For the past four years of my life, I've lived by the algorithm. My process had been something like...
Opening up work programs, doing some work, finding myself feel the discomfort of challenge, letting my focus drift to twitter, browsing For You, seeing some sexy fanart, seeing some takes that make me mad, feeling this slushie of horny and upset, going back to work, get distracted again, repeat
Or I'd need to do some housework, I'd pull up my phone, open youtube, and keep refreshing the page until the algorithm gave me an appealing looking video for me to play in the background and pay 25% attention to, thus allowing me to exist as an adult human being
And then I'd get off work, I'd have my free time, and I'd still be scrolling the algo feeds! Twitter, give me beautiful or sexy art, give me hideous takes, give me drama, tell me what's going on! Make me feel like I'm taking part on the internet world stage!
Youtube, give me a thousandsth tier list video for pokemon (I don't play) or fire emblem (I do play), give me completely inconsequential content so that I can prevent a thought from occurring in my mundane, daily life! Give me a breadtube video so I can vaguely feel like I'm "learning" while spacing out in a game or "not wasting time" out on a walk so that I can later regurgitate half-baked academic takes and imparted knowledge on Important Issues without doing the legwork of reading and evaluating argumentation in books and papers myself! Give it to me with the awful internet jokes, please!
I had, I have, completely morphed into this passive creature, like an alligator with his mouth opened for hours on end waiting for food to fly in. Like a pig on its side before a trough, waiting for it to be filled. I had place myself in my own skinnerbox build upon a thousand decisions that seemed like a good idea at a time, and trapped myself in the Four Sites' web while convincing myself it was somehow necessary.
Fomo constantly assailed me. What if I wasn't ahead of the curve? What if I wasn't on top of every little minor spat, every piece of bad industry news, every shitty take in whatever imagined community I had drafted myself into that consisted of people I didn't know and didn't like?
Every single time I found something interesting on twitter, like a fascinating channel or book or article or game or whatever, it reinforced that I simply had to be there. Every algorithmic gem find on youtube was more encouragement to keep pulling the lever, keep hitting the slot machine. The kino was always in reach, I just had to scroll more. Whatever I was looking for, I was sure to find it, right? Someone had made it, right?
Why had I allowed my insatiable need for content, for the appearance of content that Deeply Engaged With My Hobbies (I do love me the Fire Emblem video essay content mill), to take over my life so? I didn't engage with it. I didn't enjoy it. It was just gap fillers, place holders. Something to do when I was playing a video game I was allegedly engaged with. Something to do when I felt a moment of discomfort. An easy way out through distraction. A life lived looking through a window. A prison of my own choosing.
Time to see what life off the algo is like. Only gonna engage with youtube via my PC account which has no feed, and I've deactivated my twitter account. Going to deal with the horror of my own mind for a while, or at least things that engage the mind a touch more