And Yet I Still Watch

I scroll through YouTube’s endless thumbnails and I am bored. Bored of the screaming, the sensationalism, the world set permanently to crisis pitch. Every title lunges at me like a street preacher on fire: torched, crashes out, slays, buried, ruined, exposed, lies, psyop, explodes, rails against, unprecedented, loses it. All of it happening now, all of it urgent, all of it bad.

And yes — bad shit is happening. Of course it is. But maybe I don’t want to know about it all the time. Maybe I want to step away from the apocalypse carousel for five minutes without being told I’m complicit or asleep or falling behind.

Then, nestled between the madness, come the balms.

A three-minute reset that calmed my anxiety.

How to find meaning when life feels overwhelming.

Stop overthinking. Start trusting.

Whispers among the howls.

So which is it? Is the world on fire, or should I be meditating with a cup of turmeric tea and breathing through my nose? Do the soft-voiced sages cancel out the chaos, or are they part of the same trap — just another mood being marketed?

These amateur psychiatrists and two-bit philosophers, why should I trust them? They film in warmly lit bedrooms and speak slowly like I’m ten and scared, and maybe I am, but still — how do they know more than I do? Why do they get to sound so sure?

I don’t trust them. But I keep scrolling anyway.

And then I click on something. A sliver of genuine curiosity. Only to be met with two ads: one totally irrelevant and the other performed by the very host of the video I’m trying to watch. He’s now moonlighting as a salesman for a productivity app or some vitamin drink designed to replenish the soul, apparently. I sit through it. Like I always do.

Then comes the teaser. A repeat of the thumbnail. A loop of soundbites and clips, reminding me again of what I already clicked on. The whole video is barely three minutes long, but it's structured like a trailer for a trailer for a thought that never quite arrives.

And the content? A reaction to a reaction about a theory that isn’t even fact. Might never be. Doesn’t matter. It feels like momentum. It feels like I’m learning something. Until the next one starts autoplaying and I realise I’ve forgotten the last one already.

And yet I still watch.

God help me, I still watch.