I just spent 23 minutes hunting for a song. This is a common occurrence. It always goes something like this: I play a random collection of music on Youtube. One song jumps out to me. I identify the name of the song. If I’m lucky, it’ll be in the video description. If not, I’ll use Shazam or browse the comments. Then, I try to find just that song on Youtube, save it to a playlist, and, in some rare cases, download it as an MP3 to sync to my phone. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? There might, however, be obstacles.
In this case, the song artist name in the video description was wrong. So first, I had to find the correct one. Once I had that and had found the song on Youtube, I realized it sounded different from the one I’d just heard. As it turns out, in the collection video, they boosted the bass of the song and somewhat cropped the beginning and the ending.
Well, I wanted the version I had heard — so off to Google I went to find a tool that would let me crop out a small section of a Youtube video, then save just that as an MP3. After striking out a few times with various websites, eventually, I found one through Reddit. Cool. But now I had to convert the timestamps from the original video to an exact number of seconds. Okay. Did that too. I double-checked that the loop was giving me the right song with a decent beginning and ending, and pressed the button. Phew! Finally!
With the song playing on repeat and me finally emerging from my tunnel-vision focus, I realized something: First, I had just wasted 23 minutes of my 25-minute writing block on chasing down a four-minute instrumental — and second, I absolutely love falling down a rabbit hole like this. In fact, I do it all the time.
I love searching for a tool that lets me do exactly what I want in one go instead of chaining together several pieces of software to achieve the same outcome — and probably a lot faster. I love scrolling through various Pokémon card shops, deal sites, and comparing prices on different sites until I find the absolute best bargain on a sealed box or particular card. I love hunting video game achievements, to-do list items, and, yes, new songs to put on my playlists.
It’s true that we’ve come a long way from our hunter-gatherer beginnings — but it’s also true that evolution dies hard, or perhaps not at all. Somewhere in me, the ancient find-a-target algorithm is well-alive and kicking. Chances are, you, too, have not been left unscathed by evolution. Whether that’s good or bad we can debate all day long, but we have evidence aplenty that we can direct our ancient instincts towards new ends.
Are you a hunter? Gatherer? Or something in-between? Don’t succumb to your nature. Harness it. It won’t always lead you up the right mountain, but if the worst you’re doing is wasting 23 minutes finding a song, then even evolution won’t manage to carry you off some metaphorical cliff.