I’m posting on a Monday what I did yesterday. It’s a set of actions I usually perform on a Sunday.

What is a Shedding Sunday? It’s a day where I drop, or shed, habits and applications that fed those habits. I’ve already written about how I’ve dropped the use of many/most social media applications, the latest being Bluesky and Mastodon. This Sunday I took to dropping many channels on YouTube as well as several recurring Apple subscriptions. Let’s start with the YouTube channels.

I am a liberal, definitely left of center. There is no longer anyway I can meet my conservative counterparts in the middle. The chasm between liberal and conservative has been widening since Obama won in 2007, and the Tea Party fully infected the Republican party. The roots of this can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America, but it’s full hideous flowering came about in the 2010 mid-terms. The Republican party has been totally insane ever since.

And the primary vector of that infection has been the right wing media, primarily Fox News. Having recognized that I’ve devoted considerable effort to avoid anything with a right wing smell. That hasn’t helped me to avoid controversy. I started following a number of left-of-center and just left YouTube channels because I thought I might find solace in those channels. For about a month I subscribed to a number of non-right-wing channels, watching every episode that came out on those channels. YouTube helpfully surfaced more leftish content, so that soon I was awash in left-leaning content. The only problem with all that left-leaning content was the penchant for all of them to publish oh-ain’t-it-awful content about all the right-wing excesses and sins, in particular about Donald Trump. While pointing out these sins I’d hear a clip played back of Trump speaking, which raised my hackles. After a while of this constant bombardment I came to realize that the liberal news channels were carrying water for Trump by playing back his clips. I don’t care how much you were criticizing what he said, the fact you played him back was enough to continue to spread his vile and hate filled message. He’s living for free on your channel and if I allow it, in my head. I found this depressing to the point where I finally stopped searching for and listening, and I unsubscribed from them all. The YouTube algorithms being what they are, it’s going to take me a while to “not recommend channel[s]” when YouTube peppers my feed with similar content.

After less than 24 hours I can feel the stress leaving me. The feeling that I’m uncontrollably falling into a depressive state has stopped. I’m calmer and I can think more clearly.