Minimising Regretted User Minutes

I’ve been trying to reduce my regretted user minutes recently. I’m not sure if it’s an actual change, but my reels, twitter, and youtube feeds have been getting really bad lately. I have been having this experience of watching and snapping out of the spell often, thinking what is this rubbish that I’m watching?

I challenge you to think of a piece of media you consumed between 2 - 5 days ago. It’s pretty hard to do if you only consume short form low quality stuff. I failed this challenge the other day and it made me pause and think.

We love to consume, but it’s really easy to follow the path of least resistance and fall into the trap of current day, algorithmic content and short form content.

I hate the concept of ‘content’. It just seems like such slop, AI generated garbage. It’s this social media influencer type, gary V type who tells everyone to be churning out content all the time. Yes that’s what the algorithm might promote but it reduces everyone to sludge, competing for the lowest forms of attention for scraps. There are other producers who put out very occasional and high quality ‘content’ of a different level. Here I’m thinking of Dan Carlin, stuffmadehere. It’s not ‘art’, but it can be high quality. It’s something that you learn from and do not regret.

The things that appeal to a large audience are necessarily appealing to things that bind us all, but are low. This is spectacle, fireworks, marvel, lizard brain stuff, easy and accessible. It’s also interesting to see those works that heavily appeal to a small niche, that really tells you something about yourself. What is the song/movie/book that is most hated generally but is also your favourite?

Charting certain things against the mainstream is like a measure of your own unique personality, those difference are what makes you you. The x axis here is the same for everyone, but the y axis and distance from the x value is your uniqueness score.

It also seems easy to be a hater. It’s easier to be contrarian, find things to fill the bottom of the chart out. To say you love something is to be vulnerable, to open yourself up. If someone says they hate it, it feels like an attack because you love it and it’s part of your identity in a small way.

It could be generalised into these areas:

The average person is consuming a lot of low quality media. I’d say it looks something like this:

Think about an ideal, smart young person, a conscientious citizen, someone who wants to understand the world deeply and connect with history and the human experience. what might such a person do? When I think about this as an ideal, it’s a total inversion.

If a piece of content is not going to be thought about, consumed, or have any impact in the future, what is the point of consuming it today? It’s a deep question. Consuming that is basically saying time is unlimited, I’ll just have a snack for now, I will never die. There’s no urgency, no selectivity, because nothing has been consciously prioritised. We have not rejected anything, just added more on top. It’s like the US government printing more money for new projects instead of budgeting what they already have.

This is my current goal. I am setting strict app limits on my phone, and doing a digital diet. If it’s not going to be consumed in 500 years, then I don’t want to see it.

There is the question of taste, and I think choosing ‘harder’ content is part of developing it. You only get fit by running longer and faster, get muscle by lifting heavier, and only get taste by pushing the limits. This means to be selective, choosing things that are difficult but not too difficult, and being humble enough to choose something within that band.

Choosing old media that have stood the test of time is one shortcut to find influential good taste works. You can also follow people who have good taste, and see what they are consuming.