Don’t you hate them when they pop up on YouTube? You’re probably just sitting there staring at the skip button to open up. Maybe you’re forced to sit through a 15 second one. But imagine if there was a 1 minute ad you couldn’t skip. There would be petitions against the practice. People would get off the platform in favor of other video services. It’s too long to wait to get what we want.

So why is it that when something interrupts our life for a long time, we allow it to do so?

Classes, projects, other work. The interruptions keep piling up until we get lost in what’s interrupting our life instead of our life itself. Our life becomes a show for other people to grab our attention and energy. And barely anything put into what we wanted in the first place.

Whether you prefer to stick to watching the ads is up to you. But I’m the type of person to skip them where possible to get to where I want to be, not where someone else wants me to be. It also means understanding when you have to change the platform, when necessary, to do what you want to do.