105 hours: Content feeding tubes

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours: allocate 9 hours a day to sleep, and you have 105 hours a week for everything else.

When we say someone is “on social media,” what do we mean?

Maybe they’re talking to a friend. Maybe they’re publishing something. But mostly, if we’re honest, they’re watching videos of “strangers.” Someone’s morning routine. Someone’s opinion on the drama du jour. Someone’s tips to get leaner, stronger, smarter, or squeeze more out of your phone. Someone’s breakup, in three parts. Someone’s pets. Someone reacting to someone else’s video.

For hours. Every day.

We already have a name for that someone: content creators. Nobody uses the name for the other side, but it’s right there. Content consumers.

If “content consumer” doesn’t sound social, that’s because it isn’t.

Social media is no longer about being social. It’s about media. It’s a hub for content creators on one end, content consumers on the other, with an algorithm in between.

You don’t need to talk to anyone. You don’t even need to follow anyone in particular. You don’t record your own videos or write your own articles. The app already knows what you’ll watch, and it has the next one ready before this one ends, and on, and on.

So they’re less like powerful instant messaging and more like content feeding tubes.

Open the app, get fed, keep swallowing until you manage to stop. Which both the app and the creators are working hard to prevent.

That’s what this post is about: why “social media” is the wrong name for the thing eating our attention, why video is the heart of the problem, and the blunt rule I use to keep it out of my 105 hours.

It got me too

Earlier this year, I spent a chunk of my hours on YouTube. Not doomscrolling. “Studying” or so I told myself. Hikaru teaching chess. Mike Israetel explaining hypertrophy.

Not anymore.

It felt great to watch Hikaru go over his thinking in his Slowkaru series. But it didn’t teach me nearly as much chess as playing and analyzing my own games with an AI coach, or working through the book Build Up Your Chess with an actual board in front of me.

Israetel is genuinely entertaining, but I already own the one video of his I actually need, Weight Training for Grappling, and it’s how I found out about his YouTube channel in the first place. His books are also really good.

I call watching these videos performative studying. Like watching great piano players instead of spending time at the piano.

Performative studying feels good but doesn’t make you good.

I do watch TV

A couple years ago I spent a whole year without watching TV. I’ve written about it in this series. Huge time savings, by the way.

But I do watch TV now.

I watch the UFC. I’ve been watching the anime Frieren, and I’m a big fan of Rick and Morty. I watched Ted Lasso, though I much prefer its first season, and I’ll still rewatch John Wick and the Bourne movies every so often. I also play plenty of video games. I bought a Steam Deck specifically to play Chrono Trigger, considered by many the best video game of all time.

My wife and I like watching TV together. It’s a program for two. My TV-free year was fine for me, but it took something away from us, and she told me that was the last year I was doing that.

Sounds reasonable.

But I don’t use Instagram or TikTok. I get AI summaries of X instead of using their website. No podcasts: I don’t have much chore time where they’d fit, and when I exercise, I much prefer listening to music.

In practice, most of what I consume is in books.

So I watch TV. I just don’t get fed.

The line I’m drawing isn’t between screens and books. It’s between choosing what I watch and being fed whatever I’ll keep watching.

Now, I can hear the objection. Netflix has autoplay, recommendations, and a bottomless catalog. Isn’t it just a feeding tube with a bigger budget?

Yes. Let’s talk about that.

Netflix is a feeding tube too

Netflix knows exactly what it is. Back in 2017, its CEO said their biggest competitor wasn’t HBO or YouTube. It was sleep. Does that sound like a content feeding tube to you? It does to me.

And look at how it uses video. You open the app and a trailer starts playing before you’ve touched anything. Scroll and the tiles autoplay. Finish an episode and the next one starts in five seconds unless you intervene. Video, video, video.

Now, you might say the food is different. Netflix spends billions on it. Frieren is beautiful. Nobody is comparing that to a reaction video.

Sure. But ask what the billions are for. Netflix invented the binge: entire seasons dropped at once, so there’s never a week to wait and cool off. It added Skip Intro and Skip Recap so the only thing standing between two episodes is a five-second countdown. Its own Top 10 doesn’t rank shows by how good they are. It ranks them by hours viewed.

Netflix doesn’t sell shows. It sells hours consumed. The show is the bait, and the more expensive the bait, the longer you stay on the hook.

TikTok gets your hours with a million cheap videos. Netflix gets them with a few very expensive ones. Different food, same delivery.

The app is the feeding tube no matter what type of food it’s feeding you.

Video is the problem

Here’s my argument: the problem is video. Not “screens,” not “social media.”

Video.

I know a book can keep you up too late. I’m not saying text is perfect. I’m saying video has a combination of properties that no other format has.

Text waits for you. You scan, skip, stop to think, reread a sentence. If you stop reading, nothing happens.

Video doesn’t wait. Someone talks, the camera cuts, something moves. The sound is stimulating you all the time. Even when nothing is being said, there’s no silence. The next bit arrives whether you wanted it or not.

Audio-only is completely different. A podcast keeps talking, but your eyes are free. You can cook or walk. Do the dishes. Why do the dishes without listening to a podcast, after all? Nobody sits down just to listen to a podcast. Unless it’s video, that is.

Video takes your eyes, your ears, your whole attention. And content feeding tubes line up the next video.

Videos aren’t books in video form; they are different products. And it’s not a coincidence that every social platform has been drifting toward video for a decade, instead of away from it.

If your job is to keep people consuming, video is simply the better tube.

There are no text tubes

You might ask: what about LinkedIn and X? Those are text feeds, and they’re tubes too.

Look closer. I just checked my own LinkedIn feed: 18 of the top 20 posts have an image or a video. And LinkedIn doesn’t show me more than one sentence of the text itself unless I click the “…more” link. Go check yours. Does that sound like a text tube to you?

The “text” tubes aren’t text tubes. They’re image and video tubes with captions.

And that’s not an accident. Text makes a terrible feeding tube.

Strip the images and video out of any feed and what’s left is walls of text. LinkedIn in 2026 is genuinely exhausting to scroll, and it’s gotten noticeably worse as more of it is written by AI. It will keep getting worse.

Great writers spend enormous amounts of time hunting for the flow, the story, the right word. Editing is the heart of writing. A feed optimized for volume can’t do any of that, so the text in a feed is both exhausting to read and not worth reading.

Words can be measured. Good writing can’t. So the tubes stopped betting on words.

As AI video generation gets good and cheap, the stock photo under every LinkedIn post becomes a twenty-second clip. The tubes will all end up as video, because video is what works.

Which is why “no video” cuts the problem at the root instead of trimming the branches. The text that’s left either bores you off the platform, overwhelms you with AI slop, or sends you somewhere worth reading, like a book or a blog you chose to visit.

Friends who don’t know you exist

Remember the morning routines and the breakups in three parts from the beginning? There’s a name for why people watch those: a parasocial relationship.

You feel like you know someone who has no idea you exist. You know their house, their partner, their routines, their drama. You have opinions about their choices. A new video feels like catching up with a friend, and skipping one feels a little like ghosting.

It’s the perfect fuel for a feeding tube. A tutorial you watch once. A person you come back to every day. Creators know it too. That’s why the content drifts from “here’s what I know” toward “here’s my life.” The life never runs out of episodes.

The relationship becomes the reason to keep watching, long after the content stopped having anything to say.

It’s also why the name “social media” still fools us. The thing does feel social. Someone is talking to you, every day, about their life. It just isn’t a relationship. It’s a broadcast with your face in the audience.

That’s the sneaky part of my chess and weightlifting phase. I didn’t keep watching Hikaru because I was learning. I kept watching because I liked Hikaru. That’s fine for a friend. It’s a strange amount of my week to give to a stranger.

Watching Ted Lasso with my wife is time with a person who knows me and shares my life. Watching someone tell an audience about their breakup is a different activity that happens to feel similar.

The irony you can cut with a hammer

A friend recently forwarded me a video: “Why Old RPGs Heal Your Brain.” A psychologist talking about the benefits of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy.

I left it playing for five minutes while I got dressed for BJJ. It opens with a question: have you ever put your phone down after an hour of scrolling and felt a strange emptiness, like your brain got dirty? That’s brain rot. Social media, she says, is designed like a casino to fry your attention. Old RPGs are the opposite, a garden for your brain. They demand patience and reward focus.

Wait.

A YouTube video about how social media rots your brain and how the audience should play Chrono Trigger. But the audience is by definition consuming a video, not playing Chrono Trigger. Right?

The irony was so thick you could cut it with a hammer.

For this post, I asked AI to pull the full transcript. It gets better.

Right after the casino line, she asks you to subscribe: the channel has playlists with more than sixty videos on games and psychology. Halfway through, the video about dopamine hijacking pauses for a sponsor, the wireless microphone she recorded it with, link in the description. It closes with a challenge to swap thirty minutes of social media for thirty minutes of an RPG, and a request to drop your suggestions in the comments so she can make a whole video about Chrono Trigger next. No kidding.

Sixty videos, a sponsor, a subscribe button, and a comments section.

Does that sound to you like the garden that “demands patience and rewards focus”? Or does it sound like the casino?

And here’s the part I couldn’t have caught in five minutes: she makes my argument for me. She praises old RPGs for making you press a button to advance each line of dialogue, because it gives you back control of time. You read at your own pace. The information gets digested instead of run over by frantic scenes. Active consumption instead of passive.

She’s making the case for active consumption instead of passive.. in a video. An eighteen-minute video.

While the video is ironic, I understand the creator’s dilemma: the tube is where the audience is. Even the people who see the problem clearly have to deliver the diagnosis through the tube, and the tube is happy to serve it.

Right before the next video.

“Nobody” is going to learn about the garden of old RPGs in a book, after all.

Calling the problem “social media” lets YouTube pretend it’s outside the problem. Call it a content feeding tube, and YouTube is the biggest one.

Feeding tube even accidentally rhymes with YouTube. Right?

You..

.. Tube.

Think about it. What does You.. Tube.. do?

What I’m doing about it

I like blunt instruments. Nothing is perfect, but simple rules beat complex rules because you don’t have to relitigate them every night.

No video is a good blunt rule. It removes 90% of the problem for maybe 10% of the benefit. Sometimes you can get that 10% somewhere else.

I have my own exceptions, and you should have yours. Write down specifically what you watch and why. If it’s an indulgence, fine, we’re all human. But ideally it’s something inherently fun or inherently good for you, not a parasocial relationship with a para-celebrity.

Here’s my list. The UFC. A small list of shows I built with AI, which is how I found the anime Frieren. TV with my wife, which we keep for the weekends when we’re both free. And a handful of movies I’ll happily rewatch.

Even on weekends I usually pick something else first: friends, video games. I also play guitar and study chess, but those aren’t really competing with TV. They take energy, and some weekends I don’t have it. Having time for something doesn’t mean having the energy for it.

Can’t just swap an evening of TV for chess study.

Everything not on the list is out. No YouTube, no Instagram, no TikTok, no X or LinkedIn. No podcasts.

No videos.

The chess happens on a board. The training happens in the gym. No performative studying.

Whatever I choose to feed my brain with, none of it comes through a tube.