Photo credit: darksouls1/Pixabay

My Disenchanted Internet Woes

I was a zombie but it was my brain that was being eaten, bit by digital bit.

For the longest time I was hopelessly addicted to You Tube. I watched it far and wide from the videos of the worlds hottest peppers bringing grown men to their knees begging for relief to creepy old McDonald commercials to sitting for hours watching others play video games. I was a zombie but it was my brain that was being eaten, bit by digital bit.

My priorities soon changed. I went from a hopeless drifter in life to an aspiring writer. I no longer wanted to will away my free time watching video after video, yet I still did.

I needed to tackle this digital monkey, knock him off my back and send him packing

I could not resist the siren call of You Tube’s suggested videos begging for me to watch, like and subscribe. I did not think about the enormous amount of time I wasted away day after day or what more I could be doing with my life.

Eventually there came a moment of clarity. The pivot I needed to see that my life was wasting away and then only thing I had to show for it was the knowledge of how other people followed their dream and how I watched them along the way.

For the next few days, I tracked the time I spent not only watching videos but the time it took to scroll around and look for the videos. I do not have those numbers anymore but I will never forget how I felt when I added them all together. they added up to a number I didn’t think possible. I was amazed and ashamed and depressed.That was the first time I realized just how how much of my life had been wasted away.

I closed my eyes and envisioned the time I wasted ticking up on a giant score board. A number so massive it rivaled the national debt and I alone was reasonable for its size.

It was then and there that I vowed to change my ways. Writing was too great of a calling not to follow. I created a system for myself. I did not want to entirely abandoned You Tube but I did not want it to control my life anymore.

Eliminating the waste

I started by utilizing the 80/20 principle. I unsubscribed from channels that that served no other purpose then to distract me and turn my mind into a pile of goop. I stopped watching the look-at-me look-at-me people or ones that was nothing more than morons doing jackass worthy stunts.(trust me, there are tons of those.) I cut out anything that did no longer served me in a positive light.

Few survived the purge but the ones that did were deemed worthy of a cut of my free time. Soon even my trusty few wanted more then their fair share of my time…there was more to be done…

The next part takes more discipline and for the sake of full disclosure this is still a work in progress, I am human, I slip up, but am growing better everyday.

More Laws

For this part I took a page from Parkinsons law

Parkinsons law is the adage that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion- Wikipedia

First off I allowed myself to log on to YouTube once or twice a day only for a few minutes. I would work through my subscribed videos and add the ones I wanted to view to my “watch later” list. I would then log off and go about my day and my work. When I worked enough and earned myself a break, I log back on to You Tube but only allow my self a short amount of time, fifteen to twenty minutes, and only allowed myself to watch from the watch later list.

One of the better parts about this method is that it naturally filters out the junk that really do not matter to you because when you force a limit on yourself you are more likely to focuses on what you truly want instead of looking for the next distraction.

I no longer spend hours of my day blinded by You Tube dancing monkeys. As I said before there is a lot of great content there but even that will steal your time away if your not careful, time tends to slip away faster then you realize.

In a way, it's like a horror movie

camera pulls back

friends laugh

music creeps to a halt

someone says it'ss all over now

off to the side we see a shadow lurking

Finally, they think it is safe to go back inside the cabin in the woods.

The TV flickers on, a red glow fills the room

Soon something beyond their control takes over their minds

The camera cuts away to an unsuspecting hiker entering the cabin

he sees what happened but is to frightened to scream

There is only one survivor who clings on the verge of sanity

and before the survivor takes her final mortal breath as she relinquishes her body to life as a zombie

she utters a single word

... NETFLIX