Tag Archives: dumbscrolling

The Beaches – Blame My Ex

I stumbled on this fantastic band while dumbscrolling youtube shorts. I love so many of their songs. I like this one that seems like it’s part way through and changes to a different video. This song strikes me as one that probably leads to people attaching to the primary emotion of Blaming Brett instead of seeing the complexity of the song – same thing that Ani Difranco had to deal with when fans loved “Untouchable Face”.

I went to an Ani Difranco concert once where she said she had stopped playing Untouchable Face because of how crowds reacted to it, and she took the time to explain that the Fuck You part of the song is an expression of longing and hurt, not rage and revilement. It’s because the uh, Face is Untouchable. So she asked folks if they sing along to sing with a heart full of longing rather than a heart full of rage and it was wonderful.

Same way that the makers of Breaking Bad were shocked that people thought Walter White was a hero, that the makers of the movie Wall Street were shocked that people wanted to emulate Michael Douglas and took “Greed is Good” at face value. Same way that Michael Lewis thought that Liar’s Poker was a cautionary tale to warn people away from the financial industry but attracted them in droves.

But people love an antihero! There’s something delicious about becoming a beast. Anyway, you should also check out Takes One to Know One.

Avoiding Dumbscrolling

Like you, I enjoy small bursts of dopamine delivered at irregular, unpredictable intervals and I’ll do nearly anything to keep getting them.

This doesn’t often align with my long term or medium term goals.

I’m trying to be conscious of how I’m spending my time, so I noticed a while ago that I was on Youtube Shorts for… hours. Just scrolling and scrolling. Sometimes laughing. It’s not really doomscrolling, just… dumb. I’m on Youtube shorts because I’m too old for instagram or tiktok.

One of the best hacks I did around that was:

  1. Enable Screentime on the iPhone
  2. Set a limit of 1 hour for youtube
  3. Forget my Screentime password

So now I get interrupted when I run out of time and have to go waste my life doing something else. I’m sure I could reset my screentime password and figure out how to get more, but this is just enough to stop me and get me to switch activities.

It also gives me a feeling that I don’t want to use up all my precious delicious time up early in the day, so I don’t zone out too long anyway.