It took me a while, but about a month ago I came clean and admitted it: I’m a YouTube addict.

I was in and out of rehab for about five years. By “rehab” I mean a self-imposed semi-conscious notion that, as a Gen Xer, I “should” prefer an outdoor, free-range existence: running through the woods barefoot, skipping stones across ponds, building forts, shooting my sister in the butt with a BB gun -- you know, that kind of stuff. That was my pre-digital youth. I guess it would now be adult-equivalent offline activities.

But no matter how many times I repeated this to myself or wrote “get off YouTube” in my agenda, I found myself coming back to the screen for more videos, like a moth fluttering around a light or a zombie determined to break down your door.

I tried everything. Ever heard of the Freedom app? It ended up being a digital gulag. The app, which you install on all your devices, is supposed to immediately boot you out of any website on your prohibited list. But I found a loophole after just a few weeks: Go onto LinkedIn and scroll till you find a post featuring a YouTube clip and click on that. You get instant access, and thus your fix. It was like my Tuber speakeasy – the more forbidden it was, the more satisfying it was to pop in through the back door and down one video after another. But this article is part of my rehab of sorts and I suppose I shouldn’t be telling my virtual circle of YouTube junkies about these little workarounds.

The classic cute cat video; the kind Samaritan who comes across a half-dead, suspiciously skinny dog along the road and rehabs it back to a vigorous, happy, tail-wagging, snuggly friend, all while emotional piano music plays in the background; the endless sports highlights; commentaries on President Donald Trump’s latest off-the-cuff remarks; Ukrainian drones dropping bombs on Russian soldiers’ heads; and (my recent favorite) watching some long-bearded Swiss dude hydrofoil across pristine Alpine lakes – I’ve seen them all (sometimes the same clip 20 times or more).

OK, you tell me in a stern, patronizing voice, just avoid those kinds of videos. Tell the Swiss guy to relax with a hot chocolate or fondue and cut out the fluff; surely there is “valuable” or “transformational” content to be had on YouTube. All in moderation. The problem is not the medium; it’s you. You can’t moderate yourself.

Yeah, well, tried that, smarty-pants.

For about a month now I’ve been sketching three little boxes in each day’s entry in my agenda, duly checking off a box for each well-curated, highly educational video that I see, and then stopping my viewing after three. Three’s the limit. But in spite of myself I always end up surpassing it. “Just one more video” becomes, well, many more. Recently, after checking off all the boxes, I lost consciousness and woke up an hour later to find myself enraptured by Jason’s “kill count” videos. Man, can he wield that machete. Plus, it was Halloween.

I mean, I knew all along I had a YouTube problem, but it was sort of an unarticulated feeling. The breakthrough came a few weeks ago while in bed. For no apparent reason I sat up at night and said to myself out loud in a calm, authoritative voice, “You’re a YouTube addict.” While it’s too early to tell, admitting this seems to have helped (somewhat).

Another recent occurrence got me to reflect. A week ago my son rapped on my door to show me his latest Lego creation. “Ah, yeah, that’s great, now daddy’s gotta get back to work.” “Work,” of course, was actor Jake Gyllenhaal taking out a bunch of punks in “Road House.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s brilliant. He’s so efficient. Still, I felt bad about shooing my son away for that, which I’ve seen multiple times.

Where am I going with all this? Sorry, I’m all over the place. Now you know all about my YouTube history. It’s a bit embarrassing. But have you examined yours? It could be revealing or scary – the thing investigators would look at if you ever became a serial killer. And have you examined it consciously, and not in some half-conscious scrolling stupor, like my zombie mind, marinating in a sea of random dopamine hits? In any case (disclaimer) I can’t claim this article as fully mine; it's the result of my YouTube brain.

But for your sake, dearest reader, I will now try to focus and deliver something of value in whatever word count I have left.

YouTube is obviously my weak spot. But think of the full smorgasbord of distraction available to us anytime: ChatGPT, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, Reddit, not to mention gaming and whatever else the kids (Snapchat? Twitch?) are into these days.

Could it be that each one triggers – and is designed to trigger – a form of compulsiveness in nearly everyone, in different ways? Twitch will make some people actually twitch. YouTube, for example, attaches itself particularly to the male mind, while females seem to prefer Instagram. A Stanford psychiatrist has called “moving images” on these apps “drugs,” in that they produce similar patterns of addictive behavior.

Somewhere down the line, one of these apps is going to sink its algorithms into you, or already has (or many of them have). Which one’s got you? Only the Amish are truly spared – though I just googled: “Do the Amish have an app,” maybe to help with, I don’t know, pole barn construction? So far, no.

What does this mean individually and as a society? Individually, the old adage of “all in moderation” is becoming outdated as we gorge ourselves at the all-you-can-eat tech buffet. I’ve tried to be intentional about things, but as you can see, I need more help, and something drastic. What are our viable drastic options (aside from going Amish)?

And as a society, what’s certain is that our tech toys will continue to get better and better and thus more efficient at “hacking humans” in the words of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Some people are pushing back culturally. There is a movement afloat, especially among millennials and Gen Zers, to reconnect with nature and each other, and to get back to simple analog pleasures. But it appears fringe at this stage. The urgent task before us will be to find creative ways of mainstreaming such movements, lest we fall further down the rabbit hole of addictive tech.

I forgot to mention that I’m also hooked on wingsuit flying videos. If you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s awesome.

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Terrance J. Mintner is a news editor and writer living in the Midwest. He writes a newsletter on Substack called Feral Brain (https://feralbrain.substack.com/).

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