At some point I noticed I couldn’t tell which video I actually wanted to watch.

Not in a “too many options” way. More like: I’d be scrolling through Instagram or YouTube, something would catch my eye, I’d watch it, and by the end I couldn’t tell you if it had been worth my time. Everything registered as roughly the same signal. I was consuming a lot and feeling like damn, I’ve just spent too much time on “entertainment” again.

My first explanation was the content itself… it was just random videos/reels/shorts that I got lost into. So I upgraded it. Started reading newsletters, long-form articles, trained the algorithms to serve me more informative stuff. I was being intentional now.

It got worse in a very short period of time. I ended up adding a layer of “good” content on top of the existing layer, and now I had more things demanding my attention with no better way to tell which ones deserved it. The numbness didn’t go away at all, it kept increasing.

Around the same time I came across an article on “Intentional Curiosity” about using distraction deliberately. One idea stayed with me: keeping part of your brain occupied so the rest of it can actually focus. I’d been doing that with my work playlist for years without thinking about it that way. It made me realise I’d never asked what job I wanted my content to do. The algorithm wasn’t asking either. It was just optimising for the next click.

There are two kinds of pull, I think. One loops back — “ok, one last video and then I’ll sleep.” The other spills outward: you watch something, look something up, find yourself thinking about it later. The algorithm is good at the first. It doesn’t care about the second at all.

That’s what the numbness actually was, I think. My threshold had been flooded with diversive pulls, and I’d lost the ability to tell them apart from anything else. Everything registered the same because I’d trained myself to respond to the same thing over and over.

The algorithm was asking “does this feel good?” I tried replacing that with “is this important?”, but that was just as hard to answer when I was already numb to gradations of quality. What actually worked was something simpler: does this make me want to dig into the actual topic? Not the next video. The subject itself. Do I want to look something up, read more, come back to it later?

I started using the like and not-interested buttons aggressively on all apps. Not to build a feed of “Serious Responsible Content”, I am a human after all. I kept the memes, the entertainment, things that were purely fun. But everything I actively encouraged had to do something: give me “news” or teach me something I’d find myself thinking about later, make me curious about a topic I hadn’t considered, or genuinely make me laugh instead of just fill time.

This had an unintentional side-effect too! I started consuming less without trying to. When the threshold is “does this trigger actual curiosity,” most content fails it automatically. The feed got smaller on its own.

I still have to steer it. The algorithm drifts toward whatever’s getting engagement, which isn’t always the same thing. But the steering itself feels different now, I’m making a judgment about what the content is doing, not just reflexively scrolling past it. In a way, the feedback I give the algorithm is also feedback I give myself about what I actually find interesting. I’d never done that deliberately before.

The numbness is mostly gone. I think. It’s hard to tell if I’ve actually fixed something or just changed what I’m numb to.