So many people just waste their own time, all the time. I'm not immune, I use Reddit, Bluesky, rarely Tumblr, but none of these really compare to the sorts of things I'm talking about. I choose these platforms largely because there's moderately more authenticity, an understanding that certain topics and key words aren't being used to get me locked into a dopamine loop. The algorithm is far more in control, and the slop way more prevalent, on places like Twitter, Instagram. I think this extends to pretty much every streaming service.
There are ads everywhere nowadays. Every social media besides Bluesky is littered with them. For the past 6 months I've uninstalled Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube's apps and just used them in the Firefox mobile browser, using extensions to do things like remove ads, skip sponsored sections on YouTube, remove YouTube Shorts entirely, other things I forget about, and that set up probably took me 5 minutes. I made that time back in my life by the end of the following week. It's not even about reducing screen time, it's about having control of your screen time.
I've started being way more intentional with how I waste my time. It really started with me using my local libary and later on finding a local used DVD store where everything was $2. You probably think you enjoy not having to go to the store, not having to buy a DVD to watch a movie, but I swear to god, everyone's just wrong. Convenience is a cancer nowadays. When you go to the store or library, and you browse the aisle, you have to think about more than killing the next 90 minutes, you're thinking about what will best kill 90 minutes in 2 days, or a week, and that's a way different story. What's that movie you swore you'd watch someday? Which movie did I see a cool article about? Maybe you check Letterboxd and see what your friends have been into. When you get off the Smart TV, you don't have any choice but to make these choices yourself. Even the search functions on Netflix and other streaming apps are infected with these stupid robots. You can search for Army of Darkness and they'll try to funnel you to a Dave Chappelle special they paid 5 million for.
Adding on to all this, this generation seems illiterate towards piracy. I'm 27, and I hear all the time about people only slightly older than me going crazy downloading Linkin Park on Limewire, and it feels alien to so many people I know. I mentioned I've switched to storing my music locally, not paying for Spotify or anything, and someone said that it would be such a hassle to youtube-to-mp3 that much music. Of course, that's not what I'm doing. You can go online and download an album. Didn't we all have jail broken iPods? Why are we so incapable of utilizing this old ecosystem? I hang out with a pretty anti-establishment crowd, and it's unironically one of the strongest anti-capitalist tools available, but there's a refusal to do a minimum amount of work for immense gains in how you experience digital media. So many times people "throw on a movie" instead of "finding a movie to watch", and it's some crappy direct-to-streaming action movie quipfest staring Some MCU Guy or a reality show we won't continue after tonight. Why don't you create your own library, digital or physical, of shit you actually enjoy. Old DVDs cost next to nothing nowadays.
This is a tangent complaint, but I've had more than one experience where I'm invited to a watch party or something, and the person doesn't have the movie when I arrive. Whenever someone wants to watch a movie that isn't on a streaming service they own, they go to 123movies and suffer through a buffering 480p mess of a movie that was made for IMAX. There's always a 20% chance it randomly stops loading, it drives me insane. And NOTHING is worse than watching something on Tubi. If you invite me to a movie night and have me sitting through those AI gambling ads, don't invite me! There was a recent movie night I went to, people went out to get liquor and weed, they went to the grocery store and bought snacks, we were watching Moneyball so they made hot dogs for everyone, and then 30 minutes in we were on 123movies waiting 2 minutes for Brad Pitt to start moving again. Fun night but DOWNLOADING THE MOVIE SHOULD BE PART OF THAT PREPARATION. You are hosting a get together, either stop being cheap and rent it, or learn how to be cheap properly.
You know what I watched yesterday? Instead of suffering through The Boys like a schmuck? I watched She Shoots Straight, a 1990 Hong Kong "girls with guns" movie. It wasn't hard to find, and it was a great time. If you get a VPN, download Soulseek, you can find practically anything you could possibly want in movies or music.