I've been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.
Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I've ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?
Fifty-four thousand.
I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.
I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.
I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That's 5,475 hours per year. It's not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that's about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.
That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years' worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.
Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.
How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don't want to know.
I've always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That's why time has gone by so quickly.
Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn't care about the incalculable damage it's doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won't be the last.
Never again.
How much of this was music and podcasts?
Yeah like, if it's all just fortnite streams, valid that that's a waste of time.
If it's music, educational stuff, and tutorials, then that's valid. I learned how to do heaps of things on YT that I would have struggled to learn otherwise.and they are productive, useful, enriching things.
I’d argue that those Fortnite streams are not necessarily a waste of time. OP could have watched Fortnite streams while doing the dishes or left it running while reading something else. OP could have left an automatic playlist running overnight because he dozed off. Playing devil’s advocate here obviously but I’m compelled to do it when someone makes a case with obvious gaps in context.