Even though the study’s outcome makes intuitive sense, the insights should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
For anyone interested in statistics:
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That’s where the toilet visit and use of mobile phone meet again 
I mainly use my phone for the fact that 1.75x speed is not available on TV (at least my Samsung only does 1.5x or 2x).
I blocked YouTube, news and social media on all my devices with Freedom.to. I used to spend hours on these things but the older I am the less time to waste I have, and I realized that as an Internet addict I can’t consume this stuff in moderation, so (like an alcoholic or a cig smoker) I had to cut the crap out completely from my life. I realized that watching (some) valuable content (from time to time) is not worth the price of blowing up a day (and melting my brain in the process) every time I open YouTube and lost my day in some rabbit hole.
It might seem radical but I learnt that this is one of the most effective ways for me personally to be more productive, release some time for more meaningful leisure (reading, listening to podcasts/audiobooks while walking, exercising, talking to friends and family, etc), and get some peace of mind. I think it made me a little bit happier person.
PS. Cal Newport’s books were a huge inspiration for me to overcome this addiction. Highly recommend.
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Sure, if you really can’t control it, then it’s the smart move. For me, it does not interfere with my work, and after work I need to do something. Without kids there isn’t any constant obligation, and after 8-9 hours work I don’t even bother doing something productive. After 17:00 me and my gf are just couch potatoes. Sure, it would be nice to go out and move a bit, but especially in the winter, when it’s dark and cold, it’s not an attractive proposition.
I’ll admit that often times even the youtube stuff bores me, and I son’t know why I pay for netflix still, mostly it’s my gf who wants to watch it. But we both wouldn’t know what else to do. We’re both so tired after work it’s often a fight who should cook. What do you propose in such situation?
I would propose physical movement, finding some meaningful hobby (or maybe experimenting with new hobbies?) or meeting with friends and family. Studies point out that socialization is one of the core aspects of experienced happiness, another is investing in experiences (rather than investing in things which is usually the status game), another is having sense of progress towards some goal. There are many others though - re-read the beginning and the middle of this thread.
Speaking of tiredness, I always have more energy over the day and especially in the evenings when I regularly exercise. It’s weird paradox but the less you do physically, the more tired you become. When I haven’t been exercising I often fall asleep while reading bedtime stories to my son. Now I do 5-10 km walk after my son falls asleep and I’m not more tired afterwards but less, much less. Additionally, as a bonus, exercise (and preferably diet) will likely extend your lifetime and healthspan, so you’ll enjoy your FIRE longer.
I can’t propose anything in particular, but I can tell you what I do. I wake up around 8 am and prepare my son to kindergarten, I get him there between 8:30-9:00. I start work at 9 am and finish at 6 pm. In the meantime twice a week I have an online German class and during lunch break I either meet with friends or I watch German television for exercise. I often do short weight lifting exercise during the day too. Oh, and when I commute to office (usually once a week) or go for lunch, I always bike to city center.
At 6 pm I pick up my son from kindergarten. Afterwards my wife comes back from work and we eat dinner. Then we play until 8 pm, then we bath our son and put him to bed to read bedtime stories. He often falls asleep around 9 pm. Afterwards I go for an hour walk and listen to podcasts or audiobooks (I have a rule: I don’t listen to stuff while not walking). In the past I went to gym at that time, but I gave up membership.
After I come back I shower and either I read a book in bed or I write or translate articles for one of the Polish think tanks (I recently wrote a short ebook for them about one of the Polish fiction authors) or sometimes I watch something on Netflix with my wife (rarely as I find Netflix has similar effect on my brain as YouTube has) or I do some other learning activities (recently I started doing more German and algorithms+data structures). At midnight I try to fall asleep.
During weekends we tend to meet with our friends, so that our kids can play together. Lately weather was beautiful so we did a lot of hiking. Below a photo from a last Sunday hike. IMHO mountains are happiness generating too. 
To sum up:
- I spend lots of time with my family
- I often meet with friends
- I walk and listen to podcasts every night
- I do weight lifting exercises every second day
- I go biking almost every day
- I read books in bed
- I translate articles on economics for a think tank
- Sometimes I write my own articles
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Not an idea for every day, but every couple weeks I try to get extended family together on Skype (~12 people in total, usually we’re 5-8 people attending) and we play some skribbl.io or garticphone.com together. It’s a great way to maintain multiple relationships at once and if you’re tired you can let the other people do most of the talking. Even not-so-computer-savvy grandma enjoys it a lot, but I usually call her 10 minutes before to help her get it working.
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Oh that’s a fantastic idea. Thanks for sharing! I tend to call my family almost every day (they often want to see my son) but I do one call after another. Grouping people in one call might be great for weekends catch up.
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I do that, but during winter evenings it’s really not appealing to go out.
Most hobbies I like, revolve around a PC, which I try to avoid after 9 hours of work. What else could I do that’s meaningful? I do play some guitar, but I’m frustrated by my lack of progress and practice is boring.
I have no family here. And practically no friends. The friends I did have, now have wives and/or kids, and it feels complicated to meet, especially that they don’t live within minutes from me. It’s quite a lonely life, the only person I have constant contact with is my gf.
That’s why I’m renting a car, which allows me to have cool weekend trips or longer holiday road-trips. It costs a lot, but I enjoy it. I have a feeling like travel and eating is the only thing that still motivates me.
Yes, the days when I play badminton or go for a bike ride, I do feel better just relaxing on the couch
That’s a bit late for my taste. I wake up at 6am and watch some youtube. At 7am my gf goes to work and I start work too. I’m finished at 4-5pm. Then I cook and watch some tv again until 10pm.
What effect is that? Addictive?
Everybody has their own clock, but I find it easiest to sleep when I go at 10pm. Not too long after it’s dark. I enjoy the sunlight so I try to get up as soon as it’s not dark. Especially in the winter we shouldn’t waste any hour of sunlight.
I talk to my mom on the phone like once every 2 weeks. Last time I added my sister to the whatsapp call, and it worked surprisingly well. It’s cool that you have 12 people in your extended family. In my case, my close family has 4 people, and the family of the aunt also has 4, but we’re in a conflict, so we don’t talk much. The rest of the family I haven’t talked in years. Grandma has dementia and does not recognize anyone. Pretty small family, huh?
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You can do physical movement at home or at gym or some other closed place. It might be not mustachian thing to do but buy a peleton or something. I think moving is super duper important and it has huge impact on brain health. At least that’s so for me.
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Maybe attend a guitar lessons? I think you’re right to stay away from screens after work. As IT people, we already overdo them at work. Maybe you can find something that you can do with your GF that both of you can enjoy? Cooking class? Dancing? Wine tasting? Starting a rock band? Learning a language? Before our son was born, back in Warsaw, I was attending with my wife French class as we enjoyed French songs (chanson) and we wanted to travel in France one day.
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I think friends is a must have. So if I were you, I’d invest some time in arranging more meetings with your friends or making new ones. I think for people with kids this issue is a bit easier to solve as kids are bored and annoying when there’s no other kids to play with around. So parents are almost “forced” to socialize with other parents.
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I think it’s a great idea with the car.
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Yeah, everyone has its own circadian rhythm. I’m a late night person.
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Netflix is addictive to me as well. When I enjoy the show, I end up binge watching and I can’t fall asleep. I have very addictive personality and I can’t calm down and relax when I get sucked into something.
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I talk only to close family but we’re already a lot of people: my parents, my wife’s parents, my brother and his family, my wife’s two brothers and their families. We try to keep in touch daily.
PS. My proposals here probably are not Mustachian but well I think it’s important to optimize happiness and wellbeing first, and costs second - not other way round.
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Oh yes, Digital Minimalism is a bar of pure gold. Great book.
There’s also one more point that I’d like to make here about YouTube. What I’ve realised over the years is that YouTube can make me “aware” about certain things for certain time but it can’t make me “know” or “learn” them (or at least it’s much less effective than traditional ways of learning which force me to stop and think about given thing). I realised that when I was watching valuable content on YouTube, I thought I was acquiring the knowledge that is presented in the videos - but in the end I tended to forget what I watched after a day or two. And the more stuff I watched, the more stuff I forgot. YouTube has a sneaky ways to make us feel good about ourselves, it makes us think that we’re doing something productive, that we’re learning new things. But if something doesn’t stick to your brain and you won’t consolidate the knowledge in your head, if you won’t turn it into practical know-how or practised skill, then it’s not learning - it’s entertainment. I’m not saying that YouTube videos can’t be used for learning - surely, they can and some people are actually using videos to process the presented information into practical knowledge or skill afterwards, but many of us - Internet addicts - are just making ourselves feel good (get a dopamine hit) and feel a little bit smarter due to “learning self-delusion”.
Of course, this effect is not limited to YouTube - I think my evening podcasts listening is also similar in that aspect. If I don’t sit down, re-work, process, write down, stop and think or talk to other people about the thing I’ve heard/watched, I’ll quickly forget it and in the meantime I’ll lie myself that I’m wiser person because I actually know the stuff I’ve just heard. To some extend this applies also to books reading.
And don’t take me wrong - I don’t think that there’s something inherently wrong about entertaining oneself by watching knowledgeable videos on YouTube. It’s ok, anyone needs a little bit of fun and relax in their lives. I think it’s just important to be aware that this is not the most optimal ways to acquire knowledge and for some people (like me) it can have a tendency to get addictive and unhealthy.
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To be honest all learning is mostly forgotten really fast, no different then listening to a professor for 2 hours at a university without taking any notes.
In the long run sometimes things stick anyway:) a little bit at least.
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I’d say if you keep repeating the material by watching different videos on the same subject matter, then they will eventually stick. And even if we don’t know and learn from these videos, it very well may be that they still shape our underconscious part of mind. Things that feel familiar are probably easier to internalise later on.
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I tend to agree with you. Although not being able to recite what you saw in a Youtube video or read in a book is not necessarily equal to having forgotten it. I would be unable to cite you the most thrown around quotes about stoicism but the principles still run in the background in my head and when a relevant situation comes, I can put them into use. I think that’s valid for most subjects, you don’t have to “know” them by heart to get some benefit.
Have you ever tried those massive open online courses (MOOC) websites such as Coursera or Udemy? If you did, where do you stand on them?
I’m now working on one esoteric course at the time on Coursera, something like 30 minutes per day. Although you are nowhere as involved as a live course that you take to graduate, the fact that the video often stops to ask you a question and that at the end of a session you need to put the effort in to summarize and apply what you just learned in a form that will be read and “graded” by other people following the course gives you some extra motivation to be more involved without feeling forced to sit through a course and having to know everything for an exam.
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I agree, it doesn’t matter if it’s youtube or your uni degree. It’s use it, or lose it. Does it make sense to repeat and train and memorize some stuff, if in the end you don’t need it daily?
You know, often times we discuss here something and I state my opinion as a fact. But when asked for sources, I struggle, because I saw it in some yt video months ago. I think knowledge and facts evaporate quickly from our brain, what remains are opinions and beliefs, they stick for longer. So I’d say the yt videos shape who I am and how I perceive the World.
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I agree with this. What I really meant is not that we don’t learn by heart from YouTube videos, but we often don’t ineternalize the knowledge. Of course the point of watching these videos is not to become a professor and be able to present the material to others, but rather to make use of it in your own life, to make it practical, or at least to remember the “point”. It has some effect but I think other media can be more effective and without the deliberate practice the impact will be limited and short-lived.
I’ve never tried MOOCs, but I think there are probably more effective than YouTube videos because they force you to “do the homework” and do some deliberate practice. Of course you have to have the discipline to not cheat and really go through the material, but I guess that applies to all learning.
I might actually try it out as lately @ElMago has sent me an interesting course on Coursera on “Decentralized Finance”. One problem I personally have with this is that I’m at a point in life where I’m trying to focus on what I already have on my plate. I have a tendency to pick up every interesting topic I can find and spread myself too thin, so in the end, I tend to do everything a little bit, and everything bad (unfocused, distracted, not really paying attention). So for now - I’ll just stick to my evening “walking podcasts” and reading in bed. That’s already a lot of information to process.
PS. These last couple of offtopic posts deserve their own thread: “How to learn efficiently?” or something like that.
Photography?
It’s creative. It sharpens your awareness as you’re constantly scanning the area for beautiful compositions and subjects. And you can do it all year through. Now might even be a good time to start, autumn is here! And when it’s dark, you can do available light photography, e.g. city scapes at night or just use the moon as your light source. And you can join a local photography club, too, and hang out with them from time to time, if you like.
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I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do and I know.
Or something like that. 
Edit: start of the rabbithole here: etymology - Origin of "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
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+1 to that. I tend to do milion of photos and then the best ones from time to time I put on my Facebook account as a sort of bragging portfolio. I actually use my wife computer’s do this and ask her for permission to allow me to log in to Facebook, as it’s blocked on my devices. This and Messenger contacts are the main reasons why I haven’t deleted my Facebook account yet. 
I don’t have a proper equipment though - I have an old Sony Alpha but most of the time I take photos with my Google Pixel phone (like the one above).
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