Staying Grounded in the Real

Way back in the day, I was actually doing content for YouTube (and I may do it again someday), but over the last few years, my main priority with YouTube has been learning things. Whatever you’re interested in, from AI to car repair to bench press technique, there are videos on there teaching you how to do it. If a person only used YouTube for that, it would almost certainly improve their life.

Of course, that’s not all that’s on YouTube, and the algorithm there is quite clever at figuring out what will keep you watching longer. You watch a funny video, and they’ll offer up another one you may like. You look at one clip about how to play a video game, and they’ll serve up other similar ones that may catch your attention. True story: I once spent something like two hours over a couple of days watching different bosses from the game Dark Souls fight each other in simulations to see who would win. Meanwhile, not only have I never played Dark Souls, but I have ZERO INTEREST in ever playing it.

Two types of videos REALLY hooked me, though. Exciting clips from professional wrestling matches (which I haven’t watched on TV in years) and clips from different action movies (most of which I also hadn’t seen in years). One moment, you’re watching Bruce Willis get off a classic line from Die Hard, the next you’re watching an action sequence from Equilibrium, then it’s Jackie Chan in some crazy martial arts fight against 8 gang members in a convenience store. Suddenly, you wonder where the last 30 minutes of your life went.

Perhaps oddly, I was thinking about that today when I heard something a fitness influencer named Michael Smoak said. Quite frankly, I wasn’t familiar with his work, but he apparently had an enormous number of left-wingers angry at him earlier this year. It seems they were demanding he address the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, and he did a video declining to do so because he wasn’t really paying attention to it, and it wasn’t in his lane anyway.

Well, he got enormous amounts of left-wing hate over that, lost a lot of followers, and… he didn’t really seem to care. When he was asked about why that was, he talked about how hard it was for him to take care of his father when he was dying. After that, he said, dealing with hate from a bunch of strangers, most of whom probably weren’t really fans of his work anyway, seemed trivial in comparison:

And so, my dad was a massive fall risk. And so, there was always anxiety with him just getting up to go get a glass of water. And there were just so many nights I remember at least half a dozen times my mom, because I moved home to help care for him, just barreling into my room, he’s falling again. I need your help. And going from a dead sleep to having to go pick your dad up off the floor and clean the blood off his head at 3 a.m., dude, that’ll light up your CNS. But it taught me what I was capable of. I could handle so much more stress than I realized. And it dissolved me of my ego. I remember people kept asking me how I was doing when sh*t kind of hit the fan on the internet and I was getting all the crazy comments. And I just kept thinking like, I had to carry my dying father to the bath and dress him. You think an internet comment bothers me? It doesn’t. Like, I know what real stuff is and I’m grateful for that. Like, I really am, because it raised my threshold for stress so much. I’m so much more patient. I’m so much more empathetic to people’s pain.

Now, you may be thinking, “Wait, what does this influencer ignoring an online outrage mob because he had dealt with real suffering have to do with which videos you’re watching on YouTube?”

Well, there are a lot of ways to say we only have so much time in life:

So, how much of your time do you want to spend rooted in meaningless, mostly online trivia, and how much time do you want to spend on what’s REAL in life? On what will move the needle forward for you? On what really matters?

Helping your dying dad get through a bad night. That’s REAL. When my father was dying in the hospital, I went day-after-day. Once or twice, he slept through me being there, and I didn’t want to wake him up because I wanted him to get his rest. Other times, he was a little out of it and may not have remembered that I was there, but I went. That mattered to him, and it mattered to me. I’m glad that I did that. That’s REAL. That MATTERS.

Getting beyond life and death, what matters to YOU? Your kids? Working on your marriage? Your friendships? Your health? Being happy? Having a good relationship with God? Helping out your community? Learning new skills? Becoming more informed? Becoming a better person? Trying to reach a goal you’ve been after for years? Just getting better?

These things MATTER. They’re REAL TO YOU. They have a huge impact on your life.

So, how much value are you getting out of watching Doc Holiday and Johnny Ringo duel in Tombstone again? What about arguing on some social media website or online forum with some random moron like this?

We could argue about whether it’s good for most people to be on social media at all, but setting that aside, what are you doing on social media? Keeping up with real-world friends on Facebook? Trying to learn new mobility and flexibility drills on Instagram? Learning about AI and keeping up with real news on X? Or… are you using social media to look at hot girls on Instagram, distracting yourself on TikTok, and trying to keep up with influencer gossip on X?

If you’re into politics, are you following people who teach you something or who inform you? Back when Rush Limbaugh dominated the airwaves, I used to enjoy listening to his show not just because he was entertaining, but because he had a keen mind for politics and a gift for seeing things other people were missing. Do you get a better understanding of the world because of the political influencers you’re listening to, or is it just, “How can they say that stuff and not get banned?” or “Everyone is ‘Big Mad’ because they said that! Hahahah!”

How much time do you want to spend on pornography vs. making love to your wife or, alternatively, finding a girlfriend? What’s real? Getting sexually activated looking at a screen or (ladies) reading a romance novel — or just getting out of the house? Why not go to church, a meetup, or some event where you can meet real humans that will hang out at your house, go to dinner with you, or introduce you to their hot cousin?

A lot of people get into arguments about the value of playing video games, but how about this: How much time do you want to spend playing some video game you’re lukewarm on? Not some new God of War vs. Invincible crossover game you’ve been looking forward to for months, but some game you find barely better than watching sitcoms?

In a world where your attention is a commodity that everyone wants to use for their own purposes, get more value out of your time by grounding yourself in what makes your life better, what matters, and what’s REAL.

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