Well said. My weekend turns out to be decompression time.

But watching youtube for your decompression doesn't get you to a well rested state. It can do the opposite. So you aren't making any progress toward actually getting free time.

Better decompression. Turn off all networking. Read something for 5 minutes and go for a walk. Successful decompression in 10 minutes, not 10 hours.

Whether intentional or not, or just progressive improvement on algorithms, youtube thrives by providing a need, and then providing it poorly so you keep your watch time going forever. This is a fun feature of machine learning. Non-willfull conspiracies. A system can do something malicious to get ahead that is equivalent to a highly calculated malicious action, while no one, including the model itself or the algorithms that trained it, or the people who trained it, understands what it's doing.

I'm sure that applies to a lot of people, but even when I have, like, 1 day of stress and a month of chill time, I still spend the whole month laying around doing nothing if I don't force myself to do something productive.

Decompression time is definitely important, but it's also important to know yourself enough to identify when you're fully decompressed and ready to do something healthy for your body and mind, even if you just wanna watch another youtube video.

Abso-fuckin-lutely thats also why working so much sucks too because you dont have enough time to decompress LET ALONE any free time and its frustrating because it looks and feels like you just do nothing/have bad time management/are a slob when you’re off work and it becomes a maddening cycle

10 hours of YouTube is not decompression

2 hours isn't even

You can spell "unencumbered" but not pursue or pursuit?