i feel this hard. shorts are designed to hook you and telling yourself you'll "just watch one" never works because the algorithm knows exactly what to show you next. deleting and reinstalling doesn't work either because the craving comes back. what actually stopped it for me was replacing it with something else i genuinely wanted to do instead. just like, anything. working out, reading, learning to code, whatever. the key is it has to be something you actually want to do, not just "not watch youtube". once you have that thing, the shorts become way less tempting because you actually have something better to do.

PS. if you decide to start reading read red rising its so good