Think, would you give up control over your dinner to McDonald’s Corporation out of convenience? Let them optimize and learn your tastes and feed you delicious meals every night? You don’t want to let them serve you the juiciest, saltiest, best-textured meals that their labs can muster? No? But you’ve already done so, you’ve been gorging for years. How many hours per day are you spending at the feeding trough? What’s your screen time? No wonder you can’t stop yourself, you’ve let them inside your mind, they’ve rewritten your tastes and have chipped away at your life until an hour or two is dedicated to feeding on their products every day, until you feel mental tension and imbalance without them.

The worst is the self-justifications. “Well I have nothing else to do on the train” and “well sometimes you just want to relax for an hour after work”. It’s as if by invoking these magic words you can erase any bad-feelings or social shame, an inviolable psychological self-defense. Well I feel for you, I certainly partake in narcotic internet content despite what I’ve written here, but maybe wonder if the reason you feel so exhausted is because the feeds are determinedly displacing as much human life out of your day as possible, if you haven’t mixed up cure and disease.

Allow yourself to explore the wonders of human culture without the intermediation of vast technological forces you barely comprehend, allow yourself to be bored enough that watching an old movie seems like a good time, allow reality to creep back in at the edges of your consciousness and nurture that painful clarity until you can taste pure curiosity perhaps for the first time since you were a small child.

“Yeah, I should-“ Stop! If by your words you agree with this post but by your actions you don’t, it is only your actions that count. You wish you were someone who preferred real life and emotions and desires over algorithmic internet content, but you aren’t! Perhaps accepting that they’ve been warping your mind since it was at its most plastic and now you’re dependent is the first step to undoing it. Try anger.

A better way is possible.

I do not allow YouTube to show me recommendations, I have zapped this out of my life. YouTube is not sucking the life directly out of my mind with “educational videos” 1. Reddit, the same. TikTok, god no.

I do not allow Netflix or YouTube or Prime to feed me video content. I pick what movie to watch next by going to the Wikipedia pages of actors, directors, or movements I like. I have found extraordinary films simply by clicking on what’s deemed worthy of being mentioned on Wikipedia that I never would have fed by an algorithm optimized for the general populace.

I hear about interesting books by living in society and impulsively buy them until I have a small but growing stack of books to read next whenever I finish one.

Little practices, slow acclimatizaiton to a low-internet life, constant setbacks. I tell you, the more you remove the internet from your life, the better it tastes.

Beware, it’s a dedicated oppponent, the battle against it is one you can only ever fight, never win, but worth fighting all the same.

  1. Install an adblocker, and then use the “element zapper” or “hide distracting elements” features that they all have to zap away the sections of YouTube that contain recommendations. Repeat every few weeks as YouTube changes up their webpage to stop you. Your Image 2 ↩