The infinite watchlist

I’m the only person I know who actually uses watchlists — especially YouTube’s Watch Later. Something catches my eye, I throw it in. Movies, series, videos, music: I’ve got a list on every platform that offers one. For YouTube specifically, every morning I open the subscriptions tab, add whatever looks good, then go watch a few things off it. Next day, same. It’s a nice little routine. It felt, for a long time, like a system that worked. Then I looked at the numbers. 857 on IMDb, 666 on YouTube. And I couldn’t tell you what’s near the bottom of either one.

Here’s the thing you have to understand before any of this makes sense: I don’t add junk. I start from the assumption that everything I put in a list is something I actually want to watch. Not “might.” Want. Something catches me, I’m curious, in it goes — doesn’t matter how stupid it is, maybe some day. I never add things I have no intention of watching. So this isn’t a pile of noise I filed by accident.

Which makes what actually happens harder to explain.

Every morning on YouTube I add around ten videos. Over the day I watch five, maybe six. That leaves a surplus — every day, without fail, more goes in than comes out. And I watch the newest ones. Whatever I added today gets watched today; the rest sinks. Next morning I add ten more on top, watch five or six of those, and yesterday’s leftovers sink another layer. The list isn’t sorted by how much I want something. It’s sorted by how long ago I wanted it, which turns out to be the same as how unlikely I am to ever get to it. The older an entry, the deader it is. I didn’t decide against those videos. I just never stopped stacking newer ones on top, and there’s only so much day.

Part of it is simple math I can’t beat. I like long form. Twenty minutes plus, ideally — give people room to actually make their thesis. So the things I add aren’t clips. They’re the hour-long video, the two-and-a-half-hour essay, the six-hour retrospective on a series I don’t even watch. I add in units of one click. The list demands payment in units of an evening. It fills in items and drains in hours, so it can only ever grow. I’m not lazy. I’m outmatched.

IMDb is the same disease with cleaner numbers. I watch between fifty and a hundred movies a year — this year fewer, other things going on, but call it seventy on average. Seventy movies is a real feat. It is also nothing against 857. At seventy a year, ignoring every film I’ll add between now and then, the current list is a twelve-year sentence. And I add faster than I watch. So the honest number isn’t twelve years. It’s never.

And even the math is generous, because it assumes I watch off the list at all. Often I don’t. I’ll skip the certified masterpiece — the one everybody agrees is great, the one I know is great, the one I genuinely want to have watched — to put on some random garbage that was never on any list. Because wanting to watch something and knowing it’s good are two different systems, and the list only tracks the second one. I file by merit. I watch by mood. They never line up. The garbage has the one quality 857 curated films can’t offer: I feel like it right now.

None of this is a new discovery. That’s the part that gets me. I had this exact realization last year. Decided to fix it, started watching from the bottom for once, cleaned out a decent chunk. Felt good. Then, slowly, it silted back to normal. The insight was correct and it changed nothing. The habit is stronger than the noticing. I know precisely what’s happening and I keep doing it, which is a different and worse thing than not knowing.

You’d think the fix is obvious: delete. Just remove the ones you’re never getting to. I can’t. Even when the curiosity is gone — when I genuinely no longer care about the thing I once added — I leave it there. My reasoning, if you can call it that: I was curious about it once, so why not keep being curious. Deleting it would mean admitting the curiosity had a shelf life. That something I truly wanted could just expire, unmet, and that the version of me who wanted it isn’t around anymore. So I keep the entry, like keeping it keeps the wanting alive. It doesn’t. It just sits there as evidence that I used to be someone slightly different.

And it isn’t only video. The music playlist called “To Listen,” present tense, still going — everything I mean to hear before I get around to organizing it, which I don’t. And further back: browser bookmarks, high school, over a hundred saved memes and articles, all kept under the same assumption that I’d need them someday. I lost all of them years ago. Never read, never used, just stored, and then gone. I didn’t even notice the loss — you can’t miss spending something you were only ever hoarding.

That’s the one finished story I have. The watchlists are still open, still growing, so I can only guess at their fate. The bookmarks already died, and they tell me the answer. You don’t get to the bottom of the list. The bottom doesn’t wait for you. It quietly stops existing while you’re up top adding more. The eight hundred movies at the bottom of my IMDb list are already those bookmarks. They just haven’t disappeared off the screen yet.

It took me a while to write this. Long enough that the numbers I opened with are already wrong. 666 became 686. 857 became 860. I spent this whole time describing the pile and the pile grew while I described it, because of course it did — I didn’t stop adding just to write about not stopping.

So that’s what the list actually is. Not a queue of films. A museum of former selves, each one certain they’d get around to it, and me the curator who can’t bring himself to take anything down. The list doesn’t hold my future. It absorbs it, so I don’t have to feel it slipping.

Tomorrow morning I’ll open the subscriptions tab and add ten more.