YouTube Terminator Challenge

For the month of February, I’m going to be cutting off all contact to the “outside” world and by the outside I just mean YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and stuff like that – barring necessary tools which I use to contact family and work, like messenger.

Why am I doing this?

I like to challenge myself. I’m the kind of frog that goes cold turkey on anti-depressants and comes out fine – and fyi that is not a recommendation because…that was not easy and actually a little dangerous. Sanity is not my strong point but sheer fucking willpower is.

I’ve also culled all caffeine sources cold turkey for a month and was totally fine. That had interesting results with the most amazing coffee I’ve ever had in my life after it was over.

I’ve done One Meal A Day, hardcore ketogenic diets, full vegetarian, etc etc.

I’ve done a lot and learned a lot about myself from it all, but I’ve never actually culled social media all that much. I don’t have apps installed on my phone, but they’re still all over my laptop and desktop PC like a god damned plague.

I also realized earlier today as to how much time I spend just watching things on YouTube and browsing Twitter. While I use YouTube for a lot of really valuable resources like learning about neuroscience and finance, there’s also an absurd amount of clutter, like rewatching small clips from my favourite movies because it autoplays ad infinitum. I know you’re guilty of that too, reader.

I think a lot of this has a very bad effect on my mind, too – it fucks up my attention span and focus, and I want to see whether that call is correct by going cold turkey for the whole month, and seeing what happens. Something I recall when I was a teen and YouTube was barely a thing was how active minded and creative I was. I’m nowhere near that exploratory anymore, and the loss of that curiosity correlates with access to high speed internet and the advent of social media. Curious.

So this post is the announcement and the one of accountability. I’ll still be auto-sharing stuff on my feeds mainly because my blog does that, but I will be off all major social media services and YouTube until March.

I’ll also be writing about it over the month, to get an update on habitual shifts, time gained, positive/negative effects, etc.

I’m a scientist and the experiment is me. Let’s see how it goes.

And if anyone would like to try and do the same thing, go for it and comment on this post to let me know how you’re going about it and what you do instead. I’m also using BlockSite extension on my Brave Browsers, so all sites are effectively blocked off.

Lez go.