Pleasure Hypothesis: Intensity VS Frequency

I have always connected with the phrase "work hard play hard", even though I might not always embody the principle myself. My most recent vice is YouTube. I love YouTube. It is such a good platform for information discovery and presentation. It enables you to go deep when you want to, or just get quick a quick overview of any topic. The quality of YouTube production has been rapidly increasing over the years, and now it seems like the bar for quality is extremely high, even for relatively small channels. I also have YouTube premium, which reduces a TON of friction when jumping between videos. And lastly, the rise of YouTube shorts has been cripling to my productivity. I can tell the algorithm is just getting better and better.

YouTube definitely provides me value. I've learned lots of valuable information over the years using the platform. However, just like many other areas of life, it follows an asymmetric distribution on value delivery. Most (not all) of the time I spend on YouTube is actually just a waste of time and I would be better off spending it in other ways. What's worse, binging YouTube videos/shorts isn't actually THAT pleasurable. To me this is fascinating.

Something something... life seems better when you focus on the intensity of the pleasure you are pursuing and avoid frequent weak pleasures. For example, I'd rather play an immersive video game like RDR2 and experience a long-form cohesive story that truly inspires me, than spend the same amount of time getting quick hits scrolling short-form videos that I'm just going to forget within a few minutes of consumption. From the outside looking in, it seems like either way I'm not being "productive" but in a counter-intuitive way, it's the weak pleasure and addictive nature of YouTube that seems to have a worse impact on my day-to-day productivity.

Note: this doesn't apply to drugs haha. And maybe dividing on the line of powerful/weak isn't as important as addictive/long-form. Maybe it has to do with the friction involved. The best things in life seem to require some effort in order to be truly rewarding...