, but other than that, I did literally nothing other than exist in the YouTube dissociation hole. I don't think humans are required to be productive to be worthwhile, and I believe rest is important, but YouTube doesn't feel like rest to me. It feels completely satisfying when I am using it, but afterwards I usually am miserable. I didn't speak to any friends, do any chores that I needed to do, or work on any hobbies. And I certainly don't remember any of the YouTube videos I watched during that time. So I basically just chose to fast forward to Sunday, and it wasn't as though there was any particular reason I would want to skip forward. It's scary to me that, if I don't put up any resistance, the thing my brain will choose to do by default is stop existing for a while. And it's even scarier that I felt like that was normal for such a long period of time. But, I am glad that I am able to start recognizing it now so that I can do something about it.

Do The Hard Thing

Hey.

I know you probably got to this blog because you were searching for productivity tips. Or maybe even tips for technology addiction. You have something you know you need to do, and you aren't doing it. And you're hoping the next article, the next post, the next podcast, is going to give you the push you need.

You aren't going to find anything. There are strategies that might help, sure. But there is no magic internet advice that is going to make you do the thing. And looking for help is just a form of procrastination that helps you feel like you're doing the thing.

So, if it isn't going to get any easier, you're going to have to do something hard. Your brain is going to fight you about it, it's going to convince you there must be some way you can optimize this task, or maybe if you take a break you'll start feeling ready in 30 minutes. There isn't and you won't. So make this article your last article. Close this tab. Close the other tabs you've been using to procrastinate. Close your computer if necessary. And go do the thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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..

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Okay, you're still here. So maybe you really do need help. I'll give you a series of steps to do the thing. But I am trusting you that you'll actually do them. If you just read them, you're wasting more of your time.

 1. Stand up.

    Sometimes standing up is really hard, but it's important. It gives you a first task to accomplish, and tells your brain that it's time to change activities. You don't have to go anywhere just yet.

2. Get a pen and paper.

 

    Any writing implement, anything to write on. If you have to, you can just open notepad on your computer, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of standing up.

 

3. Think of the first step you'd need to do to start the thing.

 

    If there's a variety of steps you could take, you have to decide on one*. For example, if I need to call the doctor, maybe the first step I decide to take is finding the number of the doctor. If I want to use my phone less, maybe the first step I decide to take is blocking time wasting apps.

 

*Sometimes, it's not doing the thing that's hard, it's the decisions you have to make about how to do the thing that are hard. I'm sorry, but this article just isn't written for that particular challenge. 

 

4. Subdivide that step into more manageable steps.

 

    To find the doctor's number, I would need to get the password for my health services platform, log in, and look for contact information. To block time wasting apps, I would need to download a blocking app, find out what I'm spending my phone time on, and actually create the blocks.  
 

5. Continue if the first of your subdivided steps still feels unmanageable.

    For calling the doctor, let's say I still feel very stressed at the prospect of getting the password. To get the password, I might need to turn on my computer, open my browser, log in to my password vault, and copy the password. Maybe turning on my computer feels a lot more manageable to me. For blocking time wasting apps, there are a lot out there and I might not be sure which one to choose. So I would need to open my the app store, spend a few minutes looking through blocking apps, pick one that looks good, and test it out. Opening the app store probably feels less overwhelming.
 

6. Take the first step. 

 

    You've come to the problem at the start of the article again. You've made the first step as easy as possible, but you still have to be the one to do it. Hopefully, it feels possible now. 

 

 

Did this article help you do a thing? Tell me what it was below! 

 

How Having Two Phones Helps Me Use My Phone Less

    About a year ago, the phone I’d been using stopped charging reliably. Since I have a cheap phone, I was disappointed but not too surprised and promptly bought another cheap phone. However, even though I'd tried for several days to revive my old phone, it wasn’t until I’d already bought the new phone that I got the old phone to start charging again. That’s how I found myself with two phones. Of course, only one of them actually had a SIM card and the ability to call/text, so the other one was basically a tiny tablet. And that got me thinking. I’d wanted to get rid of nonessentials on my phone for a while, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete potentially hundreds of hours of game progress. And now I was in a situation where my games were already on a different phone than my essential phone functions. Why not make it official? I could use one phone as a stripped back smartphone and one as a tablet. I wasn't expecting great results, but the system worked so well that I’ve been using it ever since. There’s been a lot of fluctuation over time in what apps I decide to keep on each phone, but the overall system stays the same. Here’s my theories about why it works.

1.    Minimizes distractions

    When I pick up my actual phone to check notifications or text a friend, I can’t get distracted by social media or game notifications because they simply aren’t there.

2.    Makes me less likely to circumvent the rules

    When I had only one phone and was trying to not allow social media or games on it at all, it was really difficult to stick to the plan. Now that I do have somewhere to play mobile games, I don’t feel such a need to get around my own restrictions.

3.    Adds friction to phone leisure time

    I can’t just pick up my phone and mindlessly scroll or game for hours, because I have to make the intentional choice to put down my phone, walk to whatever place in my house my ‘tablet’ happens to be, and switch to it. This means less overall gaming and social mediaing. 

So, what do I actually keep on my real phone? 

Well, probably more apps than you’d think. I’m not a perfect person and if I only wanted to call/text I’d just get a dumbphone. But here’s what I have going on.

• Of course, I still have standard utility apps such as weather, calculator, colornote, and uber. I won't go into detail about those because that would be boring. 
• Communication apps: Unfortunately, it just wouldn't be possible to get everyone in my life to switch to Signal, so I do have to decide which other apps I actually want on my phone. 
• Some of my friends almost exclusively use Snapchat. It does have a browser version, but I know if I got rid of the app, I would forget to check for messages. So my compromise is to keep the app and block the discover feed.
• GroupMe doesn't come with distractions, and every time I try to remove it I end up back in another GroupMe group. So it stays.
• I have one friend who likes to send me videos through Marco Polo.
• I have really wrestled with Discord. Some of my friends use it to communicate, but I'm also in 40+ servers (more on that in a future post) and I often use it to just scroll instead. I started with putting it on my gaming phone, but then I was just carrying both phones around with me all the time. Then I moved it to my actual phone, but I was using it as a distraction. Finally, I removed it from both phones. I do sometimes miss things from friends, but I feel less anxious and I pick up my phone way less. Experiment, and find a solution that works for you.
• I don't have any friends that contact me through Facebook Messenger, just group chats and people I am selling things to. So I keep it on my gaming phone as a compromise.  
•  Email: some people will want to remove email from their phone entirely, but I turned off notifications for emails about 2 years ago. This was an effective compromise to prevent me from using Gmail unless I really did need to check something.
• Media apps: I have to be careful with these, because I want to be able to consume media without it taking over my life.
• If I could only keep one media app, it would definitely be Libby. It allows me to easily check out books and audiobooks with my library card and read them on my phone. It's a great way to redirect doomscrolling instincts.
•  I know Spotify is bad in a lot of ways, but I haven't yet had the energy to explore alternatives, and music is extremely important to me.
• I keep a local talk radio app for when I want to listen to something but don't want to deal with Youtube or Spotify.
• I don't use Webtoon much anymore, but it's around from when I was younger.
• I made a very strong choice to keep Youtube off my real phone. Youtube is one of my worst apps for getting sucked into and I can easily spend hours a day on it.  Having it only accessible through my computer or gaming phone has helped a lot.
• Hobbies 
• Having the Goodreads app easily accessible helps me actually remember to track my reading. 
• I keep a simple Sketchbook in case I want to make a quick drawing or more visual note. 
• Even though I've never made it to a geohash, the geohash droid app still helps encourage me to learn more about my area. 
• Home Workout is more of an aspirational app for me, but I keep hoping one day I will get really bored and use it.
• I have chronic pain, and Walk The Distance helps encourage me to walk more by turning my steps into a position on one of the famous American trails.. 
• Browsers
• I have really struggled trying to decide what to do with my phone browser. It seems obvious that a phone should have a browser, but it's really easy for me to get into unhealthy googling spirals, or just generally use the browser to distract myself or waste time, so I quickly realized that keeping Firefox wouldn't work. For a few months, I was using a weird stripped down version of Firefox called Firefox Focus that only allows one tab and deletes whatever you're looking at when you close it. It did help, but I didn't think it helped enough. Eventually, I found a text only browser app called Violoncello. I think it's SUPER COOL but I don't use it as often as I'd like. This is because I found a workaround where I could use the Google app as a browser, which is not ideal for a lot of reasons, but I'll keep trying to fix things.
• Time Management Apps 
• Because I struggle with severe executive dysfunction, I usually have some kind of routine app on my phone. Brilli is expensive but works really well, and PlanMe seems to be good also. 
• StayFree and YourHour are both good apps to help monitor and set limits on screen time, and they each have different advantages/disadvantages. That might also be a future blog post.
• Todoist is my favorite to-do app and I have used it on and off for at least 7 years.  
• Games
• That's right, I do sometimes keep some games on my phone. I did say I was imperfect. But, I have relatively strict rules about them. They have to be games I don't go out of my way to play and only get out if I am stuck in a waiting situation. If I get too attached to a game, I send it to my other phone. Generally, that means I only keep 1-3 really simple games and I make sure all notifications are off.  

    I don't think anyone should go out and buy a new phone just for the purpose of splitting up digital life. If you're going to buy anything, probably a tablet would be a better option anyway. But, if you already happen to have an old device laying around, this strategy is definitely worth a try.

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Switching To Facebook Let Me Get What I Wanted Out Of Social Media

    I understand that the title of this post is surprising. Facebook has a very negative legacy, and that legacy is well deserved. However, I was surprised to find that, if I use Facebook in a controlled way, it’s the best social media site for my internet usage goals. I’ve spent many years having problems with social media use, especially Reddit, but even Instagram and Twitter at times. Because the content is endless and designed to provoke emotion, I spend much longer than I want to and feel worse when I leave. So I started thinking about what I actually want out of social media. I realized that when I use social media productively, it’s usually to either find events to attend offline, or to connect with my local community in some way. While being connected with global communities of users (at least, users who speak the same language as you) can be great, especially for niche hobbies, doing things in person is extremely important to me and having such a spread out network makes that basically impossible.This is where Facebook comes into the picture. 

    It might just be the sheer number of users that allows for local connections, but even small towns have multiple discussion groups, and my local government even uses it as one of their main forms of communication. On Facebook, I am in a group that is designed for talking about my city, a group for trading items between each other in my city, and a group for lgbt discussion for the large city near me. Not only that, but I can easily browse events happening in person in my city and cities near me, many of which are only posted on Facebook. Of course, it would be possible to use Facebook in a different way that doesn’t align with my goals, but as long as I’m careful it’s been very helpful to me. I’ve been able to attend events that I never would have known about otherwise, and I’ve also gained access to smaller chat groups where people discuss and do things locally. Even if I do just post or comment on Facebook, I am at least involved in issues in my community or trying to help people in my community, which I think is important to help me feel connected.

Precautions

    I definitely do not want to imply that Facebook doesn’t have problems or that everyone should be using it. Facebook is the social network with the most money and power to put towards being addictive, and it absolutely has used its platform to do terrible things in the pursuit of profit in the past. I am lucky in that I find Facebook too complicated to fully appeal to me, but I still make sure to take precautions.First, I always use a browser that prevents tracking (Firefox) to access Facebook, and I don’t download Facebook or Instagram on my phone. Facebook makes most of its money through closely tracking its users' internet activity and serving targeted advertising, and I prefer to opt out of invasive tracking wherever possible.

    Within Facebook itself, I only follow people I know in real life or join communities that are local, to prevent myself from being sucked into general internet activities. The one exception to this is a group for a rare disease I have that I can’t find much information on otherwise.

    I also have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which helps me get rid of the parts of Facebook I don’t have an interest in. I block all suggested and sponsored posts, and I also use keywords to block political posts from showing up. I particularly like Social Fixer because it shows me the title of what it’s hidden and I can click to see it if I think it’s actually important. Another great feature of Social Fixer is that it stops the feed from being endless. The feed is broken into pages, each of which have a certain number of posts, and you then have to click see more at the bottom if you want to load more posts. This helps provide natural stopping points for browsing.

    Finally, I use StayFree to set a 10 minute per day time limit and OneSec to make me stop and think before accessing facebook. With all of these customizations, I feel like I am able to use facebook in a way that prevents me from being addicted – I actually often feel annoyed when I need to access facebook for something.

    I definitely don’t think it’s for everyone, but if you are in your 20s and have never really used Facebook, it might be worth a look to see if it would be useful for you, especially if you are moving away from other social medias.

Using RSS for a Calmer, More Personal Internet Experience

    We all know the feeling. It's 11pm and you're watching youtube. You don't really want to be watching youtube but you've found yourself there again. 'Just until the end of this video', you think, but then interesting post-video recommendations hook you again and again and suddenly it's 2 am and you're in a spiral of exhaustion and self loathing. Or, more likely, that's just me. But surely I'm not the only one who feels a loss of control of my internet experience due to recommendation algorithms. Every major social media site and news site has one, ensuring that you can never only do what you came there for and you'll spend way more time on the site than you bargained for, giving them even more time to track your preferences and serve you ads. Surely the internet doesn't have to be this way, does it?  Well, you can't exactly control the internet (besides contributing to it using design standards you believe in!), but you can definitely adjust your user experience. 

But What is RSS?

    Well, here's the truth: RSS is a 20+ year old web technology with a complicated development history that fell out of mainstream use in the early 2010s, and there's not even full agreement on what the abbreviation stands for. But don't go yet! It's also completely free and easy to use. At its core, RSS allows you to subscribe to content (think: newsletters, blogs, podcasts, forums) and receive an update every time there is a new post. That means you get exactly the content you want to see, when you want to see it, and nothing else.

    If RSS is this great, you may ask, why have I never heard of it before? I think there are two main answers to that question: it's free, and companies can't easily use it for targeted advertising or tracking. RSS has no support for the user metrics software that's commonly used in email newsletters and websites. Because there's no financial benefit to companies having an RSS feed, they don't see the point in advertising it for their users. 

Sounds Complicated...

    It's a bit more complicated than a social media feed or signing up for an email newsletter, but there's no coding or fancy computer skills required. I can even walk you through it right now!
    

Step one (click to expand) is finding an RSS reader.

This will allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds and view them all in one place. Because RSS is open source, there are a huge variety of readers available with different features, some of them free and some paid. For example, some readers may allow you to sync content between devices, automatically find feeds for you, or set up rules for filtering content. For this tutorial, I'll be showing you how to use Feedbro, not because I think it's the best reader out there, but because it's a free browser extension for edge and firefox that I personally use. The first thing you'll want to do is search for feedbro and add it as a browser extension for the browser you're using. To access feedbro after adding it, go to your extensions menu and click on its icon, then "Open Feed Reader". Congratulations, you now have an RSS reader!

    

Step two (click to expand) is adding feeds to your reader.

If you don't know what feeds to add yet, don't worry - I talk a bit about that in the next section. The main way to add a feed is going to the site you want to subscribe to and looking for an RSS or Atom link. On large/popular sites, it's generally at the bottom somewhere. You'll also want to learn what the RSS symbol looks like: . Sometimes the symbol will be used by itself. If you click on the link/symbol, your browser might open a page of code or try to download a file. Don't be afraid; just right click on the link/symbol instead and select 'copy link'. In Feedbro, you can add a feed by going to the feed reader and clicking the RSS symbol with a + in the top left corner. Then paste the link you just copied and click 'load', name it something you'll understand later, then 'save'. You should now have an RSS feed! If you don't, don't panic, feedbro has an easier way to add feeds too. Just go to the site you are interested in, click on the extension, and select 'Find Feeds in Current Tab'. Then, select the feed/feeds you want to subscribe to, name the feed and click 'subscribe'. If feedbro couldn't find any feeds, that's okay - not every site has a feed available.  

    

Step three (click to expand) is reading your feeds.

To do this, you can just go to the reader and select a feed. In some cases, there might not be anything in the feed yet, but for most sites you'll be able to see a certain number of past entries. In feedbro, you can adjust what the feed looks like through the buttons in the top right corner .  If you end up with a lot of feeds, you can sort your feeds into folders, and if you end up with one feed with too much content, you can use rules to filter it or mark it as read automatically, like email. You are now ready to explore the world of feeds!

 

Great, but what do I actually use it for?

    I can't tell you exactly what to use RSS for, but it might help if I tell you about how I use it. I actually started out by using it for my youtube subscriptions to get rid of the youtube algorithm, but that's a bit complicated, so I'll talk about it later on. If you listen to any podcasts, those are very likely to have an RSS feed if you go to their website. Blogs almost always have one. I do- you can subscribe to me if you want! Many news sites still have RSS, but you'll want to be careful to avoid getting overwhelmed since they tend to post a lot. Reddit allows RSS, but only has a feed of the latest posts without any kind of 'hot' or 'top' filtering, so I only subscribe to one smaller subreddit. I also realized I could subscribe to email newsletters through RSS which was very exciting - I prefer to keep my emails to a minimum, and I generally see email newsletters when I don't have time to read them. You can do this for free through Kill The Newsletter, if the website you're using accepts automatically generated email addresses, but migrating newsletters you're already subscribed to is more complicated. I would tell you how to do it except I haven't tried yet.

Sidebar (click to expand): How I ported my youtube subscriptions to RSS

You can subscribe to any individual youtube channel through RSS, although the link to do it isn't available on the channel page. You can use feedbro's find feeds in current tab feature, or you can build the link yourself using a tutorial online. But if you're like me and already have 50+ youtube subscriptions, that definitely isn't something you'll want to do for each individual channel, and youtube doesn't provide an easy way to export subscriptions. Luckily, there is an online tool to do this, but youtube has been known to change their code over the years so I don't know if it will work forever. I also don't know whether the tool is fully trustworthy, but I have used it and it worked perfectly and nothing bad happened. Also, interacting with code a tiny bit is required. It can be found here: Youtube Sub Download Tool. If you're using feedbro, once you have the OPML file from the tool, you can go to feedbro settings and select 'Import Subscriptions (as OPML)' and upload it. You should then have all your subscriptions in RSS.

 

Are there any downsides?

As with any technology, there's a few. Not all websites support RSS, so you'll probably still need to use other ways to update yourself. Particularly, Instagram and Facebook do not support RSS (I wonder why!), and neither does twitter. When you use an RSS feed, a creator doesn't get support from ad revenue, so you'll probably want to support them in other ways if you can. And, RSS doesn't automatically port between devices, although some readers allow this to happen, so if you switch devices a lot that may be frustrating. 

Can I make an RSS feed myself?

You can! RSS uses the XML markup language. Here's a tutorial that explains it: W3 Schools XML RSS Tutorial. To add the feed to your reader, you'll need to host it somewhere online. Neocities allows you to do this, but note that anyone could find it. I have a feed on my website that only I subscribe to that just has some notes in it. If you blog, most blogging websites (including this one) will generate a feed for you, but if you have coded your own website, you'll have to make your own feed too.  

 

A Test Post

 This is a post to make sure blogger is working correctly. If you see this, congratulations! You get an internet point. Okay, previewing this, looks like my colors could definitely use a bit of editing. I'll get on that.