I think 'hyperfixations' and 'rabbit hole deep dives' are just euphemisms for gorging on slop.
Edit: I called this on myself with some poor choice of words, but I dont care to debate the nature of slop and wether x or y is slop. I am sure that watching a Yale lecture on youtube can be fruitful to some and certainly doesnt constitute as slop. But just haphazardly cramming randomn information in your brain is something I started to notice myself and it isnt really helpful that way.
I used to trust my own sense of curiosity and discovery and follow it whereever it leads. But at least in this attention-economy hellhole I have come to believe that this stuff just makes you creatively rudderless and scatterbrained. Doesn't really matter if I have a sudden brief interest in Byzanthine history or whatever if it doesn't translate to anything useful in my life and will be forgotten about in a week (as in: It earns you money, helps you connect with people, make art, or anything that remotely feels precious and memorable).
Like most people here I am a bit of an annoying contrarian/self important intellectual and I used to believe that I had this really healthy media diet of listening to informative podcast/video essays instead of the radio and watching reality tv. I tought that I could translate leisure time into some form of passive learning. So a lot of listening to podcasts while doing other stuff and the like. This was back in 2018 when the whole 'slop' terminology was birthed, which will be my excuse for holding such a reddit-opinion back in the day.
Background noise is innocent enough if it helps to get you to focus but it is all slop if you get down to it and shouldn't be sold as 'educational'. And it annoys me when people in comment sections of these sloppy video essays suck each other off for being smarter than others even if they are watching it alt-tabbed and probably cannot reproduce the argument later on.
Curiosity is a healthy thing but I think it should be tamed like a horse or something gay like that. I try not to clutter my brain with useless information and chatter and keep my headphones off more. Instead turning my effort into creative project that other people will actually get to see.
The internet is so huge that it probably has something that can snare you interest for a while but if you just follow those whims than you'll end up listening to podcasts you can't remember and a stack of books that have been read for a quarter of the length. I dunno that stuff gives me a sense of dread.
Anyone can relate?