The Joy of Finiteness

I’ve been thinking a lot about the joy of finiteness. I made this connection between joy and finiteness in the most peculiar way.

I’ve been a YouTube enjoyer since the late 2000s. Back then, YouTube was simple. Search for videos. Click on one. Watch. Liked the video? Check out the channel that posted it. Like the channel? Subscribe to keep up with the channel’s new videos. Easy. I fondly remember coming home from school — excited to check out what my subscriptions feed had in store for me that day.

Over the years, YouTube’s focus shifted from being a video-sharing platform to an ad-revenue maximising platform. Subscriptions got replaced with an algorithmic home feed. The video interface became cluttered and crowded by recommended videos. The video player received an autoplaying feature that plays the next video just as you finish the current one. More recently, YouTube Shorts were added and plastered all over the website. All things to make you watch more and more and more. An infinite number of things to watch.

These changes were gradual, and I adapted my consumption habits around the evolving interface. When the home feed first came along, I ignored it and started manually visiting the subscriptions page. Over time, it got hard to keep up with updates from my subscriptions. Life happened and I wasn’t in school anymore, and I eventually succumbed to using the home feed. What’s annoying is that YouTube’s algorithm is also bloody brilliant. It routinely surfaced fantastic things for me on the home feed. Argh!

At some point, YouTube added the ability to save videos to 'Watch Later'. This felt like a blessing. This could be my new subscriptions feed – I could save videos from Home and Subscriptions to watch later. I tried this for many years and failed miserably. I would watch three things from the list and add another five from the Home feed. The list was ever-growing and felt infinite. I could never conquer it.

I was at a point where I’d given up trying to tame my watch lists. My YouTube consumption pattern had become purely algorithmic and joyless.

Then came a recommendation from my friend Arun. He and I had been talking about our struggles with consuming things on YouTube and he suggested I try a browser extension called Unhook for YouTube. Unhook is advertised as a way to hide YouTube Shorts from the YouTube interface but the extension does a lot more. It hides recommended videos, live chats from livestreams, comments on videos. It lets you disable new videos from playing as soon as you finish one. It even lets you replace YouTube’s algorithmic home page with your subscriptions feed (!!!). I installed the extension, deleted all my subscriptions, and cleared out my watch later list. I then carefully subscribed to only those channels that I truly wanted to watch videos from.

Unhook has made YouTube feel so much lighter. I now open YouTube and land directly on my subscriptions page. I pick a recently uploaded video to watch. Once the video finishes, nothing autoplays. The video player just goes black. That’s my cue to go back and pick another video. I repeat this a few times to catch up on new uploads. Then, I close the website and I’m done. If I get the urge to open YouTube again, I return to the subscriptions page and more often than not, I am already caught up on everything. I close the website and get on with my day.

An unintended consequence of using Unhook has been my Watch Later list becoming useful again. Since the inflow of things into the list has slowed down drastically, I can actually keep up with it now.

YouTube has gone from a noisy, chaotic place to a quiet, calm place. And I realise that this change has a lot to do with the finiteness baked into my refreshed YouTube experience. It turns out that having an endpoint can be a joyous thing. I want to look for more such examples of finiteness-as-a-feature. There are already a few things on my mind which might get their own blog post in the future.

We live in an age of infinite availability and possibilities. Streaming, social media, online grocery shopping, and e-commerce all invite us into The Endless Scroll. We need a counterpoint to this. We need things that are finite.