Today’s blog post is a slightly edited version of an email I received from my business coach, Peter Carruthers, founder of the WebPension.net community. He is an experienced businessman, and I read his book, Crash-proof Your Business, about 15 years ago, when I was first developing my company, NETUCATION. He had an online community, Business Warriors, which, for a time, was the largest paid private community in South Africa.
Anyway, his way of describing YouTube watching habits really struct a chord with me. It’s so easy to get into a repetitive loop as you watch one video after another, recommended by the YouTube algorithm, which you essentially train each time you like or comment on a video.
Here’s it straight from Peter Carruthers:
Late last year, I stopped watching YouTube. Not cut down. Not limited. Stopped.
Many of us begin watching with good intentions. We want to stay informed. We want context. We want to understand what is happening in the world. For me, it was politics. For you, it might be news, health, finance, or endless commentary about how everything is falling apart.
It starts reasonably. Then something changes.
You notice a tightness. A low-level agitation. A feeling that never quite switches off. You watch one video, then another appears. Then another. Two hours pass without effort.
That is not accidental. YouTube is not a library. It is not a news service. It is an advertising machine. The platform makes money only when you stay watching. Every extra minute allows another advert to be shown. The longer you are emotionally hooked, the more valuable you become to Google. (They’re already worth 3.98 thousand billion dollars, because you and I cannot stop watching YouTube today.)
So the system is designed around one question. What keeps us watching? It is emotion: Anger. Fear. Outrage. Shock. Tribal loyalty. The algorithm learns what tightens your chest and feeds you more of it.
If a video makes you uneasy but curious, it is rewarded. If it makes you calm and thoughtful, it dies quietly.
Even the people making the videos get trapped inside this system. They get paid by the number of minutes viewed, not by video accuracy or wisdom. Minutes watched matter more than the truth delivered. So titles become louder. Thumbnails become more extreme. Language becomes urgent. Everything is framed as a crisis, to be fixed now. The entire engine demands your reactions.
After a while, your nervous system cannot rest.
I noticed it in myself. I had been watching political content for over a decade. Two/three hours most days. It felt informed. (Especially when I faced some tough problems in my own business.) But recently I realised I had no peace. Not anger exactly. Agitation. I found myself tense even when nothing was happening.
I asked ChatGPT for context.
It said something brutal but simple: Stop watching YouTube today. No medication. No therapy. No long explanation.
I described the anxiety, the constant news intake, and the sense of being unable to switch off. It gave me the same answer. Stop watching YouTube Today.
Within days of stopping, something shifted. My thoughts slowed. My breathing softened. I could read again without needing stimulation. The background noise faded.
The world did not improve. But my relationship to it did. This matters deeply for us seniors.
We grew up in a time when information arrived one page at a time—or twice a day on the radio. There was an endpoint. Silence returned.
Today, there is no ending built into the system. The machine never sleeps, because your attention is the product.
Choosing calm is not ignorance. Turning down noise is not denial. It is an act of self-protection. At this stage of life, attention is precious. Energy is precious. Peace is precious. Not everything that asks for your time deserves it.
The quiet that follows stepping away is not emptiness. It is a relief.
More than that, it offers time to think about (and work towards) a new future.
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