Clickbait
May 24, 2026
I’ve got things I need to do. Dreams. And a narrowing window of freedom if I want kids; I can’t afford to freeze my eggs. I need to get my act together. I need to get my career off the ground. I need to commit before my ship sails. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
One thing I can––and should––hereby axe is YouTube. It’s sucking up my time. Making me stupid. It’s crunching my posture into ungodly angles. It splays me out, breaks my pinky, tweaks my wrist. Some genius in a windbreaker and flip flops has designed this velvet coffin just for me. He built me an algorithm––a horrible, bottomless well––and walked away. And I’m losing years of my life in its blue light; I’m whoring out my precious and limited attention to its godless whims.
Like a sober mom hunting NeeDohs in Pittsburgh. And a woman reenacting what Christmas dinner was like in jail. There’s Honey Boo Boo’s stepdad in his silver chains, gulping sweet tea out of styrofoam. There’s a Christian couple flipping protein pancakes and emptying the dishwasher. There’s a sorority girl discovering needlepoint in Alabama. There’s a magenta-haired woman writing vampire fiction and a family of five shuffling through Walmart, deciding on applesauce.
I’ve long been attracted to this kind of stupefying nothing. I first discovered it on TLC. John & Kate Plus 8, Toddlers & Tiaras, 19 Kids and Counting. The model compelled me. No stakes and no plot suspended across forty-five easy, immemorable minutes. I was repulsed and sedated. I loved how absolutely nothing happened. I wanted to live inside of an episode––forever packing for a trip to Florida or blowing up birthday party balloons or adopting a golden retriever.
When I moved to Minnesota after college, this null sensation sustained me. I was suffering then. Knocked catatonic by the brutal, alien cold and a bad relationship. I survived only by watching YouTube in my bed. By turning on my mini space heater––boxed sunshine on my face––and steeping in whatever the internet offered up.
And by this point, YouTube had a real engine under its hood. It doled out endless, automatic novelty, which I was in no position to resist. A scammer in Australia, healing her own cancer with apple cider vinegar. Blonde family vloggers and their canned pranks. A girl pouring oat milk into iced coffee and jangling it around, making the milk bloom tan.
I didn’t like these people. But I needed them. I craved their dehydrated vapidity. It kept me alive. When I sank in with them, I forgot my body; I was exempt from all sensation, from the hassle of my life.
No longer in Minnesotan crisis, I have little use for this grade of sedation. Yet I cannot shake the little talking heads. And by now it’s been years of this. People on couches all clutching microphones, theorizing for a phantom podcast audience. Women dabbing their faces with moisturizer, violently, while recounting miscarriages. Super models rifling through their purses and evangelicals pouring prebiotic soda into wine glasses. They’ve all wormed into my path by algorithmic chance; I did not choose them. But I cannot turn them down.
Sometimes I look up and notice the dog. His chin, gone grey, and his eyes impartial. Watching me watch the thing I hate and cannot quit. In his face is bald curiosity. Are we getting up? Going outside? Are we done here? Staying on the couch?
He passes no judgment. Though I cannot say for sure what he makes of how I’m passing the time. How I’m crumpled into the sofa, drinking in the dissolution of Honey Boo Boo’s nuclear family. The dog witnesses me, patient, as I waste our time. I could be throwing his Lamb Chop. I could be scratching his silken ears.
His unflinching acceptance of me is so sobering that I want to stop screwing around. I want to get off of this slow, dumb log ride. I want to throw my phone into the maw of a hydraulic press.
I type “YouTube addiction” and “dopamine reset” into my phone. All articles advise against cold turkey but I can see no other way; I must decide to be a person who does not watch unsolicited videos of British women taking their retainers out to eat overnight oats. I must proclaim it. Look my little talking heads square in their faces, thank them for their service, cut all ties. So I jam all the settings, lock myself out of YouTube. I put books in my hands instead. I read slowly, my goldfish brain darting around still for instant reward.
I’m doing it for the dog. I’m doing it for my rusting spine and my atrophied imagination. I’m doing it to reclaim some real boredom. I’m doing it to remember the feeling of an idea––thought flitting into an available mind.
Grow an attention span!