this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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That's not free time. That's decompression time. Free time is time when you are well rested, all your needs are met, obligations fullfilled, AND you have unencumbered time to persue a passion or intellectual persuit. The rich have free time, the rest of us just take breathers from our responsibilities from time to time.
But watching youtube for your decompression doesn't get you to a well rested state. It can do the opposite. So you aren't making any progress toward actually getting free time.
Better decompression. Turn off all networking. Read something for 5 minutes and go for a walk. Successful decompression in 10 minutes, not 10 hours.
Whether intentional or not, or just progressive improvement on algorithms, youtube thrives by providing a need, and then providing it poorly so you keep your watch time going forever. This is a fun feature of machine learning. Non-willfull conspiracies. A system can do something malicious to get ahead that is equivalent to a highly calculated malicious action, while no one, including the model itself or the algorithms that trained it, or the people who trained it, understands what it's doing.
Escapism is often called "Decompression" or "Fun"
Decompression depends on how much stress is accumulated. Sometimes 10 hours of mindless youtube is exactly the thing I need after some of the weeks.
It depends. I'm a huge nerd and my YouTube browsing habits are relating to educational videos and long form essays. My news sources on YouTube are also less sensationalist.
On algorithm, I kinda minimise its bs by turning off my watch history. I bookmark my YouTube page to my watch later playlist, so I could chip away at my nearly twenty years of backlog of videos to watch.
Yeah, YouTube is still great if you reject the algorithm and continuous feed junk. I've got my subscriptions categorized in a set order and just run through them every so often.
I'm sure that applies to a lot of people, but even when I have, like, 1 day of stress and a month of chill time, I still spend the whole month laying around doing nothing if I don't force myself to do something productive.
Decompression time is definitely important, but it's also important to know yourself enough to identify when you're fully decompressed and ready to do something healthy for your body and mind, even if you just wanna watch another youtube video.
Yeah, it's also important to get in the habit of lightly pushing yourself towards hobbies and other such things with that time. I didn't do much while unemployed, in part because I lost the distinction between rest and wasting time
Abso-fuckin-lutely thats also why working so much sucks too because you dont have enough time to decompress LET ALONE any free time and its frustrating because it looks and feels like you just do nothing/have bad time management/are a slob when you’re off work and it becomes a maddening cycle
Well said. My weekend turns out to be decompression time.
You can spell "unencumbered" but not pursue or pursuit?
English language is one of the worst languages known to humanity. The way it arbitrarily incorporates some words and makes up pronunciations is diabolical. It took me four tries to spell "pronunciations" correctly.
Be glad that we speak at least somewhat coherently in this bullshit language of yours.
It's just pronounce but then you take away some of the letters for some reason!
And some words, you pronounce the root differently if you add a suffix. There's no rhyme or reason for why, you just do.
10 hours of YouTube is not decompression
2 hours isn't even
That's being so tired the lights are on, but there's nobody home.