Every day, YouTube tries to sell me thirty seconds of my own life. Thirty seconds for detergent. Thirty seconds for car insurance. Thirty seconds as the toll to enter the temple of distraction.
But I refuse.
Instead, I back out of the video and restart it. Again and again. Sometimes for two minutes straight. Why? Because if I’m patient (or stubborn) enough, the algorithm eventually cracks, and I get the five-second ad instead.
On the surface, it’s absurd. I waste 120 seconds to save 25. That’s not a strategy—it’s a joke. But the joke is the point. This is not about efficiency. This is about reclamation. My time is not for sale, even if I must squander it extravagantly to prove it.
Each restart becomes a kind of mantra: Not today. Not this ad. Not this self.
My thumb taps back like a monk’s bell, ringing out a refusal. And the minutes of looping become less annoyance and more… ritual.
When, at last, the blessed five-second skip arrives, I laugh. Not because I “won,” but because I turned commerce into comedy. What was meant to extract my attention became a private performance of resistance—a small absurd theater of freedom.
This is what makes it a ritual. It’s inefficient, unnecessary, and a little ridiculous. And yet, it makes me feel more alive, more awake to the absurdity of systems that think they can own my time.
Sometimes, wasting time is the only way to prove it’s still yours.