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