The 2x Playback Button on YouTube and TikTok Is Peak Brainrot

I’m a screentime maximalist. I make no apologies and really feel no guilt about how a lot time I spend looking at my telephone. I am a grown grownup who pays taxes and makes my very own selections about how I spend my valuable free time on this blue marble. And what I would like is to spend as a lot of these moments as attainable consuming short-form vertical video on my telephone.

My must devour increasingly more inane content material jogs my memory of the famous photo of the Florida Everglades python whose abdomen exploded whereas attempting to eat an alligator. I establish with the insatiable snake; the alligator is the infinite scroll I can by no means get sufficient of, figuring out there’s all the time one thing extra to look at.

My aim is to maximise consumption of video hours, and clearly, I can not add extra hours to the day. I am already shaving the time I waste on sleeping (boring, overrated) by watching TikToks in mattress.

So the issue must be solved on the provision facet: I want these movies to go quicker so I can get extra in.

Fortunately, TikTok and Instagram Reels each have buttons that make movies play at 2x pace. There have been some bumps alongside this highway. TikTok added the 2x-speed characteristic in 2023, however solely just lately added the essential characteristic that permits you to “lock” 2x pace with out having to carry your finger on the display (press the display to begin 2x pace, then drag your finger all the way down to lock it). Reels was later to the occasion, including the 2x pace in 2025.

Simply this week, YouTube Shorts is lastly including a 2x pace characteristic. Thank god, I say! Truthfully, I’m not an enormous Shorts client, however I think about that is big information for like, 12-year-olds.

The flexibility to hurry up content material has most likely change into one of many most-used options throughout the apps I exploit each day. I pace up podcasts and non-fiction audiobooks to not less than 1.25x (recently, I have been bumping fiction audiobooks to not less than 1.4x). The thought of listening at precise pace is torture to me at this level.

At first, I believed the concept of speeding up a Netflix show was an abomination, however then I spotted it is the one respectable strategy to devour actuality exhibits like “Love Is Blind.” In the previous few weeks, I’ve discovered myself irritated that I can not pace by way of the six (!!!) episodes per week of “Love Island” on the Peacock app (although apparently there are Chrome extensions that allow you to achieve this).

Does it say one thing kind of unhappy about our society that we have to speed-watch by way of a 90-second video? Sure, sure it does. I am not going to disclaim that. Our consideration spans are so decimated, and our brains so rotted, that we will not take heed to somebody talking at regular pace anymore.

And what’s guilty for that? The firehose of content material itself, after all. Quick-form movies have rotted our brains in such a method that we crave extra short-form movies. It is virtually like toxoplasmosis, the illness from dealing with cat poop that makes rats obsessive about cats.

I am positive that there is a strategy to wean your self off all this and reset your consideration span. Sign off, contact grass, dopamine reset, and so forth… However I’ve no real interest in that. I’ve made my selections, and I will be rushing by way of movies till all of the platforms have so as to add 3x speeds.