Comments

• By mac-mc 2025-08-3118:263 reply

  Procrastination is not a time management problem; it's an emotional management problem.

  What it comes down to is not having belief in what you do, so you do other things. You might feel trapped, so you pass the time with stuff like YouTube because that is the most compelling thing available to you. A man will walk on broken glass with a smile if he truly believes in what it will accomplish.

  When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.

  When there is a rare game or youtube topic that really obsessively catches your attention, like Factorio, pay attention to it! It helps show you what drives you, and you can try to leverage that into things you find healthier.

  Also, it might be worth it to look into ADHD testing if this has been a persistent pattern your entire life.

  By anal_reactor 2025-09-010:101 reply

  The problem is, in real life you're unlikely to find yourself in a situation where your needs are met, or at least have an action plan how to get there. There are tons of things that go wrong and you can't do anything about that. Stuck in a shitty job? Sucks to be you. Marriage drains you emotionally? Sucks to be you. Mother is sick and you need to take care of her? Again, sucks to be you. "Find a passion" is actually a ridiculously unrealistic standard - most people really do spend their free time just scrolling TikTok.

  I'm really really tired of people throwing solutions at my problems while one of the problems is that I'm fundamentally profoundly tired of trying and failing.

  By mac-mc 2025-09-0220:29

  Yeah, burnout is hard, and real. Everything you've described, I've literally been in an equivalent. To get out of these ruts requires a sober assessment of where you are and some hard decisions, and maybe the end result is acceptance for someone in your case. As I said, it's belief that drives this, and you do have ultimate control & choice over your beliefs.

  For many tho, what I said is a revelation and it can save them from yet another ineffective pomodoro exercise. Many are not middle aged people stuck in a hard place and this advice helps them.

  By Shatnerz 2025-08-3119:011 reply

  > When I was younger, I was into video games because they gave me a sense of accomplishment and progress compared to high school, which I found relatively meaningless. I called it progress quest.

  Well do I have a game for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

  By mac-mc 2025-08-3120:57

  Heh, yes it was inspired by that game once I saw it.

  By bonoboTP 2025-08-3123:16

  It's just difficult to tease out at what scale you should address the problem. It requires reflection, ideally together with someone, on where you are headed. Maybe the answer doesn't lie on the level of setting up firewall rules or setting timers but on the level of having to change jobs or even careers, cities, or finding new social connections, or resolving some conflicts with family or whoever. There can be many reasons for escapism like that.

• By dvh 2025-08-3119:015 reply

  I'm a programmer, a creative person, working on my projects, and regularly I need a short break, so on every break I usually lay in bed and checked the news and I often ended on YouTube watching more videos, wasting hours every day. What eventually helped me was use css to replace entire YouTube (and other doom scrolling websites) with a motivational picture that says:

  "One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."

  And it worked.

  The css for yt looks like this:

      body {
       min-height: 100vh;
       background-image:url(https://example.com/effort.jpg);
       background-size: contain;
       background-repeat: no-repeat; 
       background-position: center; 
       background-color: black;
      }
      p,div,h1,span {display:none}
  

  It's been 6 months and it's still working.

  By TheAlchemist 2025-09-010:351 reply

  I did the same and it worked very well for me too. Redirect all dumb sites I don't really want to visit with a link to the quote I found inspiring at the time:

  "It was a day like this when Marco Polo left for China. What are your plans for today ?"

  By mejutoco 2025-09-0210:25

  I like the idea. Regarding the quote, I find it funny that people are not sure if Marco Polo ever left or he was just repeating stories he heard from other travelers.

  By mikker 2025-09-0517:21

  I do this too. I use my app Sprinkles to do it. For Mac, you can inject your own js or css into any site.

  https://github.com/mikker/sprinkles.app

  By juancroldan 2025-09-016:20

  That's just a first step, your muscle memory to open youtube.com for instant gratification requires time and motivation to go away. But the extra effort of having to disable an extension to fall into patterns you decidedly wanted to end is maybe enough to get you going.

  By crimsontech 2025-08-3119:19

  I love this, I block sites during certain times to stop me wasting time but I might add this too.

  By boppo1 2025-09-012:022 reply

  What, did you edit your hosts file or something?

  By euler2100 2025-09-0216:47

  You can use Stylus for this.

  https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

  By Anonyneko 2025-09-0112:13

  I assume it's a userscript in the Tampermonkey extension or the likes.

• By npteljes 2025-08-3120:082 reply

  When I was doing a similar schedule, it was a failure of introspection, and a mounting number of unprocessed emotional issues, and unconfronted personal problems.

  The way I got over it is that I have started realizing, confronting, communicating these issues. I "sat down with myself" daily just to think for 15 minutes, without any distraction like youtube. Communicated what I though were my problems to my partner, friends, parents, therapist, forums, LLM.

  Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.

  I also picked up hobbies that nurture the specific parts that I was lacking. For example, I had a very hard time to persistently care about living things. But after a leap of faith I successfully kept a plant alive, and I slowly build a hobby around this.

  Funnily enough, youtube helped in this, because I also shaped that so that the helpful videos remained. While doing chores, self-care and other such things, I listened to a lot of mental health, lifestyle, introspective, hobby content, and these were wonderful sources of inspiration.

  In a way, having a bluetooth headphone also helped a lot. It helped to bridge the gap between the digital world, which was my only comfort zone, and the "irl", which was like the cold, hard, overwhelming rest of the world that I didn't really want to deal with.

  By mercenario 2025-09-0218:381 reply

  Very illuminating.

  > Over time, patterns emerged, either by others pointing them out to me, or them occurring to myself. The patterns became higher and higher level, and I had more and more power and agency to fill in my gaps, and those in turn made my problems smaller, manageable. Challenges, even.

  Could you give some examples of those patterns?

  By npteljes 2025-09-0221:30

  Sure thing.

  For example, my plants were always dying. I hated that, and I hated facing my inability every time I interacted with them (granted, there weren't many in the first place). I hated to touch soil and the general mess that happens when maintaining them. I was really disgusted by the way a rotten stem felt, how the soil stank after watering, and I was confused about where to put them, what to do with growth, browning leaves, etc. It was an overwhelming ball of negative emotions.

  One time after multiple of them really died, I gave them new soil and vowed that this time I will really water regularly. I did, and they actually came back to life. I was very happy about it, and it inspired me to look up more information about them. That inspired me to have more plants, which in turn meant more work with them. I found youtubers I really liked who kept a lot of houseplants, and watching them normalized the chores for me, and helped me get an idea on how things actually look, and what it all takes. I began to have ideas about where I want to go with this. I dared things like repotting, buying different species, growing them from a small cutting. I went a little into interior design. I bought a plant nursery lamp. And the plants loved it!

  The negative emotions all but went away, and positive ones gained traction - or I should rather say destructive and constructive. Behind hate and disgust I realized sadness and fear, and overcoming that I realized curiosity, stability, a warm pride toward myself and my creations.

  I had a similar evolution in most other parts of my life, like relationships with people, relationship with animals, relationship with self.

  Turned out from this all, the ingredient that I sorely missed was a courage to put myself out there. To find out what I am actually like, and to represent that genuinely in the different situations of life. This same pattern, fear of expressing myself, and repressing parts of me that I dislike or doubt, served as a foundation for many of my seemingly actual problems, like the inability to keep a little green thing alive, and so many more.

  By mac-attack 2025-09-012:12

  This is a good post, thanks for sharing.