Hypocrite No More! I Finally Stopped Paying for YouTube Premium
Soapboxes aren’t made for standing on. Soap, I believe, is the intended use case. They require but cheap timber and nails. Putting this kind of weight on one, well, that’s a recipe for disaster. I learned that last year, after railing about how I quit YouTube and moved to Peertube because I was so morally superior to everyone else. Then my PC died, and that high-minded righteousness died with it.
YouTube has always been my little comfort. After a long day of work, I’d collapse into bed and turn on Atomic Shrimp, Folding Ideas, or Not Just Bikes and drift away. I could do that with YouTube Premium, because I didn’t have to worry about a tidal waves of ads that ran longer than the actual video I was trying to watch. That’s no longer the case with bog-standard YouTube. I mean, have you seen the ads on there lately? If not, you should know that watching an ad on YouTube in 2026 is akin to gazing in the unblinking eye of madness. How can I relax when AI Idris Elba is yelling at me about crypto? Or the real one, for that matter?
That’s why anyone buys Premium; to escape the ads. I don’t want to give Google $150 a year anymore just to not see ads. So, I came up with a clever plan. I would simply hook up my computer, running Linux Mint, to my TV, and use Freetube. This is an app which circumvents all of YouTube’s YouTubeniess and plays videos from the platform. No ads, no comments, no shorts or horrible mobile games shoved in your face. It’s an app you can’t get on the PS5, of course, or your smart TV. So, of course, my PC had to ruin everything.
What about my laptop, then? I hooked it up to the TV and the video playback was jerky, laggy, and low resolution. While it can play videos at 1080p 60FPS, it screams like a banshee while doing so. It’s old, cut it some slack.
Without the laptop, I could at least watch videos from my desk on the external monitor. But, I mean, well, you know. I’m on my feet all day at my day job, and then I come home and write for hours at my desk. I don’t want to sit there for several more hours watching videos. That’s how I ended up keeping Premium, it was the only solution I could think of.
After four months of this, I realized what a hypocrite I am. I complain about people refusing to quit YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Substack, and other awful websites and tech companies, favoring convenience over doing the right thing. I complain about the hypocrisy of lamenting these companies but still using them. I complain about people forgoing the plentiful alternatives like Lemmy, Mastodon, or Bear Blog. Yet here I am, pouring money into YouTube’s pocket months after I said I’d stop. The sole reason for doing so being my desire to watch YouTube ad-free, lying in bed. Now I am become Spider-Man, pointer at self.
Good foresight (i.e. a crippled bank account) allowed me to pass on buying another year of Premium in December, instead buying it on a monthly basis. So, fix the PC in February or March and hook it up to the TV like I originally planned. Problem solved, right? Well, being a genius, I decided against fixing my PC. Okay, on to Plan C, I think we’re on now: mirroring my phone or tablet to the TV. I’ve got PipePipe on there and that’s the same thing as Freetube. Problem solved for real this time! So this didn’t solve jack because my LG TV refuses to recognize the phone for love nor money.
Okay, Plan, er, Four: use a USB-C-to-HDMI adapter and plug it in like a 1950s wired remote control. Not ideal, but I can live with it. Unless I trip over the cable and break my neck. This (the cable, not my death) resulted in a black screen and choppy audio, which would vastly improve 99% of YouTube videos, but not the 1% I planned on watching. Alright, let’s try Plan E: buy a raspberry pie and eat it. Delicious. Plan F: buy a Raspberry Pi and use it on the TV to watch Freetube. The problem there is one of price. A Raspberry Pi 5 is about $300 these days, and that seems like tripping over a ten foot USB cable just to watch some videos on my TV without ads.
A portal rips through spacetime, a leg pops out before the rest of Josh falls onto the floor screaming. He shakes his head and clears his throat.
Oh, thank goodness I made it before past me published this train wreck. Listen, I realized while editing this how insufferable it sounds. Past me doesn’t know this yet, but this isn’t a blog about me overcoming my hypocrisy by ditching YouTube Premium. It’s about a man not realizing he’s addicted to something.
All the signs are there. He’s unable to see he has a problem, much less admit it. He’s making excuses about why he can’t quit. Finding increasingly ridiculous ways to carry on this habit, spending far too much time and money on it. Letting it consume his life. The dude unironically talked about how he was going to watch less YouTube, and then made his Thing of the Whenever (terrible name, by the way) about a YouTube video about table tennis sending him down a rabbit hole watching more table tennis videos on YouTube.
I had a sense that something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I created problems and trying to figure out increasingly absurd ways to fix them, and sharing them as if it was all perfectly normal. As I tried beating the blog into submission, it dawned on me that the problem wasn’t the text, but me. I’m working this hard, and willing to spend this much money so I can watch some YouTube videos in bed? And I don’t want to read, or play a video game, or do anything else? It has to be YouTube? This thing I’ve said multiple times in the past that I’ve grown to hate?
I thought about what I’m doing with my free time and how I can better utilize it. YouTube is on all the time, hogging my attention. It’s on when I cook, when I eat, even when brushing my teeth. I’d put it on when I sat down to write, and most of the time I’d pay more attention to the video than writing. Now, here I was thinking about spending all this money so I could keep watching it in bed. How pathetic can you be?
Since then, I’ve largely quit watching YouTube. I still watch every so often, but it’s not a constant in the background. I’m being more deliberate and controlling when I watch. I finish my work before I even think about videos. I focus on what I’m doing, maybe playing some music while doing so. Often, I simply enjoy the silence. I didn’t know how much I hated worrying about what to watch, scrolling dozens of clickbait garbage videos, and re-watching content I’d already seen several times.
I’ve been so much more productive, too. My blogs are better now. I used to write one draft, give it a once over, and post it. I liked the free form nature this “method” provided, but I’ve realized these blogs are much with multiple rounds of edits. The first draft of this blog also contained the word ‘that’ 47 times! Yeah, I think these need a little more editing, Josh. The last two blogs I’ve published are some of my best. I’m spending more time writing, though I spent my last blog blabbering all about it, so I’ll spare you the regurgitation.
Best of all, after a long day of work and I’m too tired to write, I grab a book and start reading. I’ve started re-reading some books, which isn’t something I normally do. My bookcases aren’t display pieces, they’re a library! I’m re-reading Guards! Guards! right now after polishing off Monstrous Regiment in two days. Discworld is so damn good, I don’t know why I waited so long to get back to them. Watching YouTube less has allowed me to go back to those books. I’m even getting saucy, reading two books at once.
I didn’t realize how much control YouTube had over my life. I didn’t realize writing this blog was going to cause such an epiphany. It’s been one of the joys of maintaining this blog. Every so often, I’ll write something believing it to be an ironclad truth, only to read it back later and think to myself “are you an idiot, Josh?”
Blogging won’t change your life, but it is an excellent way to self-reflect. Perhaps the next time your face trouble, sit down, start a blog here on Bear, and write “Josh really is an idiot.” It’s helped me, and I’m happy to pass the advice along.
The portal of light re-opens, and the handsome, slender, muscular man walks back through the portal like he was never there, though he left a permanent impression on your.
Thing of the Whenever
I could easily spend this edition of Thing of the Whenever talking about Discworld, but that’s such well-trodden territory I’d feel a bit silly. So instead, I want to talk about my rediscovery of my love of table tennis. The most popular sport in the most populous country in the world, and popular in much of East and Southeast Asia.
In late April and early May, London held the World Team Table Tennis Championships, marking the 100th anniversary of the competition. I watched most of the tournament on… a video hosting website, after getting a sudden hankering to watch a game. I had never watched a match outside of the Olympics, where I first discovered the sport, and seeing this event made me realize how much I had missed it.
There were multiple times during I’d scream, whoop, shout, and swear. 17 year-old Miwa Harimoto getting her first win in 12 matches against world #2 Wang Manyu in the Women’s Teams Final (while rocking some sweet Kuromi hair clips) made me yell so loudly and so often I was worried my neighbors were going to call the cops. Her reward was later having to face #1 Sun Yingsha, another fun match to watch for entirely different reasons.
I can’t explain why table tennis resonates with me instead of football, futball, baseball, basketball, or any other that’s more popular in the west. I like that it’s a much deeper game than it appears at a glance. Between different paddle types, the differences between left- and right-handed players, and the different shot types, it’s the quintessential game that’s easy to learn but hard to master.
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