Is YouTube beneficial or a waste of time?

Sometimes I wonder how many hours I spent on YouTube watching content I would forget before the next 24 hours would go by. On the contrary I wonder how much I've grown personally from watching content and found useful information I actively benefit from.

I recently started using Notion and obsidian. Which *feels* productive for now. But before I have done any actual writing or work on these platforms, I jumped on the next tutorial video for the perfect setup. Tweaking my productivity tracker further and further without doing actual work really summarizes how people chase the feeling of progress instead of any actual progress. This realization made me question YouTube more on whether it is beneficial or useless. My conclusion was somewhere in between. Meaning the benefits I got was obtained wasn't up to questioning but also I was exposed a lot of negative effects almost feeling trapped in Google's algorithm.

Starting my thought process

The way I use YouTube, I realized that I actually get spoon-fed content to fire my dopamine receptors around 80% of the time. The remaining 20% is me looking up information and researching topics. 

Though this does not mean I waste 80% of my time since one fifth of the content I consume mindlessly turns out to be quality information that spikes my interest on a whole new topic. This type of content is the type of content that broadens my vision and discover new topics I might be interested in. Just as a simple example: the reason I'm taking my notes in this language is because of a writer's YouTube channel I discovered 2 weeks ago that gave me inspiration to improve my English writing skills.

So there is no question YouTube is very useful when it comes to certain aspects. I use it all the time for learning, discovering and researching. When it comes to these certain aspects there is no question that I am and will be using this platform in the future and it's not a platform I can completely eliminate from my life altogether. 

But I have also found it to waste my time and affect my life in ways which are very hard to notice. So I have paid extensive attention for some time to notice these effects and put them into this writing.

Not being able to go deeper

With my broadened vision thanks to YouTube exposing me to a very large range of new topics. I now am interested in lots of topics with very little actual knowledge or practice in all of them. Since going deeper in any subject requires for a person to be very intentional with their effort, the only upside YouTube can achieve can be the discovery of some niche topics of interest. Therefore if you make the mistake of feeding off of novelty instead of satisfaction of learning you might be left with a very surface level knowledge in a variety of topics. I feel I also suffer from this to an extend which also affects my general behavior to become more impatient and unfocused. 

There is no royal road to science and learning in its core, is a very messy process. Unlike how consuming digital entertainment reinforce the craving of easy rewards, deepening your knowledge requires you to be slow and calculated in your approach. The rewarding feeling comes and goes along this meticulous process. Sometimes there are long periods of plateaus where the feeling of accomplishment fades away for quite some time where you have make the fatiguing push all to deepen your understanding.

Feeding off of novelty and reinforcing behavioral patterns that are "anti-learning" results in becoming a jack of all trades. Even though it may sound good to the ear becoming which is very undesirable. The appreciation and true sense of accomplishment is only achieved with deep knowledge of few subjects which a person becoming a jack of all trades will presumably lack. A curious mind is good at discovering but is distracted with novel knowledge, deep understanding is required for satisfaction in the long run.

This understanding makes me feel YouTube is tend to push curious people in the opposite direction of where they will find happiness one day. YouTube reinforcing harmful habits and behaviors can be very dangerous paired with the lack of intention for types of people like this.

Para-social relationships

I recently realized I developed something called para-social relationships with certain content creators. Funny enough I also learned this term from a YouTube video. I had around 4-5 content creators whom personalities I liked so much I considered myself a "fan" of them. Some of these creators were gaming related, some sport and even one being Caroline Winkler who talks mostly about interior house design in her videos.

I realized what I had developed was not a usual fan behavior when I found myself leaving a comment. I was revising this comment so much I felt as I was writing to make the person reading like me back. I realized my unusual behavior and I realized how connected I felt to these creators I regularly watched. I realized what I was doing was caring about an online persona like you would care about a friend. 

It's not impossible in these confusing time of digital isolation to mistake a person as friend dear reader. And there are many online communities to prove this. Developing relationships with online personas instead of actual humans is not healthy especially in the case where it is one sided. This development of one sided connection is what's called a para-social relationship and Youtube is one of the platforms this type of behavior might arise with unintentional use.

Common incorrect behavior

The first and most common mistake is to watch videos on topics which is generated for entertainment purposes only. An important example that immediately comes to mind is gaming content. This type of content will never be of any use to the person and watching it is even less beneficial to user than watching a random tv-series since a YouTube video almost never holds any cultural significance where you can have a chat about it.

The second common mistake is to fall into the productivity trap by watching content which is educational without actual intention to learn from it. Watching any science, history or culture related content without giving it attention of your own by having a piece of paper in front of you is wasting time but feeling productive doing it. In order to take information you have to give attention. The danger of this mistake comes from not realizing this rule of give and take.

And third but not least is watching any type of content off the platform before sleeping. The sleep schedule should be uninterrupted at all costs and disrupting it through this platform is only damaging with no benefit. Blue lights from digital screens before bedtime is well-proven in the literature to reduce the quality of sleep and keeping your mind busy is also bad for actual rest the body needs.

The conclusion

I have came to the conclusion that the side effects of YouTube on the person can be mitigated with one action: Intention. Although this action is not as easy to implement as it sounds these days. However the first step of having intention is to realize what happens when you don't have it. In this sense I hope this writing might be useful to my friends who read it.

Avoiding some digital platforms was are no longer is feasible or realistic in these times. So as the only chance we have left is to become mindful of our use of these platforms and embrace the feeling of boredom from lack thereof.