Stop Consuming Content and Start Creating it

In this article I wanted to discuss some of my thoughts about consuming content. What I mean when I say “consuming content” is actively spending time watching/reading things that other people have produced. Examples of consuming content is watching YouTube videos mindlessly consuming the content that YouTube recommends to you, reading news articles, watching Netflix/Disney Plus etc. Let’s face it how many of us mindlessly consume content on YouTube that it recommends to us especially with the addition of YouTube shorts its so easy to mindlessly spend hours watching funny 30 second videos of YouTube shorts.

I made an article in 2020 about how you should stop consuming new content – in that article I argued that people nowadays place a priority on content that is new over content that actually has value. I also argued that content that is old has stood the test of time and that content that is old such as movies, books etc will be of greater value that content that is new because that old content is still considered good in this day and age even though it was made years ago, while content that is new hasn’t stood the test of time. The point I was getting at in that article is that old good content such as the book the Tao Te Ching has lasted for generations upon generations and has proven to be good high-quality content. Therefore, we should place greater value on the content that is old and good rather than constantly consuming the latest content from the news etc.

I also just want to highlight how effective modern-day media is at making you watch/read. YouTube videos have mastered the art of getting you to click on their videos with eye grabbing titles and thumbnails that have someone’s facial expression with their facial expressions shocked/laughing/confused or doing something to encourage you to click that video. YouTube is now a world of videos with such effective click-bait videos that it takes a strong will to not be sucked into the videos. The recommend videos are now so well-tuned with such effective algorithms that it is so easy for you to get sucked in watching video after video and spending so much time watching that content in the process.

I personally have blocked the YouTube website several times this year using hosts dns file because of how much time I spend mindlessly consuming the content on the platform. Granted I do use an add-blocker “ublock origin” which saves me time by not having ads. But even still I spend unhealthy amounts of time mindlessly consuming content in my recommended because of how effective and fine-tuned the recommended system is on YouTube, hence why I’ve blocked the website several times. I would even go so far as to say that YouTube itself has become a form of mind control because it makes you spend so much time on that platform mindlessly consuming video after video with such well-tuned algorithms and stops you from doing more constructive things.

But the whole reason I’m making this article is because I decided to search on Google “stop watching youtube” and I came across a number of websites, one of which was a blog called “monthlymethod” link is https://monthlymethod.com/stop-watching-netflix/ and essentially the article goes onto say that if you want to stop consuming content, start producing it instead and I kind of took to this because I think that creating content is much more important than consuming it because when you create content it forces you to actually think about what you want to produce and when you produce said content that thing is yours forever. So I just want to emphasis here how important it is for you to reduce your consumption of online content and emphasis how important it is to create content because I’m of the mind that everyone should bring to the world themselves in their entirety and creating content is an extension of yourself and what you represent to the world. Hence why I recommend that everyone starts their own blog and share with the world their own ideas on topics and have their say because its also an important part of democracy (power to the people) for everyone to share their ideas/thoughts on topics.

But I guess what I really also wanted to highlight in this article is how effective modern-day media has become at getting you to consume it. YouTube especially has become a master at getting you to consume the content on there with such effective algorithms. I also just wanted to say that you should be more mindful of the content that you consume because as the old saying goes “you are what you eat” and what is meant by this is that whatever you take in and consume – you become. If you are filling yourself with content that promotes hate/racism etc then you are more likely to be a person that has hate and racism as part of them.

I also just want to emphasis how important it is for you to produce content yourself. There are many different ways you can do this, examples include creating videos on YouTube, creating your own personal blog, creating coding projects, streaming on Twitch.tv, creating personal vlogs about your life, creating a book of your own etc. Consuming content only affects you, creating content has the capacity to affect every single person. Ponder on that.

I’ve also decided that on this blog I’m going to bring back every article that I’ve ever deleted, except for the articles which I think are just of too poor a quality to keep the blog’s authenticity. I will also get back to posting about updates on learning French but right now I’ve taken about a month break from learning French mainly because I lost interest in it, but I will get back to learning it. I’m also in the process of fixing this blog’s SEO (search engine optimization) because this blog is indexed very poorly on Google for some reason, so I’m still trying to fix that.