Abdullah's Notes
Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts
25 Jun 2025I don't think there is anything I can say about endlessly scrolling through short-format content that hasn't been said before. Yet another day, I found myself scrolling through YouTube shorts (which probably has the worst content among the popular short-vertical-video platforms). 45 minutes passed, and I felt the customary emptiness that usually follows such a session.
Why does it feel that way? There's a lot of research done on this and there's a lot of reasons for this all too popular emptiness, but I wanted to figure out my specific reason for it. And here's what I think.
Creating "content" can serve, broadly speaking, two kinds of purposes. The first, is artistic. You make something because you feel like making something. You wish for something to exist, so you put your head down and create it. The second reason is profit. Of any kind - money, commodities or attention.
Often, they overlap, and they should. That's how artists make money.
I think of publishing content into the world like casting a spell. The more skilled you are at casting spells, the more intricate these spells are, and the more spellbound your audience feels, as the recipient of this spell.
Let's say it was all a video game. (And who's to say it isn't). You can either kill your opponent by learning the right skills, moves and combos. Or, you can just mash all the buttons haphazardly, casting little short-lived and pathetic spells that have no substance or thought behind them, but chip away at your opponent's energy nonetheless.
That's what vertical short-format infinite-scrolling content like reels, shorts and tiktoks feel like. Once in a while you'll see a really good one - and you just know that that spell was cast not by haphazard button-mashing, but by a skilled player who learnt to how to cast short-but-effective spells. But those are occasional gems in a sea polluted with trash.
I would also go as far as to say, all the apps, subscriptions, ads, notifications, emails and newsletters - all of these things that reach our devices, that weren't requested by us, are spells cast, for profit, distributed over the mindbogglingly impressive "spell delivery network" that is the internet.
And none of us were prepared for this. Everyone has a handheld gaming console on them 24x7, and we are playing all the time! So, whether intended to or not, these spells wear me down.
These spells wear me down to the point where even boredom feels cathartic. Airplane mode feels escapist. Being in DND mode and having all notifications turned off have become essential for sanity. Watching a movie, playing a video game or reading book all feel like a detox.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for.
I do think, however, that there is hope. Not in shunning these technologies (for, begrudgingly, the good parts are now essential to surviving in the modern world), but, in choosing reality. Fortunately, even though things feel dystopian, they don't feel cyberpunk.
Yet.
There's still parks and trees and friends and family and colleagues and acquaintances and strangers and their dogs and stars and planets and mountains and valleys out there. And it is on me to make the choice to allow myself to be spellbound by these things instead.
Now, like a ping-pong ball floating above a hair dryer, I've been unable to leave the endless stream of pathetic spells, because the effort and energy required to exit this stream is immense, and the effort required to keep floating in a daze is non-existent.
But I think it is time to put in the effort. Here's what I'm gonna do:
Dumbing Down My Phone (Just Enough)
I will not buy a minimalist phone. I love technology too much to endure that farce. What I will do, is convert my phone into a swiss-knife as much as I can. Keep the incredible camera, eBook reader, maps, browsers, etc as they are. Remove social media, remove games, disable YouTube, uninstall Instagram; remove anything that allows me to fidget with the phone. Fidgeting with knives is dangerous.
Instead, I would like to carry analog alternatives. Playing cards. Coins. Pens and small notebooks. Elastic bands. Whatever. I would like to try a bunch of things till I find something that sticks. And if nothing sticks, I'll just be bored. The biggest hallmarks of endless childhood summers were how often we were bored and just how much we acted upon ideas born in that boredom.
And, I wanna start carrying my camera with me. Not all the time, but more often. Go on dedicated photo-walks. Have it on me if I'm ever just casually hanging out somewhere.
Rebuild my mp3 collection
I will probably make another post on this, but I would love to rebuild my mp3 collection. Whether it's using YouTube convertors online or dedicated CLI tools, I wanna listen to mp3s again. I have a YouTube Premium subscription, which I will use for discovery and for supporting artists. But I wanna relinquish the reliance on subscription services for my music.
Follow-through
There's a good chance some of these things will fall through the cracks. That's natural. I will make a follow-up post on this, with results on how easy these things were, which things stuck around, and which ones didn't. Hopefully, enough things stick around for me to feel like there's a little more life in the few hours I have in my days.