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Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

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Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#21

YouTube is easy to block. Just clear all your history and disable history. This stops home screen recommendations and also disables YouTube shorts

highly recommend that as well. Disabling history greatly reduced my time spent in the app. UnTrap plugin for Safari helps as well. Can't say that I feel like I spend a reasonable amount of time on the platform still, but now it's mostly me having an urge to distract myself, opening the website and finding the videos I have seen already then closing the tab.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#22

Have a purpose. When you're gungho to do something or get something done, and you have tremendous drive to do that and not procrastinate. Do something you enjoy. Here's a test for you. If I were to offer you $10 million to do anything you want during your day, what would you do? Would you accept the money? Of course you would. What if the consequence of accepting was that you don't wake up tomorrow morning? Obviously…

My approach is slightly different. If someone offered you, say, 10k USD every day you put in efforts to achieve your personal goals, and they gave you a condition that there should be no days off, would you turn up every day for the 10k dollars or would you let your distractions win?

I bet you'd do what you have to do for the daily 10k dollars, like reading a book, going to the gym, etc.

But since nobody is offering us money we let our distractions win because we don't want to achieve our goals bad enough!

https://www.rxjourney.net/how-badly-do-you-want-it

Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#23
You are weak and aimless, because being aimless makes you weak.

When you look at life, ask yourself what brings you most joy in life, what makes you feel most alive, find your direction, and avoid the petty traps designed to enslave you.

Find your discipline, challenge yourself, and find like-minded people without your phone as a filter. The cost of social connection increases exponentially with malign influences as it becomes digital. Learn the education and related skills of discernment which have been purposefully withheld from recent generations. Seek and base your actions on actual truth, not rhetoric.

The first step is recognition of the compulsion traps that have been set for you to enslave you to addiction.

Read a book, Robert Cialdini's "Influence", and you will begin to recognize the subtle factors in your own psychology that allow others to manipulate you towards detrimental ends without your knowledge.

Learn about what specifically defines torture, so you can recognize and eliminate such torturous and vexatious things from your life as intolerable.

Most of the things people have been brought up to believe today are true only in the narrowest of respects, and in a broader perspective are lies of omission, designed to blind you.

Evil didn't stop existing, people were just induced to willfully choose to be blind to it with carefully crafted convincing lies, and technique, and systematic indirect interference to tie you down leaving you without agency.

Reclaim your cultural heritage whatever culture that may be, and prepare yourself for the dark times that are ahead, which may move slowly but are coming.

Without joy, partnership, children, a future, there is nothing. If you aren't moving forward towards that, you are moving backward.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#25

YouTube is easy to block. Just clear all your history and disable history. This stops home screen recommendations and also disables YouTube shorts

Yup, this is the way.

Regarding Shorts, I have no YouTube history, but I still get Shorts. I hate them. You must be doing something else to disable them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#26
Go to the gym. Start a social hobby like salsa dancing or a casual team sport like kickball/cornhole/flag football/bowling etc. Join a run club. Do active social activities. Stick with them and don't get discouraged when you're new at it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling

#29
Despite the title, I don't think YouTube is the main issue... You can replace it with tiktok, twitter, your favorite video game, watching TV... and that still sounds unproductive and unhealthy. In fact, I'd rate short videos and fragmented social media content worse digital distractions than YouTube.

To help me disconnect, I set my phone to turn on power saving, grayscale, dark mode, and max redshift after 11 PM. It makes it so annoying to use that I can just put it down.

Don't worry too much about being unproductive outside working hours. Worry about unhealthy habits that will eventually harm your productivity.

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