One Month, No YouTube

I have an addiction. Its name is YouTube. For the past few years I have used it for a few hours every single day. It saturates my life, fills in all the empty spaces and gaps in my time. I use it for entertainment, to stave off boredom, as motivation to do things I don't want to and as background noise when completing tasks. In short, I can't imagine my life without it.

There is an issue with this. Youtube is the best way to get a dopamine hit. But it isn't productive. It doesn't enrich my soul. Deepening relationships, being creative, finding new experiences, living out personal and painfully real emotions are my aims in life and YouTube doesn't provide any of those things. What it does do is inspire me and fills me with ideas, but with the amount of videos I watch, all the ideas blend together and are never actioned upon like neglected books in the library of the brain. 

This past week I have learnt that happiness is counterintuitive. That we must struggle to overcome and learn from our mistakes in order to keep moving forward and adapt to change. So what is there to do? Trying to stop watching has never been a simple ordeal. As soon as one of my triggers happen, I fall back into the same pattern. This next month, I will endeavour to stop watching it altogether. I will blog as much as I can, and accept the challenge as something I need to do to ensure my own happiness. 

It will not be easy, as I associate watching these videos with so many parts of my life, waking up for one, reaching for it as soon as my eyes open for a few minutes (or hours) in bed. I associate it with boredom, the worst is when I happen to be home alone. When it's quiet at home I need to have something on. When I eat by myself I like to watch it too. 

I hope to achieve a few things during this month and hopefully they will distract me from the massive void that is left behind. I hope to blog regularly, so things might get rambly here, but I hope it will make me more disciplined as well. I also hope to edit some new videos and see where that leads. 

I only get to experience this life once, be 24 once, and live this day once, so why not make the most of it?

Sincerely, Jen.

PS. Tonight Astroboy and I went for a run. It was hard. More on that tomorrow.