Almost two years ago I had given up my 12-year fast of watching violence and I wanted to revisit a TV show that I'd enjoyed sporadically as a teenager. Only vague parts of the series remained in my memory—especially one particularly scary episode, which was on replay one Halloween night. As I watched the entire 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was awestruck at the quality of the stories, the humor, the strong female characters, and the queer experience that was expertly woven throughout the series.
Now, don't duck out just yet—I promise to restrain myself from talking too much more about Buffy. Instead it was what happened after I finished watching the series that matters for today: I immediately started over to watch it all again. My wife sensed that this series meant a lot to me and bought all 7 seasons on DVD for me, and that's what changed everything.
I'm currently on my fifth round of watching it end-to-end (there were two tiny breaks to watch Angel, the spin-off series, which is not nearly as good), and this practice is more than just a really weird binge-watching obsession. It set the stage for a whole new way for me to slow down.
Ad Detox
The biggest benefit that was immediately apparent to me was the lack of advertisements mingled with my show. I've confessed before that I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I used to watch it in the evenings before bed, because I usually have an hour or so to myself waiting to get tired enough to fall asleep. The problem is that YouTube has continuously been adding more (and longer) ad breaks. As an aside, I've watched them make subtle design changes to the "Skip" button and I can just "see" the team in the background pulling a few levers, checking the numbers, trying a different combo of design tricks, checking the numbers again. It's very annoying ;)
I realized after watching Buffy DVDs without ads for the first time, that all of the ad breaks had been interrupting my ability to relax. Sure, I know that there are better ways to get ready to go to sleep, like getting off of screens, but this is not a "do what I say" nor "do what I do" takeaway. The point here is that the frequent interruptions have negatively impacted my thinking, my relaxing, and my emotional regulation. Yes, even emotions. I get angry when ads jump in front of the speaker or the program I watch on YouTube or any other streaming service. It's not (usually) an anger that sticks around or that gets expressed, but I can feel it. It's like trying to listen to someone in a conversation and someone else comes up behind you and jabs their finger into your ribs as a joke. Being able to have an uninterrupted episode of a series I love has made it possible for me to slow down and just enjoy the show without the possibility of that extroverted salesman jumping in and ruining my peace.
One other way I've reduced ad breaks is by pulling out my Zune (a phenomenal mp3 player from the early 2000s that gets eye rolls from die-hard Apple users, but I dare say Zune's interface design is one of the best). My Zune has all of the songs I loved to listen to growing up and throughout college. I even put a few new albums on it so that it has a very nice swath of music that I can confidently "shuffle" and listen to, ad-free for weeks.
Very quickly after putting together this old mp3 player + speaker setup, I noticed the exact same thing that happened with Buffy: I felt significantly better. So much better, in fact, I wonder if our attention spans are dwindling, not just because of consuming short-form content (which is still a huge factor), but also because of the constant interruption we have to deal with all day? Notifications, ad breaks, and even doom-scrolling are all forms of interruptions to our focus and our thinking. So, inspired by Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing, I consider these music and Buffy practices to be part of my personal protest against the attention economy. I'm obviously still a part of it: I still watch YouTube and other streaming platforms, I still listen to podcasts on Spotify, but I've removed most of my media from reliance on my phone. I'm moving away from "free" music with ads to owned mp3s, and this has drastically reduced the media-based interruptions I'm faced with daily.
Cyborg
Sometimes I see examples of people bravely deleting their social media accounts entirely, moving to "dumb phones," and setting up home labs that effectively become a personal media streaming host (like your own private Netflix). These drastic changes are fun to watch, but I still find myself trapped by time or social pressure, preventing me from going "all in" on these practices to completely evade the attention economy.
Although much less flashy and interesting, my silly little experiments have brought an effect that is similar. I think it simply demonstrates that you can do something low-effort that still helps unhook yourself from the feeds and the ads. I get deep satisfaction in unchecking new notification permissions on apps in my phone, slowly reducing the visual noise (although, this may be the least impactful method, see this insightful video about interface design: The Lost Discipline of the Alarm).
My biggest takeaway is that I can still make significant changes to my habits and even my emotions by taking what I already do and modifying it slightly. I'm going to watch an hour of TV before going to sleep, so that can either be on an interruptive platform like YouTube, or it can be an ad-free episode of Buffy. In a way, choosing to rewatch Buffy ad infinitum is borrowing the goal and design of a social media platform in the sense of removing choice. The only choice I have to make is to turn on Buffy, just like Facebook merely needs you to open its app. I already know which episode is on next, so I don't need to make any other decisions. It's a system that I set up and that I chose for myself.
There's always something we can do. Don't stop experimenting.