Youtube...

 For the last 5 years, I have been addicted to watching YouTube. It was completely normal for me to spend up to 2 hours each day watching my favorite content creator, ignoring the world and issues around me and rather indulging in an escape. It sucked my motivation and killed my time yet I still justified it to myself.

Even when I was very young I loved learning new things, I loved learning how to build new toys especially those which my parents would not buy for me. My logic was my parents could stop me from buying them but they couldn't stop me from making them. As a result, I spent tons of time on the internet researching different “toys” to build. When I say toys I mean weapons that shoot small objects, but other than the weapons I also researched anything that caught my fancy. I did not only use Youtube to research these projects, At this point in time, I didn’t spend too much time on Youtube, I watched a few videos to gain inspiration then continued to work on my projects. In my opinion, when Youtube is used in this way it is very beneficial, it can be used to gain new ideas or perspectives on your project and see how other people solve the same problems that you have faced.
As I grew older and started school I became more bored with my projects and spent more time on Youtube. Rather than using it as a jump off point for my project I would rather just watch other people do the work. Generally, these were short videos that I would easily binge watch. However watching these short videos introduced me to channels with longer videos that sucked up even more of my time. Then I began to watch Youtube far more seriously.

During the first two years that I seriously watched Youtube, I mainly watched Minecraft Let's Plays and other games. I moved away from the DIY projects due to my friends at school getting into video games and me following the trend. A Let's Play is watching someone else play a game and listen to their commentary. The personality was one of the reasons why I continued to watch and enjoy content creators that I grew out of, their commentary made them so likable they became my “friends.” I not exactly sure if this type of relationship with what is essentially a stranger is healthy but at the time I didn't care.

In the most recent year, the majority of my time on Youtube has been on following various car channels and the cars they are building. Each one of these videos could be up to 30 min long and it was not absurd for me to watch 4 videos a day. That is 2 hours of my life wasted on watching someone repair their car, and the time I didn’t even have my license. I continued this cycle of watching hours of Youtube each day for the majority of Junior year and the 2017 summer. As school started again I decided to quit cold turkey. I deleted the Youtube app off my phone and deleted the bookmark off my laptop.

Looking back on the amount of time I spent on Youtube and how much time I wasted, I do not regret quitting. I would like to say that if I went back to watching Youtube that I would be able to control myself, but I don’t believe that is possible for me.