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Why what you watch keeps changing
Everything here is general information, not a diagnosis and not medical advice. If something about your sleep, your mood or your thoughts is worrying you, that is a moment for a professional, not a website.
This is one of the most distressing things people notice and one of the least discussed, because saying it out loud feels like a confession about who you are.
The observation is: over months or years, what holds your attention drifts. Things that worked stop working. You end up somewhere you would not have picked at the start and would not defend now, and the obvious conclusion is that this is what you secretly wanted all along.
A different reading
There is a more boring explanation that fits the same facts.
Attention responds to novelty, not to content. Anything watched repeatedly becomes less engaging — that is true of comedy, of music, of a game you loved. The usual response to something losing its pull is not to stop; it is to look for a variation. Repeat that a few hundred times over a few years and the variations compound in whatever direction happens to be different rather than in a direction you chose.
On that reading, drift is a property of the format — endless, free, instantly switchable, optimised to keep a tab open — at least as much as a property of the person watching. Nobody browsing a library of essentially unlimited novelty stays put.
What this does not mean
It does not mean anything you watched describes what you want in your actual life. Plenty of people are alarmed to find the gap between the two is enormous, and it is one of the more consistently reported experiences after some time away: the drift reverses, and reverses faster than the escalation took.
It also does not mean nothing matters. If the drift is toward anything that would harm a real person, that is not a novelty effect and it is a reason to talk to a professional, today. That is a genuinely different situation from the one this article is about, and it deserves a person rather than an article.
The practical part
Escalation is the strongest argument for Change the room, not yourself rather than resolve. The mechanism runs on unlimited instant availability; friction interrupts it in a way that deciding to want less never has.
