teenage dirtbag

WATCH DUMB VIDEO ESSAYS!!

I am so goddamn serious. If you have a short attention span, the best thing I've found to help with that is video essays. Please bear with me on this post, or read the tldr:

My attention span was, and still is, totally fucked from my years on the internet and my adhd. I would spend hours on tiktok, instagram reels, yotube shorts, etc, and could barely sit through a TV show episode without opening pintrest to get even more mental stimulation.

But fast-forward to mid-fall last year, where I got really into video essays. Started out with 5 minute "storytime stickmen" videos, then 10 minute explanations of game lore bits, then 15 minute videos on punk subculture stuff, etc, and even though I was still using pintrest and reels relentlessly outside of that, after a little while, I realized that I had stopped pulling out my phone mid-video. The videos were actually grabbing and KEEPING my attention, even if I had little to no prior interest in the subject.

And by now, I've finished multiple 2.5 hour long videos on totally random stuff like the characterization of king candy, the making of a now lost-media tinkerbell movie, weird random stuff in fnaf security breach, etc. Now I actually SEEK OUT these longer videos, and even find myself getting involuntarily disappointed when a video essay I'm watching cuts out at 20 minutes! I actually enjoy sitting through long videos now!

And sure, I don't always watch them in one sitting, but if anything that's even better! I can come back to a video I was in the middle of and STILL keep my attention on it!

This is all to say, you can't just cold-turkey your way out of the instant-dopamine-rush of shortform content. It's just not gonna work. But if you do it gradually, you will likely find yourself getting actually INTERESTED in just the act of watching a longer video. And maybe by extension, you'll find yourself being more engaged in things like your classes because you're already GOOD at being engaged with lectures on random stuff, which will likely make you want to find MORE of that class content (the coursework) because you're used to the information being given for even longer periods of time than the classes are.

Now, this won't work for every type of content, and it obviously won't completely fix your attention span. Hell, I'm still addicted to plenty of online shortform content. But it is undeniably helpful to have even just one facet of your attention span be over an hour.

TLDR (since this IS a post directed at people with short attention spans); I used to have a detrimentally short-as-fuck attention span, but I basically exposure-therapy'd myself into enjoying long videos, and it did WONDERS for my attention span. I want to help you do the same.

So please, for the good of your brain,

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

The beauty of it is that you could place that exact same dialogue into any time and place in human history and it would make just as much sense, you could have it as a conversation between sailors in a 1600s ship, a group of bronze-age warriors cleaning their weapons, stone age hunters walking home from a hunt, or a bunch of 21st century redditors on the internet, and it would hit just as splendidly.

There was this conversation about if you could have sex with any specific person from any time through human history, which one would you choose? Famous legendary lovers were brought up, queens, emperors and such were popular, might as well fuck Rasputin just to see what the hype was all about, the kind of answers one would expect.

Then some guy said he would choose his own late wife. He went on to talk about how brutal it is, that you might find the love of your life, but there's no promise that this life couldn't be suddenly cut short. That his body aches for hers and how there isn't much he wouldn't do for one more opportunity to make love to her one last time.

Now, I'd like you to imagine a pause in the conversation. A solemn, contemplative moment of silence, with several of the people present nodding in agreement that this is indeed the finest answer - it wasn't a competition, but there's no doing better than that.

And then someone breaks this solemn silence and says: