Hypocrite No More! I Finally Stopped Paying for YouTube, and Quit the Addiction
Soapboxes aren’t made for standing on. Soap, I believe, is the intended use case. It only needs cheap timber and a couple of nails. I’m not a skinny guy, either. However you look at it, standing on one of those is a recipe for disaster. I learned this lesson last year, after making a big stink about how I was quitting YouTube and moving to Peertube because I was morally superior to everyone else. Then my PC died, and my carefully laid plan of uploading videos to Peertube and watching YouTube on third-party apps like PipePipe and Freetube died with it. With a broken PC and all these splinters in my feet, I wasn’t feeling too hot, so I stuck with Premium.
For years I watched YouTube Premium on my TV using my PS5. I’d collapse into bed after a long day of work, put on some Atomic Shrimp or Folding Ideas or Not Just Bikes, and drift away. It was my best way of dealing with stress, finding interesting videos by creators I love and learning something new, or putting on something mellow and falling asleep. I felt like, without Premium, I'd lose something vitally important.
Nothing is stopping me from watching bog-standard YouTube, sure. But have you seen the ads 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 buying crypto? Or the real one, for that matter? That’s why I bought Premium. Why anyone buys Premium; to escape the garbage ads.
No longer wanting to give YouTube $150 a year simply to not watch ads, I had to come up with a clever plan. It was easy, which probably means it wasn't that clever. 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 without ads. You can also turn off comments, recommended videos, livestreams, shorts, and those garbage mobile games nobody plays.
The problem with it, and others like it such as PipePipe or NewPipe, is that they are not available on the PS5. Or your smart TV. Or any mainstream digital storefront, for obvious reasons. That's why I had to hook the PC up to my TV. So, of course, my PC had to die and ruin that.
What about my laptop, though? Well, I hooked it up to the TV and the video playback was jerky, laggy, and low resolution. I'm still not sure why. The laptop is old, and its fan screams like a banshee while playing back video, but it works perfectly otherwise. The HDMI out also works fine when connected to a monitor. My only guess is that because the laptop is so old, it doesn't know what to do with the 4K TV. Somehow. I don't know, don't ask me.
I can at least watch Freetube 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. I don’t want to sit there, cramped on my uncomfortable office chair for several more hours watching videos. And what else am I going to do with my free time? Read? Play a video game? Go outside? Ridiculous. That’s how I ended up keeping Premium, it was the only solution I could think of. I felt bad about it because of all the reasons I laid out in another blog about not wanting to support YouTube but I felt like I had no choice.
After four months of this, I realized what a horrible hypocrite I am. I complain about people refusing to quit YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Substack, and other awful websites and tech companies because they care more about their own convenience than doing the right thing. I complain about the hypocrisy of people lamenting these companies but still using them. I complain about people not using the plentiful alternatives that already exist. Yet here I am, pouring money into YouTube’s pocket because I want to watch ad-free videos from my bed. Now I am become Spider-Man, pointer at self.
I had the foresight (i.e. a crippled bank account) to not purchase another full year of Premium in December, when my subscription ended, 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, the genius I am, decided not to fix the 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 those, and that's just as good. Problem solved for real this time!
So that didn’t work 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 the phone into the TV 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 long USB cable just to watch some YouTube videos without ads.
A portal rips through spacetime. A leg pops out before the rest of a strange man 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 the first draft of this post how insufferable it sounded. Past me doesn’t know this yet, but future me knows that this isn’t a blog about me overcoming my hypocrisy by ditching YouTube Premium. It’s a story about a man realizing he’s addicted to something.
It was so obvious I knew something was wrong, but I never quite put my finger on it. I'm creating 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 to beat the blog into submission, it dawned on me that the problem was not the text, but me. I’m working this hard, and considering spending that 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?
This made me stop and think about what I’m doing with my free time and how I can better utilize it. I have YouTube on all the time, and more often than not it’s taking up all 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. Only last week I wrote about how I'm writing more than ever and enjoying it, yet I'm realizing I'm still spending more time distracting myself. How pathetic can you be?
I’ve since largely stopped watching YouTube. I still watch every so often, sure, but it's not on in the background all the time anymore. I’m more deliberate and in control when I watch now. Work for the day has to be finished before I even think about videos. Instead, I listen to music while I write, and that easily fades away in the background so I can focus. Sometimes I'll write in silence and enjoy the lack of competition for my attention.
It’s been nice not spending so much time thinking about what I’m going to watch next, and so much more productive, too. 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. I’ve got bookcases stacked with dusty books, they’re not display pieces. At least they shouldn’t be. I’m going re-reading Guards! Guards! right now after polishing off Monstrous Regiment in two days. Discworld is so damn good, why did I wait so long to re-read these?
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?”
Okay, I have to go now, but remember, the next time you're facing unexpected difficulty, think long and hard about whether you even need to face it to begin with. Maybe it's an obstacle of your own creation.
The portal of light re-opens, and the handsome, slender yet muscular man walks back through like he was never here, though he left a permanent impression on your.
What was that blue light just now? Huh. Anyway, yeah, I'm going to have to think of something, no matter how impractical or expensive, so I can keep watching YouTube!
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 rediscovering my love of table tennis. The most popular sport in the most populous country in the world, and hugely popular in much of East and Southeast Asia. That's much less well-trodden territory.
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 a few weeks ago. I had never watched a game 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 games where I audibly screamed, whooped, shouted, and swore. 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 on me. Her reward was later having to face #1 Sun Yingsha, a match in which she got obliterated. That was heartbreaking, but watching Yingsha is a treat.
I don’t know if I can 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.
It was in the Olympics that I first watched archery and fencing too. I’m going to have to see if I can find any live streams of those events, too.
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