Online media platforms - where ambitions go to die these days

by Amjad Desai

There is a quiet lie most of us believe about content consumption. We treat it as harmless. A show after dinner. A few reels before bed. A podcast on the commute. Each one feels earned, and none of them looks like a problem. Just trying to relax. But add them up across a year, and you are looking at hundreds of hours. Across a decade, you are looking at around 10,000 hours. If consuming content were a skill, then, according to Malcolm Gladwell (2008), I would be a master of wasting time by now.
If you are the kind of person who wants to build something worthy, then the hours you spend on these media platforms are the hours you are not feeding into the thing you said mattered to you. The side project that has lived in a Google Doc for two years. The language you swore you would learn. The business idea you have told three friends about and nobody else. The book you were going to write.
Whatever your version of it is (and only you know what it is), you have been trading it for screen time.
And that is how ambitious people end up mediocre. Not through dramatic failure. Through a thousand small evenings that felt like rest.

But How Can We Resist All This Good Content?

My screen time report, and probably yours as well, is proof of how much so-called "good stuff" is out there. How can we escape? Unfortunately, you cannot.

Here's a fun fact

In 2015, over 2 million cat videos existed on YouTube, averaging 12,000 views each. And just in 2023, TikTok videos with the #cat hashtag have garnered over 502 billion views. Who can resist a good cat video, right?

Here is something worth noticing. For most of human history, there was a natural limit to how much content was created. Someone had to make it. A book took years. A film took months. A television show took a crew and a budget. The supply of content was limited by the number of people willing to put in real effort to make it.
Then the ceiling started rising.
The rise of the internet was the inflection point. Then YouTube put a broadcasting studio into every bedroom in 2005. The smartphone made the content follow you into every spare minute of the day. Short-form video compressed the unit of attention from minutes to seconds. Each step made more content available with less effort to produce it.
Until recently, even the worst of this content had a human cost to its production. Someone had to show up and want to make the thing, even if the thing was bad. That minimal human intent put a floor under the stream.
Then came generative AI, and the ceiling was shattered. Now, a machine can generate a video, a voiceover, an article, a face that does not exist, a song nobody sang, in seconds and at almost zero marginal cost.
The evidence is already in front of us. In 2024, researchers at Stanford and Georgetown studied 125 Facebook pages posting large volumes of AI-generated images. Those pages averaged around 147,000 followers each, and their output collectively drew hundreds of millions of exposures. One AI-generated image made Facebook's top 20 most-viewed posts for Q3 2023, with 40 million views (DiResta & Goldstein, 2024). The economics are simple. Meta's Creator Bonus Program rewards viral engagement, and a page of weirdly lit AI popes and "Shrimp Jesus" images can earn real money for whoever is running it from a laptop halfway around the world.
Audio is even worse, because you do not see it coming. In December 2024, journalist Liz Pelly published an investigation into Spotify's internal "Perfect Fit Content" program, which commissions cheap, pseudonymous tracks to fill mood playlists. Pelly's reporting identified popular playlists such as Ambient Relaxation, Deep Focus, and Bossa Nova Dinner as almost entirely composed of this material (Pelly, 2025). A Swedish production house called Firefly Entertainment was linked to more than 800 pseudonymous acts, nearly 500 of them placed on official Spotify playlists. The Deep Focus playlist you play while you try to work on the thing that matters to you is, at least in part, a shell.
These machines now leverage platform algorithms that watch you, know your habits, and decide what should appear in your content feed to hold you captive.

So, Neo, Are We Stuck Here Forever?

The system is engineered to beat your willpower. That is not a flaw in you. That is the design. The people who built these products hired the smartest behavioural scientists they could find, ran millions of experiments on real users, and know exactly what leads to the most time on screen. You are playing chess against something that has already seen every move you will make. And no, there is no red pill coming your way to escape the system. Nobody is showing up in a trench coat to unplug you from this one.
(Full disclosure: unabashed Matrix fanboy and always will be)
So how do you get out? If you were hoping the answer is "try harder," sorry to disappoint. You cannot escape the stream once you are caught in the moment. Nobody can.
The answer lies somewhere else. Something a lot simpler.

Just don't get pulled in. The people who have escaped this trap have not out-disciplined the machine. They have out-designed it.

Why are the existing solutions not good enough?

Before I talk about what out-designing looks like, let me clear one thing first. I am a productivity junkie and a big fan of the classic frameworks. Getting Things Done, Atomic Habits, Deep Work, Flow, and Digital Minimalism. Read them all and have bits from all of these as part of my rituals.
They are the best thinking we have on designing your life around what matters. But are these frameworks good enough for this charge from the machines? I don't think so.
Those frameworks were written for a world where the environment you were designing against was stable. You could put the cookies on a high shelf, and they would stay there. You could set a time for deep work, and the distractions around you were not actively rewriting themselves to beat you.
The content stream is no longer static. It's a mutating adversary that learns from your behaviour in real time and adapts. It notices what pulls you back in on Sunday at 11 pm and queues more of that for next Sunday at 11 pm. Every defence you build, it counters.

The Part Where I Stop Pretending I Have This Figured Out

If you were expecting this to be the moment where I reveal how I cracked the code and pull out the snake oil, sorry to disappoint. This is not that kind of article.
I am writing this for myself first, and I am publishing it because a lot of you are in the same place, looking at the same numbers on your own phones, telling yourselves the same small lies about how this one is fine and the next one will be different.
The people I have observed who have managed to handle this well do not have ten magic habits. They have one principle.

Make a deal with yourself. Decide in advance what your hours are for, and remove the stream from the places where those hours live.

To start winning, first you have to take control of your hours. Start with the following

  1. The first hour of your day belongs to you, not the feed. No phone until after your most important work has started. No phone. The feed cannot run its algorithm on an audience that is not there.
  2. The last hour of your day belongs to your mind, not the feed: a book, a walk, a conversation, anything else. The specifics matter less than the absence of the feed.
  3. The transitions between things are where the feed sneaks back in. Waiting for coffee, waiting for a meeting, standing in a lift. Filling those cracks with nothing is a skill worth rebuilding. Boredom is when your own thoughts finally get the attention.
    That's one key principle and three fights to pick. Winning even two of them will put you ahead of almost everyone you know.

Starting With Myself

So what have I actually done?

  • I deleted the OTT and social media apps from my phone and my tablet. Not hidden in a folder. Gone. If I want to watch something, I made a pact that I have to watch it on TV at home, which turns out to be enough friction to kill most of the impulse.
  • I bought a basic alarm clock and stopped using the phone as one. The phone now charges in a different room at night. That does not automatically win the first and last hour of the day. It just gives me a fighting chance at them. What I actually do in those hours is still a work in progress.
  • I started a "don't break the chain" tracker (popularised by Isaac, 2007, and loosely attributed to Jerry Seinfeld) for days off OTT platforms. I am seven days in as I write this. Let us see how long that lasts.
    Here is what I am still fighting.
  • Removing the stream of content is the easy half. The hard half is deciding what the reclaimed hours are actually for. I am still working out how to make the first hour, the last hour, and the transitions carry the weight they are supposed to carry.
    That is the work I am doing this month. It won't make any difference unless the architecture of my day changes. The platforms are getting better at holding us captive every passing day.
    But it's possible to take control. Not in the moment. The moment is already lost. The control is in deciding, in advance and on a quiet Sunday morning, what your hours are actually for. And then making sure the stream does not get a vote.
    So catch yourself ahead of time. It is the only place where the stopping begins. Pick one small move this week. Delete one app. Move the phone out of the bedroom. Set one hour where the stream does not get a vote. You do not need a plan. You need a start. That is how you take your hours back from a system that has spent years learning how to own it.

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