Curiosity Is a Trap Now

What’s different about learning new things now vs when I was a kid is how algorithms immediately bombard you once you express a new interest.

I’m old so I only had books to learn from as a kid.

I had to physically search out new information I was interested in, like some kind of nerdy dinosaur.

It was harder to get distracted because at some point, you just ran out of the material in your hand.

So you either had to leave your house and search for more on your own, like at a library or bookstore, or go do something else.

Now, as a new video creator just trying to get started, the minute I open YouTube I immediately get ambushed with videos that are way too far ahead of me right now in my YT journey.

Or not really where I want to take my channel at all.

I say I’m going to just go past them and do what I came here to do.

But they’re like those guys on the sidewalk in Times Square that shove flyers in your face as you walk by.

I came here to get some concealer at Sephora. But you know, I could probably squeeze in a comedy show first.

Who knows? I might learn something about being funny that might help me in some other area of my life.

The YT thumbnails are worse than those flyers, though, because of all the razor sharp marketing tactics in play. And because YT has a pretty good beat on what it thinks I’m trying to do.

But after providing the click-through metric, I don’t feel a sense of mastery.

And I don’t get a challenging idea to chew on, annoy all my friends with, and then produce something out of that.

I get a kind of sad left-behind feeling, or wondering if I’m doing all the wrong things (prolly because so many thumbnails say, you’re doing all the wrong things 😂).

And I waste my productive time, or worse — my reflective time where my voice lives — in 15-30 minute increments with no artifacts to show the world what I learned.

The tragedy of living in an algocentric world isn’t just that we’re distracted.

It’s that we’re hypnotized in a spin cycle that never produces anything.

Instead of a valuable learning resource, YouTube has become one more place for hard boundaries.

The irony is it isn’t YT’s fault. I was the first one to ask a question about making videos.

But that question inadvertently turned on a fire hose, when I was just trying to figure out how to light a match.

If you like to make things, how do you handle this?

Especially when you’re in an environment where your most valuable tools are trying to take the lead on where you go?

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