Have you tried this?:

I’ll give you a simple thing you can do that will make a huge difference. First and last half hour of your day, spend them with no screens. Sounds minimal but it will help you lower your dopamine baseline, after that it’ll be easier to embrace tranquility with each passing day.

After that, if you can, add some friction between the thing you’re doing (maybe you can add a pincode requirement or something?) and yourself and if possible, set a defined time of day for the activity.

Lastly, just some willpower every now and then to stop or even not start.

The way I understand it, you will be able to keep enjoying it without it consuming your life, IMO this is the kind of thing we should all know to do in this day and age.

Write a comprehensive thesis about administrative practice in the early mongolian empire and then obsessively maintain the wikipedia page on it

Get ready for it to suck. Embrace the pain like a masochist.

Currently seems like you have a pretty solid routine of wasting days on YT. While it may be long term painful, it’s short term very pleasant, and it’s gonna be hard to force yourself to do anything less pleasant.

Gotta expect the suck and treat the feeling as progress.

Or substitution for other dopamine dumps, but that’s just making a new future problem

My honest recommendation: realize that you’ve been sucked in to using youtube as an addictive coping mechanism. You say you love youtube, and I get it - there is a lot of fun stuff and a lot of useful information there. But YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIFE. For many people, watching some youtube videos sometimes is fine - but for you, at this moment, you should strongly consider the tradeoff between continuing to watch videos and doing literally anything else in your life. Finding and spending time with a significant other, cooking healthy food and exercising, making new friends and spending time with old ones, advancing your career and making more money, creating art, exploring nature, learning about the world, becoming a valued member of your community, etc. Looking at those great big distant dreams you had during childhood and adolescence and chasing them!

I highly recommend that you do everything possible - EVERYTHING possible - to remove youtube from your life Right. Now. Seriously - take your tv off the wall, stand it up on the ground, and give it a swift kick in the screen with the toe of your boot. Or if you wanna be an environmentalist about it, list it for sale on fb marketplace and take it off the wall so you can hand it off as soon as someone comes around.

Install every app/site blocker you can on every device that you own. Pay for the premium version so you can get all the features to keep you off the platform.

Make plans for what you are going to do with the time you are no longer spending watching youtube. Hang out with friends. Sign up for a pottery class. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Clean your home up.

Your brain will fight you. It will say “but youtube is so fun, and I’m really invested in these channels right now, so I can just cut down a bit and it will be fine.” It will say “but youtube has lots of good information - what if I need to fix my car?” It will say “but youtube has a lot of cultural relevance - how will I keep up with the memes my friends are sharing without it?” Your brain is trying to protect itself from being deprived of its most consistent, low effort source of feel-good chemicals by coming up with all sorts of convincing-sounding reasons for never having to change. Don’t listen to it. For any benefit youtube might provide you with, you can get that somewhere else in the world. If you want to laugh, you can see a standup show or make jokes with your friends. If you want to learn something, you can read a book or take a class or read wikipedia or ask a friend who knows more. And the biggest one of all - if you want that feeling of feeling comfortable hearing about the small minutiae and updates of someone’s life that you’ve known for a long time, you can do that with your friends! You can do that, and have the other person actually know you exist!

And of course your brain will say “I’m not addicted, I just need to cut down a little, but I could stop anytime I want.” Yeah? Then prove it. Try to go 2 weeks without youtube. If you can’t, then you have a problem

How do you find so much content to watch? For me, the worthwile content simply runs out after a while and the recomendation engine just starts to push the uninteresting clickbait videos.

Make a decision to make better choices. Only you can make that choice.

Overkill: get rid of your home wifi and go back to physical media. Use a mobile hotspot with limited data for everything else.

I don’t watch YouTube anymore, though I do listen to it plenty over my phone’s connection.

Edit: Bigger picture: find something you want to do more. Set a goal and make a commitment to set aside a modest amount of time every day to achieve it.