🐌 You Need To Stop Consuming Slop
Highly Dopaminergic activity with no functional route to self-actualization must be purged from society. It was once a luxury behaviour for a nicer world with fewer problems; but no person in this world has the surplus capacity to be pacified. If you are successful (by work or birth) you must be working to better others and if you are not you must be working tirelessly to better yourself. The pacification by the infinite slop engine has, I hope, reached the apex of its parabolic trajectory and must come crashing back down to the muck where it belongs now that its novelty has been quickly exhausted.
Slop is useful as a broad term, a thought-terminating cliche (yet another valuable memetic tool) to bundle all pacifying passive consumption. Slop takes many forms, the least controversial of which I expect to be infinite feeds of short form highly-dopaminergic (often AI-generated) video content. Enough evidence exists for the neuron-degenerating danger of excessive consumption of this type and the decay of attention (as close an approximation to soulful agency and urgency as can be commodified) that I feel little need to lay it out here in full. Suffice to say it's bad.1 I do expect more resistance when I happen upon the particular poison sloughing into your particular trough.
For God's sake though you do have to stop. First I will attempt to convince you that your particular brand of passive comfort consumption is slop, then I will ask you to reduce your consumption until it is gone.
Streamers
If you have a favoured personality you rely on to fill the air with a curated carousel of content overlaid by their highly informative, socially-stimulating or hilarious commentary - you are consuming slop. You may believe that because it is on your second-monitor, or passively absorbed while performing other tasks, you are merely lessening the load of an otherwise necesssary activity - day-to-day work, household chores, video games you long lost the capacity to focus exclusively on.2 There is almost no streamed content that does not fall into the category of slop for a few reasons - most prominently that the producer of the content is themselves a passive participant in the production of the content. Because they have tapped their personality into a (literal) stream of consciousness for the purposes of production they do not enter into the legitimating iterative cycle of production>release>feedback>retreat necessary for all viable creative works. It is no surprise that almost all major streaming is itself a ritual of content consumption - streamers produce reactions to content (Video Games, Politics, Drama, News, Even walking around the "real world") with very few exceptions. Savvy streamers not captured by this phenomenon usually treat streaming like most people treat sex work - get in, decimate yourself accumulating capital at cost to your soul with great haste, get out and pour the resources into your real life's work.3
Breaking News
For sufficient evidence I direct you to the intellectual wasteland of Bluesky - a liberal vortex of passively consumed and regurgitated breaking news generating a neurotic panic spiral of swirling memetic pathogens. Breaking News is hell, all events are projected through the lens of each institution's agendas bending to warp with each new injection of context until we've repeatedly consumed the same information multiple times. There is literally no benefit whatsoever to not waiting a few days for the dust to settle and the actual story to percolate through these filters until it can be observed more concretely. Breaking News is an extremely convenient mechanism by which reality can be extruded and processed, filled with repetitive starches and preservatives to languish on screens adulterated with commercial products.
Superiority Content
This is a category under which I'd place any content that presents people in humiliating or undermining contexts at length. Most obviously this includes racebaiting, policecam, SJW destruction, MAGAtard debate, or self-destructive lolcow content. Essentially anything that instils you with a sense of superiority over your fellow man is toxic and falls well within the category of slop for providing cheap dopaminergic ego-fuel that requires nothing of yourself to participate in. Why change when you can watch a filtered form of your weak, degenerate, enemies as their real active elements (savvy enough to evade this contentmill) pursue their goals and destroy your pillars of value offscreen.
There are other forms of this content that exist that are more subtle. Much True Crime rests in this category, particularly for women vicariously engaging with the violence they're subjected to while reinforcing their personal virtue through points of difference between them and the inferior, less-savvy (though sympathetic and unfortunate) victims of inexplicable horror. Much philosophical and debate content is the same, consuming works as conveniently as possible for the purposes of accumulating status that can be used to bookmog in niche communities of sycophantic disciples of dead men and failed academics.
Eduslop falls under the same category by reducing actionable knowledge into the passive dopaminergic experience of understanding without engagement. Political and News podcasts that get you "up to speed", "in the know", "well-informed" are there so you can flex your higher quantity of leisure time on the lesser educated. I assume much historical content falls under this category though I'm least confident in it having almost no experience with longform historical content4
Repetitive Comfort
Referring back to a piece of media you've previously consumed is often a valuable exercise. Watching The Office for the 14th time because it's a reliable source of passive entertainment is passively committing psychic suicide.5
Stop Consuming Slop
You need to realise that this is slowly killing you. Let's consider two rebuttals here:
"This necessary work is unfulfilling and unchanging, so I must lessen its negative impact"
Work that requires your maximum focus and attention... requires your maximum focus and attention. It leaves no room for sideloading content and so you do not, but it also leaves no room for the big picture percolation and contemplation that yields your most genuinely personal realisations about your work, yourself and the world. You cannot unlock the secrets of the universe amidst all-encompassing work - mundanity is the vehicle to your most important understandings. To sell this to the grinders - I attribute a significant degree of my career success to my willingness to do extraordinarily gruelling tasks no one else in a corporation is willing to do - manually working through tens of thousands of lines of an excel spreadsheet to audit some critical business function that only ever gets represented in metrics convenient to those who built the metrics. At the time it feels monotonous, pointless, excruciatingly dull - but I find myself internalising patterns that yield uniquely powerful insights inaccessible to others. Some ideas only occur in the boredom of an 8 hour data entry exercise. This is available to anyone who is willing to have a shitty few days (and my best advice to any up and comers is to immediately offer to do the gruelling tasks that no one else is willing to for exactly these reasons, aside from the social capital you gain).
To sell this to the terminally online softleft - In recent history prison time has been seen by those trying to change society as a failure point to be desperately avoided. Fear of prison keeps many people from performing the activism they would like to do, and repressive regimes (including my own countries' govermnent) wield this to great effect. I am glad to see the return of an important aspect of activism - that one must regard every restriction as an opportunity, and prison is an opportunity to mature, meet and understand the people you ostensibly claim to want to help, read, grow and even radicalize those around you. Imprisonment is not a naturally obvious benefit, yet can be made one to a movement and to an individual (particularly one entering from more privileged circumstances). Many of histories greatest activists spent time imprisoned. A letter from Birmingham jail was written from a Birmingham jail. Mandela wrote hundreds of letters from prison. Hitler wrote some of his finest work there.6 To wrest this tangent back to the point - your unjust incarceration to the kitchen is still an opportunity to better yourself. We live in the slopocalpyse but there is also a bounty of access to works that help you understand the world.
This work is unnecessary, changeable or has the potential to be fulfilling but I lack the substance to exploit this
Oh you're sleepy? Little baby is tired? Grow the fuck up. Energy is not a finite resource you are not a battery you are a discoordinated discombobulated engine that's out of tune and running out of time to sort its shit out. If you aren't literally losing consciousness to sleep or fainting due to hunger pangs you are capable of exerting yourself and every exertion brings with it an improvement in capacity. Almost everything in the human body works the same way - humans are efficient engines that habituate to stimuli and develop patterns to avoid expending energy. Our tragic circumstance is that to follow this habituation is to degenerate, run down and die because we are built for a hostile environment. The hostile environment remains, it just became more insidiously effective and you didn't notice because you were chasing up your Uber Eats delivery. The sickly sweet allure of the pitcher plant's digestive juices is to the ant what the siren call of TikTok is to your countless hours spent in antiagentic autopilot.7
You're not tired you're sad and you're sad because you're doing a shit job at living and you know it.
How to Curate Your Own Content
There is a meagre tax you are unwilling to pay - consciously deciding on what to consume, roughly (with minimal practice) two minutes agency per hour of consumption. Your body is a machine that takes inputs and assembles them, mostly unconsciously, into outputs. Your mind, by contrast, is a garden. Your task is to feed the soil the raw materials to enable the outputs you want. You do not need to remember it all, or even most of it, you need to create a nutritious substrate in which your mind can grow. Everything poisonous you lay into the earth seeps in and kills vital systems that can have cascading impacts on your life at large. Every time you stimulate your brain with dopaminergically rewarding slop you pay an opportunity cost - incur a debt that is temporary and can be paid off but must be paid.
Regard every ingestion of slop as poison. I once used the analogy of sugar but even sugar has value that slop does not. Slop will not sustain you like gummy bears will in dire circumstances. Sugar is highly concentrated energy, slop is a hollow vampiric vessel forming a phylactery with your soulful attentiveness. You can't even have a little bit as a treat because there is no safe level of consumption of slop. It displaces and destroys your capacity to engage with more substantive content. No one is immune. I have never touched TikTok or shortform video because I know it'll get me. I'm not better than you or braver than you or stronger than you I know my limits and I'm not getting into the ring armed with one man's attention versus a trillion dollars of corporation. We are in a sisyphean struggle against the content mills every day as they make it harder and more ardous to access media with intentionality.
Follow the golden rule: Do not consume anything you would be embarrassed to watch in public.
Shame is an underutilised tool that has overstepped historically but has been vastly overcorrected to everyone's detriment. You should only watch and read things that you'd feel enriched to discuss with a friend or loved one. You should engage with media you disagree with and understand your blindspots, which is why this post is sponsored by Ground News - the platform that makes it easy to compare news sources across the spectrum and find YOUR blindspots. See every side of every story with ground news - become a better informed news reader today! Perhaps by reading about the same event from every perspective you'll finally arrive at the objective truth-reality at the center by averaging them all out!8
Subscriptions Only
Anyway, books are probably too hard for you right now and that's ok. We'll start you with video and work your way up. Youtube is still a viable resource with some caveats: You must turn off autoplay, and you must never click anything that is suggested to you. I'm serious. Subscription Page only. Remember that the home page may contain some of your subscriptions but it is not your subscriptions page.
Your subscriptions are on this barely perceptible "button" above your list of subscribed channels. You will need to curate this regularly. Channels no longer treat youtube like a chronological feed of subscribed channels because it isn't. You will need to unsubscribe from channels regularly that change format in ways that make them incompatible with your style of usage. Unfortunately shorts will still get pushed on you so if you lack self-control install something like this extension.
No Short-Form Video
No other way to say it - Delete TikTok. Uninstall Instagram. If you need to use the messenger functions then unfollow everyone other than the people you message. Everyone has the same disease but that disease yields the same loneliness, isolation and desperation for connection in everyone - they want meaningful interactions with you more than they want slop. Get them to another platform. Texts, Whatsapp, Signal, Discord, any system of communication that is not attached to a dopamine slop machine.
No Notifications
Turn off your fucking notifications from everyone and everything that isn't a human being in your life that matters to you. Everything. Block it all. Turn off all notifications and then whitelist the ones from the people that matter. You must eliminate reactive autopiloting from your life in all its forms and that includes your attention being seized by your phone. Furthermore - keep your phone off the table and out of sight. You are genuinely expending constant mental resources keeping an eye on it in your peripheral vision that you need for productive activity.
No Defaults
Your muscle memory contains a sequence of taps you execute immediately upon unlocking your phone to access your habitual source of instant dopaminergic activity. It might be reddit, it might be twitter, it might be the aforementioned slopvideo mills. Whatever it is, it's gone now. Get rid of it. Take it off your homescreen. Put it in a folder or two folders. Make it more annoying to get to. If the habit reforms, change the positioning again. Do not allow your brain frictionless access to stimulation - it will fuck you over again and again no matter the sequences of obstacles required to get there. Deny it. You must regain consciousness between the moment of need for stimulation and the moment of stimulation. Stop. Quickly. Why did you need it?
Every day I watch people I love repeatedly die. They'll be in the midst of a perhaps strenous conversation, or they'll encounter a natural lull, or they'll be reminded of a difficulty in their life and their hand moves under its own power. They seize the phone, unconsciously, and open The App. I ask "Everything ok?"9 and they go "Hmm? Oh, yeah, everything's fine". They pause, confused for a second, awake again, wondering why they picked up the phone in the first place. And then they're back in the land of the living. By pure luck I happen to not have had social media for roughly the last 15 years.10 I've had nothing to reach for, and I've seen everyone around me get warped and shaped by this monster that did not get me. It's truly bizarre to not relate to this phenomenon that has captured literally every loved one in my life.
It's worth remembering that (again, particularly for the strivers) in the modern age merely not being siphoned by this system gives you an unbelievable advantage, all else equal.
But, but, but...
Yes it's not your fault. Yes you are disadvantaged. Yes this system is designed to do this to you and you are one little monkey dodging the blades in the psychic superblender. Poor you. Your structural critique, accurate though it may be, does not absolve you. You are useless to us braindead.
If you were privileged, you must pay it back. If you were fucked over, you must save the next generation from your hardships.
Get to work.
Footnotes
If you needed evidence for this probably best to stop reading now I can't help you↩
At this last stage you're probably a lost cause↩
There are some exceptions but they're both rare and fairly obvious on basic reflection as to why they differ. The point has been made to me that the speedrunning community is an exception and I'd argue that the streaming is both documentary for the purposes of proof and more a documentation of a craft than passive. More like consuming sports content.↩
With the exception of something specific, episodic and finite like Behind the Bastards which is decent enough to fall asleep to when my wife is out of town.↩
I am going to do myself a disservice here by caveating - if you are in dire circumstances, and I mean truly a situation where you merely need to passively survive something in order to improve, then you can have your tv show. I think this is the least damaging as a last resort but I absolutely do not mean you being depressed or having a hard time financially. I mean you had catastrophic dental work done and every minute is torture until you heal and you're skipping painkillers because any moment of disassociation from your body is a failure (based) so you endure. Personally mine is Always Sunny. You are also allowed to rewatch a show with someone who hasn't seen it before but let's be honest, you're not watching The Sopranos you're watching them watch The Sopranos for the first time.↩
Which goes to show how shit his writing was really↩
In case you can't tell, I'm mad at you↩
Even unslopping has itself become commodified slop.↩
The best response in my experience - ironically it suggests a pattern break, despite them performing a familiar pattern. The only reason you should pick up your phone in a social interaction is a notification reading some equivalent of "Your entire family has been captured by ICE and executed on camera, here is the viral video", so something must be wrong right? Why else would you pick up your phone? Even further, they do check if something is wrong, and perhaps realise the little discomfort that pushed them to reach for then phone in the first place. I highly recommend this little social tech.↩
Like Pluribus, there's nothing special about me it really was just luck of the draw that I didn't also get assimilated.↩