Perspective shift.

Imagine zooming out of your body, into the sky, looking down at all the people and land and everything.

You can’t keep up with all that, right? But is most of it really worth much? Is a squirrel eating a nut over yonder really all that important?

Your attention is always limited in scope, but it’s existing in a nearly unlimited world. So you have to manually constrain it with your own conscious decision-making. Goals are helpful in this.

Can also help to relieve the FOMO on actually genuinely important things to you by setting up a nice system that feeds you the news you want. There’s lots of services.

Two sayings come to mind, “You can’t do everything” and “Variety is the spice of life.”

There is not enough time/energy/money to do everything. Life is short, pick and choose what you do and try to experience all the different things you can.

Once you let go of feeling like you need to do everything it’s liberating. You can make your own path, but still do things you used to do as well.

Accepting the “missing out” part is the hardest battle to overcome, but I like to think of it in terms of active versus passive.

There are only so many minutes during a day and every minute spent doing one thing means that is a minute not doing something else. If I have to choose how to spend one minute or sixty, I choose between active and passive activities. It’s perfectly fine to do a passive activity, but every minute spent in something passive - that is, something that does not require you to entirely engage - is a minute away from something active - that is, something that does require your full engagement.

Obviously, you can’t spend a full day on “active” activities or you would readily burn out, but life is generally more pleasurable when we engage in something active versus passive. It’s more “doing versus seeing. So, take an hour and watch something on YouTube, but make it a relaxation from a number of active activities rather than endlessly watching without getting anything else out of it.

“It takes all kinds” is something I have remind myself when comparing myself to others. If were all the same we would be collectively lesser for it.

Everything is an opportunity cost. That is, if you’re engaging in YouTube you are missing out on something else. It’s fine if that’s the choice you want to make, but understand that you’re “missing out” on hanging out with friends or reading or video games or calling a family member.

I subscribed to too many YouTubes. Then I tried to watch all the good videos from the YouTubes I was subscribed to.

I can sort of almost keep up? If I go and watch YouTube constantly I can clear like 6 months’ backlog in 2 months. But then at the end of the 2 months I’m like, was all that stuff really any better than the new stuff that’s showing up today? Or than the other stuff I would have been watching or listening to? And the answer is really no.

So I think next time I take an interest in YouTube I’m not going to try and clear the backlog. It’s not like it won’t be there later; if I hear of a great video, I can go and watch it. And anything that won’t be there latter is deliberately designed to exclude me, so why would I want it?

Whatever you decide to participate in, you’re participating in that thing. You can’t actually participate in anything if you keep going around trying to participate in everything at once.