I'm losing my will to fight. You're losing your will to fight. In the last few weeks, you've been nothing but despair. I am trying to hold it together so I can keep up the fight. But it's been getting harder. All the levity has been lost. I guess I got more levity from you than I realized. I don't know how I became so dependent on you. Isolation has become the norm for us, I guess. But right now, all I know is that I can't do this without you. You've gotta stay strong, and stay light. So that I can stay strong, and stay light.

Yes, you. The faceless mass.

I've been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.

Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I've ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?

Fifty-four thousand.

I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.

I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.

I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That's 5,475 hours per year. It's not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that's about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.

That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years' worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.

Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.

How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don't want to know.

I've always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That's why time has gone by so quickly.

Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn't care about the incalculable damage it's doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won't be the last.

Never again.

While they're busy loading your bike, hop into their driver's seat. If you're lucky, maybe they left the keys in the ignition, free car! If not, either surprise the fuck out of them and ask "Where are we going?", or call the law, or just beat the shit out of them, your choice.

So four weeks into the new year most regulars are at my gym and two of the 50 new people stayed.

Maybe someone is here who is one of the vanished people that I can "bait" back to the gym, atleast is my hope. So now real talk:

BRO, it's four weeks. FOUR WEEKS. You can't and I can't fix a trashy one decade lasting diet. You can't get from skinny to strong in four weeks. You can't get from obese to lean in four weeks. You didn't notice change after four weeks because your scale at home has the same high number?! YOU fail to understand that you are most likely GAINING MUSCLES and LOSING FAT at the same time so your job is to throw that scale away and take pictures of yourself every week.

Throw away all youtubers you know and just go to the gym and move things around. You don't need splits, routines, kcal counting, you need to get back to this gym and keep going.

I am not saying counting kcals, tracking protein intake, following a routine is bad. In fact all these things increase the time to reach goals if done correctly. But if you are exhausted and quit after four weeks cause counting kcal is exhausting, you hate every protein shake, you are following a routine you hate you will fail.

If you hate doing benchpresses find another exercise that is for your chest that you love. Who cares if benchpresses are better for chest if you won't do it the rest of your life while you love doing push ups but not doing them cause it's not in your routine.

Find one, only ONE exercise you like and stick to it. Forget about all those woobidoobi youtubers "Switch routine every 6 weeks" screw it. Do that forever if it makes you happy and makes you go to the gym regulary.

Don't scratch your whole nutrition and lifestyle just for a friggin' gym. In the end it took you (and me) a few years to get overweight or staying skinny. Forget people telling you to eat oat meal and bananas for breakfast if your bad diet was Pop tarts in the morning. You won't remove that habbit for longer than three months and eventually quit so keep eating it and go to the gym anyways. Worst case scenario is you won't gain weight but not lose weight. Not gaining weight is already a win (if obese). Worst case as a skinny dude is your not gaining muscles if not enough and being exhausted. Your body will tell you to eat if the scale isn't hint enough after a few weeks.

So get back. Don't quit. Most people in the gym are chill and honestly people quit and they don't even notice they achieved so much in four weeks.

One person started in January and told me last week he ain't seeing results. He showed me his routine and I told him: "Bro, you started Latpulldowns at 3x12 with 25 kg. You are ding 32,5 kg now..." 7,5 kgs more. He didn't see that as a positive result because his physic hasn't changed.

good morning! what do you plan to do today?

3 months later back to zero.

People say that dying isn't the solution... But piling this with my eternal single status, loneliness and other problems...

Life is a torture.

I am a native English speaker and recently started learning Esperanto a few weeks ago. I was inspired by a TED Talk that explained how Esperanto is an excellent first choice for those interested in acquiring multiple languages.

Due to its relative simplicity, learning Esperanto effectively prepares your brain for learning additional languages, making the process quicker and smoother.

So how many here speak different languages and what are they?

I'm putting in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for my living room today. I mostly read e-books on my Kindle, but I have an affection for old paperback pulp books from 60's and 70's.

So I go to ebay and buy "lots" of them fairly cheap, not caring about the titles. Sometimes 10 books at a time. Now that I'm retired I plan to read every single one, even the bad ones. I have the equivalent of a small home library of them now.

How many fiction books do you all read? E-book or paperback. But not interesting in audiobooks. I'm curious about physically-read books.

This is my first post on Lemmy that isn't a reply.

GOOOOOOD MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORNING!!!!

I hope you have a swell day today. what do you plan on doing today?

Feel free to have a look at

• !movies@lemm.ee
• !showsandmovies@lemm.ee
• !animation@lemm.ee
• !horrormovies@lemm.ee

Being allergic to ads, I can’t watch YT on the default app. Google isn’t one of my favorite companies, so getting premium isn’t on my wishlist either.

When at home, I use a computer with Firefox and uBlock origin, but now I’m traveling light , so I left my laptop at home. Previously, it was possible to use my iPad to block YT ads, but that stopped working about two months ago. There are ways to watch those videos anyway, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can avoid YT instead.

Currently, I’m traveling with a tablet and several video apps, such as Nebula, Odysee and even Loops. My local TV channels have made some video apps, and nextDNS can block those ads without any issues, so now is the time to explore those as well.

Got any thoughts, questions, comments, or random stuff?

Edit: Turns out, my nextDNS was blocking .*.jnn-pa.googleapis.com, and that causes videos to stop after precisely 60 s. If you allow the jnn-pa.googleapis.com, the videos can once again play normally. That didn’t used to be a problem. Maybe nextDNS didn’t block it before, maybe YT didn’t route any critical traffic through there or something. Who knows. Either way, if your videos stop after 1 minute, make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com is not blocked in your DNS settings.

So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I've given up.

It wasn't one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don't have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.

So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I've given up and just..... bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.

See, the thing I really didn't consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.

It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there's a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.

For everything the watch doesn't do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn't strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don't want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.

For sure, it's not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the "cheapest" versions, and I'm paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it's $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).

I certainly did.

I was taking a wooden box apart and realized I grabbed the wrong bit. Rather than go get the correct one I used my extremely hard head and decided to make the wrong bit work. The screws were not fooled.

On the bright side, I successfully turned a <5 minute activity into a 2+ hour project. Go me!

Edit1: some thoughts based on comments. I was diagnosed with low vitamin D a few months ago but took bills. Maybe a month ago I ran out. I thought getting outside more recently was enough. You all inspired me to be more serious about it. Got my vitamin D3 and b12 pills.

Also, I noticed the two days I felt so tired I slept later and had alcohol too late in the night. One drink but around 12am. I think not just sleep quantity but when I sleep and quality matter.

Will aim to take my pills, not drink after 8-9pm if I drink, and sleep before 11pm.

Thanks for all the advice :)