What are we seeking now?
Yes, I am trying to compare the two incomparable topics.
However, I think they share some common points including:
- Time needed to be spent on them
- They could be the break from our daily routine
...
But wait, the main answer is why?
Yes, I was able to monitor myself watching Youtube Shorts, the current record for a non-stop watching is about 1.5 hours. It's too much, right? Hmm...
I will not discuss what I use Youtube Shorts for, I think maybe everyone may find their own reasons.
The mechanism of Youtube Shorts/ Reels/ Stories is really the disruptive innovation that changed the way we consume content significantly.
I think the main point now is, do we allow Youtube Shorts consumption to cost us more than 3.5 hours per week? Why 3.5? Consider 0.5 hours as the average time per day, then we spend time for Shorts more than watching a really good movie, writing some diary notes, asking deep questions to ChatGPT about one or two topics...
With 3.5 hours, I can already improve my Agents system to return less unrelated results...
Also converting these hours to paid time, it can be quite some money to buy some new machines, subscriptions for Claude Code Max plan...
Continue with the consumption, do we like to continue with this 3.5 hours with Shorts... for the next 10/20/30 years?
But, the consumption brings the joy, the unexplainable joys... I have bookmarked about 5/100 Shorts I watched. Youtube understood me well to try to show me some technical, creative topics too.
And we should not be too strict with ourselves, right? Our body/mind always needs the recovery/reproduction phases for the next focus sessions.
So, yes, it's the recovery or reproduction for our body and mind. You know what I mean now, right? Such a manipulation from my writing...
I knew and learned about Zen in various forms from different sources:
- From Martial Arts movies, Cartoons, Star Wars, etc like some folks growing up at the same age in Vietnam like me
- From my Mom, Grandmom since I was a child
- From my important Friend who told me a lot of historical stories with words nearly exactly from the sources. Thank you!
- From videos and books of my Teacher, books of my Master, written stories and speeches of my Grand Grand Master, and Buddha's teachings.
- From books of Masters that I had the chance to read.
- Last but not least, from discussions with my Mom, Wife and nephews.
Basically, I have reserved some of my life time for this Zen topic and luckily found some Zen understandings that suit me in the practice.
Then from my experience with Zen, I can see one new similar point between Zen and Youtube Shorts/ Reels/ Stories. We can see also the loop of visual, images, feeling, ideas, histories during the Zen session, automatically displayed in our mind. Like a proverb said, "Our mind likes a monkey, keep jumping from one tree to another tree...".
And if we let it be freely enough, with the awareness of our breathing, those visuals or streams just appear in uncontrollable ways sometimes from our very deep subconscious.
It looks similar to the mechanism of Youtube Shorts/ Reels/ Stories, right?
But there's one difference but maybe not really different, which is the streams from Zen could be more related to our mind than the Algorithms optimized day by day from Youtube.
In short, with Zen, from my point of view, we have our own Shorts service which seems to be healthier than hours with watching, harmful to our eyes, body, and possibly too much input to our mind.
For that reason, possibly, 15 min of Zen stolen from 0.5 hours of Shorts every day might be better for my remaining time of this life.
One more thing: this Zen is just my own understanding, from what I have read, it's just the first tiny step in the long journey to the real Zen. FYI, I have built my own form, simple and lazy enough so I can spend more time, but optimized it over time to the form I learned from my sources. Similar to the way I am practicing baby skills on Piano. That's why Zen I mentioned in this post is just 0.000...1% of Zen.
References
- Youtube Shorts: https://www.youtube.com
- Facebook Reels/ stories: https://facebook.com
- https://www.mindful.org/monkey-mind-meditation/