The One Where I Watch A Bunch of Random YouTube Videos And Try To Get All Philosophical And Shit

The internet is a black hole of perpetual procrastination. You take a five-minute break to check your email or the weather and then, an hour later, you realize you're stuck in a vortex of cat videos and witty tweets and Facebook statuses. There's just so much out there. Cyberspace is a double-edged sword, providing many productive resources, yet just as many distractions.

No one refers to the internet as 'cyberspace' anymore and that bums me out. 'Cyberspace' is such a sweet term. Very futuristic sounding. Like 'world wide web.' Or 'caesarean section.'

I've been pretty disciplined about not wasting time online. Recently, I started using the pomodoro technique which is a fancy way of saying "work for twenty-five minutes, then take a five-minute break." You use a tomato timer, like this one, to keep you on track. Why tomatoes? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because tomatoes are a good source of lycopene and other antioxidants? Ever think of that? Huh? You dumb dummy?

Like I said, I've been pretty good about time management. I've been curbing my reddit and Facebook habits and I've been way more productive. Then I came across this:

http://randomyoutube.net/

You guys. Random. YouTube. Videos.
Random.
It's like playing Russian Roulette only instead of dying, you end up with something like this:

On the flip side, if you're lucky, you could end up watching this:

The world is filled with so much wonder and beauty.

For real though, I spent two hours watching videos last night and three hours so far this morning. I can't stop watching them.

A good third of the videos are either private or have been taken down and a good third of the remaining videos are either video game clips or shitty guitar covers.

But the other three-sixths of the videos?

Completely random. Seriously. It's fascinating. I'm seeing things I never even knew existed. A German ambulance drive down a busy street in Frankfurt. A couple of Parisian rappers freestyling in a Lids store. A guy in South Africa squatting 700 pounds. Whatever this is:

Intriguing moments of life, captured and put online for everyone to see.

Part of the reason I love it so much is because, like most people of my generation, I have a short attention span. Being able to watch so many videos in such quick succession is addicting. It's like channel surfing, only you're flipping through the lives of people around the world and there are millions of channels. I've yet to come across the same video twice.

The majority of the videos are mundane. Dull, boring snapshots of life. A train passing by. A cat hiding under a bench. Twenty-three minutes of the Hong Kong marathon.

But they're real. It's the candidness of it all that intrigues me. Nothing scripted or staged. And it's that quality that makes most of the videos dull and boring. Yet it's all very personal. Some of them too personal.

Watching some of these videos, I got the sense that I was viewing something I shouldn't be viewing. It felt wrong. I shouldn't be watching the teenager practicing the sermon he's going to give to his youth group. Or a grandmother wishing her only son a happy birthday and bursting into tears because she's so far away.

And yet, the videos are there. They're up on YouTube. For anyone to watch.

I wonder what the motive was behind some of these videos. Not everything needs to be shared, but I appreciate the fact that it's out there. Why is there a video of a man fixing the coin dispenser of an Elvis-themed pinball machine? Why is there a four-minute video of a guy unboxing a Nokia 3310 set to dubstep?

Why is there this (really good) piece on people Megan Boyle has slept with?

Someone told me once that, just because YOU think it's interesting doesn't make it so. You don't need to write about every little thing that happens. No one wants to read that shit.

And yet, here I am. Sharing thoughts, feelings, stories.

Maybe you find reading this entertaining. Maybe you don't. Maybe you find it about as exciting as this:

Maybe people share those videos for the same reasons I write. To document reality. To confirm it actually happened. To connect with others by sharing. To say "Hey, this is real. I am real. You are real."

We are real and we exist and we are living life. We record and we write and we create. We dance, we sing, we fight, we love. To leave behind a trace, a footprint that, yes, we, too, once walked this earth. And we made a mark. We made something, even if it's a fifteen-second video of us attempting to parkour.

Otherwise, what's the point of it all?