The film that broke my mind

My favorite kind of film is the kind that, through some combination of masterful artistry and life’s own timing, manages to seem to touch my soul. The kind of film that leaves me stunned, unable to move as the credits soar towards the heavens. Whether it takes me to a new world, or allows me to appreciate our own just a little bit more, I love films that strike me with beauty and awe. This video, however, isn’t about those films. This video is about something far, far dumber.

It began with what was supposed to be a chill type of hangout over voice chat. When one of my friends claimed to have something for us to watch, I didn’t think much of it, at least until I saw the title.

The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) … Right.

To be completely honest, I didn’t know what The Seventh Seal was in the first place, so I bolted to Wikipedia for an easy answer.

Wikipedia: The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, [...] [it's] considered a classic in the history of cinema, as well as one of the greatest films of all time.[1]

I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. If The Seventh Seal is so renowned, surely my first experience with it should be watching the film itself and not the alleged “Zoomer Edition”. Out of respect for the film as well as myself, surely this would be a mistake. Why don’t we watch the original film instead? My friend insisted, however, and against our better judgment, we proceeded. Right before pressing play, I thought to myself, “What makes this the ‘Zoomer Edition’, anyway? And, by watching this, what of the original film will I miss out on?” I would get answers to both questions very soon.

As the film began, I immediately realized what I had gotten myself into. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is The Seventh Seal, untouched and unedited. It has, however, been delicately sandwiched between Subway Surfers on the right and oddly satisfying videos on the left. The core conceit is clear.

felipecampos1403: I can finally watch a cult, old, philosophical black and white movie with that dopamine boost just a slight tilt of the eye away[2]

You’ve probably seen something similar before. Known as “sludge content” or “overstimulation content”, videos like this proliferated across platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts in the early 2020s.[3] The idea behind them is simple: add colorful motion, and people will watch longer. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is pretty plainly a parody of this type of video, the joke being that the only way to get someone in my generation to even survive the film is through a serving of Subway Surfers on the side.

Duncanster: I can't focus on the movie. Do you think you can throw in some Family Guy clips too?[2]

As the film continued, a certain sense of horror began to set in, not from The Seventh Seal’s themes of death and futility, but from the futility of trying to watch the film itself. And it’s not like I didn’t try. We may have put on The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition), but I wanted to watch The Seventh Seal. And so, I poured all of my attention into…uh…hey do you think the subway surfers is looped? like, i know the score is really high, but like, surely there’s a cut somewhere. i mean, you can’t cheat the guard, and you can’t outrun the guard, so like, whoever’s playing will have to die at some point, right? oh wait what just happened

Bergman is a director known for striking, high-contrast cinematography in his films.[4] His films are the kind to leave you in awe, or as film historian Peter Cowie puts it, “nearly everyone who sees The Seventh Seal emerges stunned and thrilled by its visual splendors”.[5] These visual splendors are, however, no match for the vibrant colors and perpetual motion of the parasites possessing the margins.

No matter how hard I tried to keep watching, no matter how hard I tried to stay focused on what mattered to me in the moment, I simply couldn’t. Ten minutes had passed, and I wasn’t sure I had paid attention for a single one. To make matters worse, not only are its visuals a critical component of The Seventh Seal and its storytelling, the entire film is in Swedish. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) embeds subtitles, but you do have to look at them. Every second spent subconsciously staring towards the side of the screen would cascade, relentlessly shoving understanding even farther from reach. I was completely lost. And—oh my god why is that person cutting towards themselves. the blade is gonna slip. the blade is gonna slip. the blade is gonna slip. it’s going to slip. the blade—

As time marched on, the film only continued to slip from my grasp. Every few minutes, I’d check back on the film, hoping that maybe—just maybe—I’d be able to understand. Invariably, I couldn’t, and I’d again let myself be washed away by the empty embrace of oddly satisfying slime videos.

There was a certain disturbing level of lucidity I experienced throughout all of this. To my abject horror, I was wholly, blindingly aware of my own inability to focus. With eyes wide open, I watched as my own eyes, wide open, betrayed me in what they watched. And yet, no matter how concretely cognizant I was of my own situation, I couldn’t do a thing. It was as if I was trapped in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from, and Jake Subway Surfers was my sleep paralysis demon.

Overstimulation content, as a genre, is one that’s fairly unique to the online landscape of the 2020s, and that’s because of the types of algorithmic feeds we see on platforms like TikTok. This form of social media feels ubiquitous today, but it wasn’t always that way.

Whenever you access a website, your web browser receives data through a protocol called HTTP. It stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and its function is as its name suggests. Hypertext, by the way, is a term that simply refers to text containing links to other text.[6] Considering the vastly varied varieties of media that are now ricocheted across the web, HTTP’s definition feels quite quaint. That’s because the web was originally conceived simply as a way to store and retrieve hypertext documents over the Internet.[7] In the earliest days of the web, there were no algorithmic feeds, “social media” was an alien term, and search engines were no more than hand-curated lists. As idyllic as this sounds, the problem is obvious—as the web grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually sift through. Eventually, code was written to automatically crawl and rank websites, which would then be organized by topic.[8]

When you think about it, these early search engines aren’t too dissimilar in purpose to the recommendation algorithms of today. At a very high level, they both solve the same basic problem of “too much content”, and they both solve said problem by parsing and ranking said online content. Still, it took some time for algorithmic feeds to reach widespread adoption. Social media algorithms aren’t new—Flickr holds a 2006 patent for ranking content by “interestingness”,[9] and Reddit has used upvotes and downvotes to rank content since 2005.[10] At the same time, it’s a little surprising how long they took to reach some major platforms. MySpace was the dominant social media platform for a sizeable portion of the 2000s,[11] yet it didn’t include a feed during the peak of its popularity. Facebook introduced a reverse-chronological feed in 2006, yet this wasn’t changed to a ranked feed until 2011.[12] And Twitter’s feed was reverse-chronological all the way until 2014.[13]

There’s always a bit of controversy tied with algorithm changes. Just look at the hundreds of thousands of people who signed a petition protesting Instagram’s algorithmic feed in 2016.[14] Despite this, it’s important to remember that algorithmic feeds solve a genuine problem, at least in theory. There are a couple of reasons why a user may want an algorithmically ranked feed. Without manual, intentional cultivation, it’s easy for a chronological feed to become burdened with uninteresting or irrelevant content—the weeds of the feeds. Using an algorithm to filter out irrelevant content may help the user to better spend their time on the platform. And maybe, just maybe, with all the spam gone, you could finally reach the end. Now, there are also a couple of reasons why a platform may want an algorithmically ranked feed. With uninteresting and irrelevant content filtered out, users are less likely to leave, meaning they spend more time on the platform. For services that profit from advertising—that is, every major platform—more time spent on the platform is more opportunities to extract revenue. And maybe, just maybe, with all the spam gone, users won’t ever leave the infinite flow of content.

This is where the concept of “engagement” comes in. “Engagement” is nearly a meaningless term—it refers to the fact that a user is engaging with a platform without any information about how they engage—and yet, it’s one that’s crucial to content creation and distribution on the Internet. As a result, social media companies have found a multitude of ways to calculate and predict a user’s level of engagement.[15] I previously mentioned Flickr’s “interestingness” patent, which appears to aggregate views, favorites, comments, tag relevance, and timing.[9] Reddit’s algorithm was public up until 2017, and at the time, it was basically the difference between upvotes and downvotes decaying over time.[16] Regardless of how it was calculated, however, user engagement has been incredibly important to social media companies for a long while, at times even more than revenue itself. In 2012, as Facebook was preparing for an IPO, Mark Zuckerberg himself warned investors:

Mark Zuckerberg: Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results. Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.[17]

It’s funny to peer into a time when Facebook was a widely beloved service. It’s also funny to see “user engagement” and “better services” used as interchangeable terms. Make no mistake, these algorithms were doing their absolute best to get people hooked for as long as they existed—Facebook ultimately always had financial interests at heart—but there’s a pretty fundamental difference between the social media algorithms of then and now. During the late 2010s, social media companies shifted their recommendation algorithms towards deep learning models.[18] A brief explanation: by shoving massive amounts of data down a complicated data-processing network, these companies could more accurately predict how you will use their platform. Not “you” in the general sense, but you, specifically.

In order to both build these models and use them, these companies need a scary amount of data, and they get it from tracking you, everywhere, from news sites to actual physical stores.[19] Of course, a lot of the data comes from your usage of their platforms. Every link clicked, every post seen, is obsessively logged and fed into the machine. This creates incredibly important incentives surrounding engagement. When you engage with platforms, you’re shown ads, which provide income to these platforms. This has pretty much always been the case. Now, when you engage with these platforms, in addition to providing revenue, you provide them with more data, which allows them to create better models, which creates more engagement. When you use social media, not only are you giving social media companies your time and attention, you’re arming them with the resources to make social media even more enticing. In 2012, Facebook claimed to prioritize engagement over revenue. In 2025, these incentives are intrinsically and cyclically linked.

One interesting effect of using deep learning models is that we don’t actually know precisely how they work. Deep learning models are trained on user data to find patterns, but even the developers making these algorithms can’t tell you why exactly a certain video is ranked higher than another.[20] And as data continues to be collected, these algorithms are constantly evolving.[21] We may not be able to understand the specifics, but we can get a decent idea of the broad strokes. Attention, for example, is pretty commonly understood to be a major factor, especially on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.[22] TikTok themselves have stated that watching a video to completion is a “strong indicator” of interest, and therefore will have a significant effect on a person’s recommendations.[23]

The result of this is pretty simple: TikTok—and likely similar services like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels—will show you videos it thinks will capture your attention. If a video can hold your attention, not only will you see more similar content, the video will be pushed to more people. For creators that wish to have lasting success on these platforms, holding attention is a key consideration because it has a tangible impact on their reach. And whether consciously or not, creators on these platforms mold their content and persona to succeed in the eyes of the algorithm, ultimately striving to make content to better grab your attention.[24]

All of this creates an ecosystem of engagement, where posts are pitted against each other in a strife for survival. An arms race of attention. And oh boy are there arms available…

Colorful visuals. Unholy amounts of saturation and contrast. “Wait for it…” Math problems to keep you from scrolling, and so you can argue in the comments. (cut music) Genuinely interesting and insightful content. (pause) Car crashes. Arrows! And! Circles! Extremely loud music and noises. shutupshutupshutup— Is that just a picture of an AI-generated cat? Why… I don’t know what this is, but I’m disturbed! People actually freaking dying—I wish I was kidding about this one.[25] Lots of motion! Why are there so many AI-generated cats? I don’t understand—looking up the problem just brings me more AI cats. “Wait for and”? Oh, is this just baiting corrections? Wait, it has 17 million views? Huh… What about straight sensory input?! Who needs anything else?! And, of course, Subway Surfers on the side.

Obviously, your feed doesn’t look like this. I hope it doesn’t look like this. I found most of these logged out in a private tab, flying past YouTube Shorts at supersonic speed, so it’s not going to reflect the tastes of a given person watching them. (Though, actually, if this is supposed to be the most general-audience, widely targeted form of YouTube Shorts…maybe people actually are watching this? Scary.) This doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of tricks creators can employ to manipulate your attention. Some are as brazen as what I just showed, but others are a lot more subtle, like including a camera shake at the beginning of a video to introduce a bit of eye-catching motion.[26] And these tricks can change over time. Adding Subway Surfers was especially common a couple of years ago, but it seems to have somewhat subsided. Of course, it’s just one of a long litany of techniques that creators have to keep you watching. It’s simply a fundamental part of the current online landscape.

As the playhead bumped the corner of the screen, and The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) came to an end, I was distraught. For 90 minutes, there was something I wanted to watch right there in front of me, but I just…couldn’t.

To be honest, before the movie, there was a part of me that thought I was “above” this sort of thing. I hadn’t really used TikTok or other short-form video platforms pretty much at all by then, and so I thought that, somehow, the Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos just wouldn’t affect me. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I didn’t have the control over my attention I thought I did—that, or these videos are just that entrancing.

Either way, watching The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) left me regretful and scared. Before it began, I asked myself, “What of the original film would I miss?” It turned out to be “everything”—an answer to my question, but also no answer at all. I still wanted to watch The Seventh Seal. I still wanted to know what I had failed to witness. But a certain thought pestered me. Even if I did watch the original Seventh Seal, would I even have been able to pay attention, or would I have simply become bored? Did I want to know the answer?

The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) led me to realize just how distracting Internet content could be, and not in the way we normally talk about it as a “distraction”. It’s not merely a distraction from work, or cleaning, or any other “important” task. The Subway Surfers distracted me from a movie, one that I think I would have otherwise really enjoyed! These cheap tricks didn’t just distract me from obligations and chores—they distracted me from things I genuinely wanted to spend my time doing. Something had to change.

And, in a funny way, things did change a bit. The despair I felt after The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) was shared with my friends on voice chat. And this inadvertently led to a lengthy conversation about social media, its content, and their effects. By now, I don’t remember the specifics of our discussion, but that hasn’t changed its impact. It’s kinda silly, but after watching Zoomer Edition, I began to think about it whenever I went online. I try for the most part to avoid YouTube Shorts, and if I watch one, I make a conscious effort never to scroll to the next one. I realized I wasn’t getting any value out of Twitter, so I deleted my account. It didn’t stop or prevent all of my bad habits—I very often find myself distracted as the secondary screen I put on for YouTube becomes the primary focus of my attention, and I certainly catch myself stalled scrolling sometimes—but, oddly, it helped. This all happened two years ago, and, well, obviously, I continue to think about it even now.

So, is the Subway Surfers sidebar shortening our attention spans? What about short-form media as a whole? As obviously true as it seems, we don’t actually know for sure. Significant correlations have certainly been found between media multitasking and shorter attention spans,[27][28][29] and the same is true for short-form video at large.[30][31][32] Correlation is not causation, however, and the latter is much more difficult to investigate. It’s possible that there’s causation here, but it’s also possible that we’re not getting less attentive—social media is simply getting better at grabbing us. Or, that people that are easily distracted simply gravitate towards these platforms naturally.[33] Besides, media multitasking, at least, isn’t anything new. I mean, take a look at Disneyland’s Main Street Cinema, originally opened in 1955. And we’ve used television, and radio before it, as background noise since the introduction of those technologies.[34] It’s not like I can judge, either, as a heavy media multitasker myself.

We don’t know if TikTok and overstimulation content are strictly bad for us, but at the same time, it can’t be good for us, right? And even if media multitasking isn’t new, engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are. It’s my personal opinion that algorithmic social media platforms are, ironically, uniquely isolating as a form of media. By hyperpersonalizing your feed with complex engagement-driven algorithms, social media companies are able to create an experience crafted specifically “for you”, and this makes it harder to share the experience with others. Sure, you can share a video with someone, whether that’s by handing over your phone or using the dedicated “share” button. But in the same way that showing a friend vacation photos isn’t the same as them being there, sharing an individual video is sharing a small snapshot of your experience, not your experience as a whole. Movies, shows, games, music, and even books to an extent, are designed to be shared—to be discussed with others, if not experienced together outright. Short-form video feeds, by design, aren’t. And it’s not like there aren’t places on the Internet where you can find both meaning and meaningful connections with others—but the largest platforms have other incentives in mind. All else will fall before engagement.

Clearly, as many people say, we need to be mindful of what we watch. But that’s tricky to actually do, for a couple of reasons. To start, it’s not immediately obvious what that actually looks like. And even if you know how to be mindful online, it’s even harder to find the innate motivation to use that knowledge in the first place. It doesn’t help that mindfulness runs counter to social media platforms’ goals. In the words of Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan, “The fact that users might sometimes exercise judgment and resist their impulses is treated as a problem to be solved.”[22] This is even reflected in the overall designs of these platforms, especially surrounding short-form video. Most social media platforms—even ones without complex recommendation algorithms—structure their feed around an infinitely scrolling page, leaving no natural stopping point from scrolling. This is even worse on platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, which inundate you with a continuous stream of unending content. This leaves you with limited agency, as you don’t actually pick what videos you watch—another video is already playing as soon as you decide to stop watching the previous one. Paired with the loud (and honestly obnoxious) ways creators try to grab your attention, there’s intentionally little opportunity for reflection.

This endless barrage of content is designed to induce flow state in the user—the same feeling of focus that you may feel playing a sport or difficult video game. According to psychologists Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the preconditions of flow state are clear goals, perceived opportunities for controlled or skillful action, and immediate feedback.[35] If the goal of watching TikToks is to see entertaining content, swiping provides an illusion of control towards that goal, and the feedback in the form of the next video couldn’t be more immediate. The effects of flow state are incredible in many contexts, but somewhat alarming in the context of scrolling social media—they include the distortion of time and a loss of reflective self-consciousness.[35] In other words, these platforms get exactly what they want out of you—even more engagement as time itself appears to evaporate around you. And this can be observed—a 2023 study found that the experience of flow state was significantly correlated with problematically excessive TikTok use. Worse, the researchers failed to find a significant correlation between enjoyment and excessive TikTok use.[36] To platforms like TikTok and the algorithms they create, it doesn’t matter if you found something meaningful during your time there, or even if you had fun—it only matters that you’re enveloped and engaged. It’s meant to break your mind. To quote cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, “the immediacy of the machine’s response joins human and machine in a […] closed circuit of action such that the locus of control—and thus, of agency—becomes indiscernible.”[37] Though, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize she was talking about gambling addiction here, not social media.

So how do we break the machine? One of the biggest challenges with answering this question is how varied people’s experiences are with social media, and I think this makes specific advice and techniques less helpful than one might think. I’ll mostly be going off of my own personal experiences here, and of course that comes with the caveat that my suggestions may not align with your own experiences; though, I’ll also be referencing some other videos on this topic.

In general, I personally believe there are two key factors to consider: desire and convenience. It’s the desire to use a platform that prompts you to use it, and it’s often the convenience of access that keeps you captured and coming back, even when you don’t intend to. These factors are deeply intertwined. The frictionless experience of scrolling isn’t just convenient—it prevents you from reflecting on whether you want to be there in the first place. Of the two, however, I find it important to prioritize taking care of the former. This is because it’s really easy to form new habits that circumvent any reductions to convenience you make. Once, I wanted to reduce how much I was opening YouTube. I had a habit of clicking this shortcut on my new tab page, so I removed the shortcut. Instead of decreasing my YouTube usage, it only created a new habit: rapidly typing “ctrl+t, y, o, u, enter”. Even if you make social media less convenient, if you still strongly wish to use it in the first place, you’re going to find your way, anyway.

This desire can come from anywhere: the want to be entertained, the want to keep up with news or communities, even the want to distract yourself can be a reason. It’s hard for me to give advice on this area, because it’s so dependent on your personal situation. For me, finding low stakes, low effort hobbies and activities gave me less reason to turn to social media for entertainment. I’ve also noticed the more socially isolated I feel in real life, the more I’ve turned to the Internet in search of connection, but once again, this is just my own experience. And if you want something concrete to try to take matters into your own hands, you can try the method Internet Shaquille suggests in a video on his second channel:

Internet Shaquille: Navigate to the explore tab and find the least
relevant, least shareable post with which you'd never interact. [...]
Open it, tap the share icon, and back out. Refresh the explore tab and
do that again with the two or three similar posts that are sure to show
up. Rinse and repeat five times and your whole feed looks like you care
deeply about this topic that's totally irrelevant to you.[38]

The goal of this technique is to, hopefully, nudge you to become repulsed by your own feed, decreasing your desire to come back for more. Becoming repulsed by social media seems a bit drastic, but it may be effective where simply finding alternatives isn’t. It’s also not lost on me that my experience watching The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) probably gave me a bit of that repulsion.

The second factor is convenience. As I mentioned earlier, social media platforms are designed to be frictionless—designed to keep you from consciously reflecting on what you’re doing. And it’s very easy to fall into a rhythm of using these apps and platforms—it’s frankly embarrassing how many times I’d catch myself in a loop of opening and closing YouTube, as if pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping for a big win. There are a ton of ways to add friction and make accessing distracting apps and websites less convenient. Most obviously, you can try to block them outright whether by uninstalling the app or installing a blocker. This may work for some, but it only takes a single lapse in judgment to reinstall an app or bypass a block, and it’s really easy for these override maneuvers to simply become mechanical habit, functionally identical to not being there at all. You could, of course, try to escalate the situation—have a friend or partner set the app blocking password, so you can’t enter it yourself, and many app blocking apps on both iOS and Android can be granted admin privileges to prevent them from being uninstalled or easily bypassed. But I don’t think you need to.

Adding a delay as brief as six seconds can give you a chance to reflect and rethink your use of the app or website. This is what I do, using the browser extension LeechBlock NG on my computer and the free version of the app Ascent on my phone—though, LeechBlock NG is sort of confusing to configure, and I can only hope that Ascent doesn’t remove key features from its free version. Especially when I started, I caught myself absentmindedly activating addicting apps an alarming amount, and I’ve definitely noticed a significant decrease in my use of them since I implemented this system. It’s important to use those seconds to actually reflect, especially since it can be easy to submit to numbing nothingness and zone out. You ultimately have to make a decision about how you’ll use that time. You can also reclaim this reflection while you’re using the app itself. I really like the strategy outlined by HGModernism in a video about social media addiction:

HGModernism:
Before you open your app, start a five-minute phone timer. When the timer is up, pause the app, and ask yourself the following questions.

First question: "How did this experience make me feel?" Neutral: "Is there something else I could do that would make me feel something?" Positive: "What else could I be doing that would also give me that feeling?" Negative: "Is there a useful way for me to harness this negative energy, or is it just draining me?"

Second question: "Was this a good use of my time? Did it bring me closer to others, update my understanding of the world, or even calm or relax me in a way that will give me the energy to do something else I enjoy?" 

Now restart the timer, go back to your app, and repeat.[39]

I really like this strategy because it allows you to restore the self-awareness these platforms want you to lose, while still allowing you to use them. It also feeds back into helping you dampen your desire. Remember from earlier that excessive TikTok use has been tied to flow state, but not enjoyment. You may discover that, most of the time, you don’t actually enjoy using these platforms as much as you thought you did, discouraging future use. Regarding this technique, the tools I mentioned earlier, LeechBlock NG and Ascent, are both capable of automatically providing these periodic reminders for reflection—and of course, the same disclaimers from earlier apply. Additionally, a commenter on the video has a similar, simpler strategy: starting by scrolling down a bit and then reading in reverse, which provides a point for reflection when you get back to the top.

I don’t believe you need to quit social media cold turkey to have healthier Internet usage. You just need to be aware of your own thoughts and feelings, something that can be done by managing your desire and adding just a little bit of friction to the experience.

Despite the inexplicable impact The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) had on me, something was really bothering me. I still hadn’t watched the original Seventh Seal. I still hadn’t done what I had initially set out to do. I told myself I would, but it ended up sitting on the backburner for a while. The more time passed, the greater the mystique surrounding the original film was to me. Like I wondered when I first watched Zoomer Edition, what have I been missing out on for all this time? Yet, I still didn’t watch it. Maybe part of me was scared that I still wouldn’t be able to pay attention. That Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos weren’t strong distractions—I was just weak.It’s not the right time. I’m not in the right headspace for something this heavy. I’ll watch it tomorrow. I kept coming up with excuses, hoping to avoid this film and whatever it contained. But I couldn’t run away forever.

I was at the used bookstore, browsing. After looking through books, CDs, and Hatsune Miku figurines, I stepped into another aisle. I started scanning through the shelves, until, suddenly, I stopped, surprised. Two years after I had first faced the demons of distraction, there it was. The Seventh Seal. I couldn’t escape it. One Blu-ray disc’s worth poorer, it was at last time to face my fears head on. I sat down, slotted in the disc, and let it begin.

The Seventh Seal[40] is a film about God and death. This is fitting, considering it takes place in Sweden during the Black Death, right after the Crusades. The film begins with the character of the Knight, as he becomes face-to-face with Death itself. In a desperate attempt to cling onto what little life remains for him, he challenges Death to a game of chess. If the Knight wins, he may continue to live. And as the Knight and his Squire continue to travel around a plagued Sweden, his game of chess slowly and inevitably marches forward.

What leads the Knight to hold on to life so tightly? There are two internal conflicts that create his desperation. The first is his wavering confidence in his belief in God—his lack of knowledge about what happens after he dies leaves him with a deep-seated fear of death. The second is the animosity he feels towards his own life, which he describes as “nothing but futile wandering and pursuits”—he wants to perform just “one meaningful act” before he faces God, the abyss, or whatever it is that lies beyond the veil.

Thus leads to the central question The Seventh Seal asks its cast of characters: In the absence of answers about God, how do you live your life? Where do you find meaning? It’s a simple question, but it’s also one without an easy answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of answers, though most of them are, ultimately, distractions.

The Seventh Seal wields its historical setting to create burning dramatic irony, portraying actions from the past that we now see as horrifically futile. As the Black Death spread across Europe, a growing group of people began to practice self-flagellation. Believing the plague to be punishment from God, the flagellants would whip and scourge their bodies, hoping their suffering would bring mercy from the heavens.[41] It didn’t.

There’s another character the Knight comes across, further highlighting the futile places people look for meaning. This character is a girl who many think is the origin of the plague, including herself. She claims that the Devil lives in her eyes, and that you can see him simply by looking there. But when the Knight peers into her eyes, all he sees is “dumb terror […] nothing else”. In the end, she’s burned at the stake, senselessly, needlessly.

There are other places people try to find meaning in The Seventh Seal. There’s the Knight’s Squire, who turns to bitter cynicism. There’s Raval, who turns to petty thievery. There’s Skat and Plog and Lisa, who engage in a romantic(?) dance of cheating and revenge. And then there are the actors Jof and Mia. They find meaning in life a couple of ways, the most crucial one being the time they spend with each other, as well as with their son, Mikael. This attitude seems to do them well. They’re undoubtedly the happiest characters in the film—perhaps the only ones truly happy in the first place. By the end of the movie, these characters are the only important ones not to be reaped by Death. This leads me to believe that the film treats Jof and Mia as having the true “answer” to the question posed earlier. In the absence of answers about God, how do you live your life? Where do you find meaning? By bringing joy to others and yourself through kindness and connection.

This message is perfectly illustrated through a scene that takes place when the Knight first encounters Jof and Mia. The two offer the Knight fresh strawberries and milk, and they, alongside the Squire and his servant, partake in the snack. While eating, the Knight talks about some of his inner turmoils—noting that it all feels “insignificant all of a sudden”. He continues:

The Knight: I will remember this moment. The stillness, the dusk, these wild strawberries, this bowl of milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to remember what we spoke of, and I'll hold that memory in my hands like a bowl full to the brim with fresh milk.

Some time after this interaction, Death asks the Knight if his reprieve was “of some use”—if he was able to perform his one meaningful act. He says he was.

As a character, Death is omnipresent—always lurking in the background, ready for when the time comes. The Knight tries his best to outsmart Death—ironically attempting a gambit consisting of “a combination of bishop and knight”, a symbol of his time fighting in the Crusades.[42] But, inevitably, he loses. In the end, you can’t cheat Death, and you can’t outrun Death. One of the Knight’s main struggles was his thirst for knowledge about what happens after death. In his unease, he asks Death itself. But Death doesn’t know, and perhaps doesn’t even care. The answer to the Knight’s question isn’t of particular concern to Death—no matter what happens after you die, you will die.

And so, if there isn’t meaning to be found in death, the best you can do before that inevitability is to find meaning and fulfillment in life through time and kindness shared with others. It’s a perfectly imperfect answer—if cherished memories are to be held like a bowl of fresh milk, then perhaps these memories are as fleeting as life itself. Milk spoils. But that doesn’t make these moments and memories worthless. No, their impermanence makes them all the more valuable. After his “one meaningful act” is complete, the Knight cannot let go of his fear of death. In fact, he becomes even more desperate to hold onto life. But the character of the fear is different. He’s no longer scared that his life had been meaningless. Instead, he now wants to protect the meaning he’s found.

I loved The Seventh Seal, once I had finally watched it. The cinematography, soundtrack, and performances were all masterful. The film came with impeccable timing, too—it held a lot of the questions and anxieties I had when I watched it. And, ultimately, my worries about watching it ended up being for naught. I didn’t have a single problem paying attention during The Seventh Seal. It’s a phenomenal film, rich with narrative and visual depth in every scene.

Like, for example, one of my favorite shots in the film occurs shortly after the strawberries and milk scene I mentioned earlier. In it, the Knight’s game of chess against Death creates a frame around the characters that the Knight had just spent valuable time with. It’s as if to communicate that the very inexorability of death, and therefore the very transience of life, makes every moment spent with each other all the more meaningful.

(subway surfers and oddly satisfying videos slowly slide in)

Right.

So, the funniest thing about The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is how it actually seems to play off of the themes established in the original Seventh Seal? In the same way that all of these characters, trying to find meaning, end up falling prey to distractions, the Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos are right there as literal distractions. It’s even to the point that, when I first watched it, the silly sidebars of slime and subways obscured the very message of finding meaning that was present in the original movie. That’s what I had missed out on.

And besides, how am I supposed to spend that valuable time with others if I’m just constantly consuming content alone on my phone? How can I truly share kindness on a platform that taints every facet of its experience with the need to vie for your time and attention above all else? The Seventh Seal depicts a multitude of dead-ends and red herrings in the search for meaning. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) simply adds one more ingredient to that pot.

This single stupid, stupid addition to the margins ends up adding this absurd, deeply ironic layer of texture and meaning to the original film. And it’s…kinda genius??? I don’t know if Piper Paige, the creator of this edit, intended this or not. The only comments I’ve seen her make about this video are essentially just saying this bit is hilarious (which, objectively, it is).[2][43] And I really don’t know if she would’ve wanted me to examine it to this idiotic degree. But, regardless, this asinine analysis I’ve accomplished gives me a deeper appreciation not just for the satire underpinning The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition), but, somehow, for the brilliant themes of the original Seventh Seal. I…can’t believe I’m saying this. Am I insane? Maybe I’m just insane.

The Seventh Seal is a film that means a lot to many people. It’s even been referenced in Muppets Most Wanted. And now, it’s a film that’s incredibly important to me, too, albeit in a wild way. It’s extremely silly, but the strong emotional reaction, let alone the actual substantial change it brought to my life cannot be understated. I feel like there’s already a bit of an innate understanding that services like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and even more traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit may not be the best for us, but it takes a lot more than that knowledge to actually evoke change. And, in my case, The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) was a strange piece of that puzzle…

Vsauce: Have you seen those videos where it's a split screen and one part of it is a Family Guy clip and the other part is just someone cutting up slime? [...] We get panicky about like "Oh, attention spans", and, "What's wrong with us", and all of this, and I'm like, "Hmm, what is really going on here?" [...] Before TikTok, before the Internet, people would talk to each other but, like, watch the birds, *at the same time*.

Anthony Padilla (sarcastically): Wait, people had short attention spans *in the past*?!

Vsauce: People would divide their attention. They would talk on the phone, and they would also watch the cars driving by on their street. [...] It's just human behavior doing what it's always done for tens of thousands of years, but with a new costume on.[44]

In some ways, Michael Vsauce is right. Multitasking isn’t new. Attention grabbing isn’t new. But the actual problem here isn’t either of those things. The problem, unique to social media, is the churn of the algorithmic addiction machine, prioritizing “engagement” over the very social connections it claims to create. And that is new. I also think it’s interesting that the examples he gives for multitasking in the past both involve directly spending time with other people. Like, these are not the same thing as watching Family Guy and Subway Surfers simultaneously. When we’re so surrounded by complex algorithmic feeds, it’s easy to feel as if it has always been this way. It hasn’t. And it doesn’t need to continue like this, either. It’s completely possible to reclaim your attention, something I hope I’ve made clear.

Life is full of distractions. It was true during the Middle Ages. It was true in 1957, when The Seventh Seal was made. And it’s true now—we may even have distractions more powerful than ever before. But, like how death creates a frame around the quality time we spend, these distractions make it even more important to actively and consciously protect what little time we have. By being more thoughtful about social media and algorithmic feeds—by adding friction and reflection back to my experience—I can take back some of that time, and I’ll hold it in my hands like a bowl of fresh milk.