You are not alone with then attention issues, all my friends and myself have been or are currently in the same situation. It's easy to get lost and scroll for hours. Longer form content feels like too much of a commitment, but you waste the same amount of time anyways. I would tell myself I cannot waste time on a (probably good) movie, but then watch YouTube for three hours. The time commitment is low, and I was still able to receive enough satisfaction to keep me there, but would leave feeling like my time was wasted.

Waning off was hard. For Reddit/FB/Insta I found the best method was to uninstalling the app and logout online. On iphone you can set time limits of usage, which really helped me. I think I set each to 10 minutes per day. When I decide to watch a movie, I make that the only thing I am doing. No phone. If it becomes boring, I'm willing to watch something else.

Its been easy for me to regress and watch way too much Youtube. I'll occasionally be struck with the thought of "I don't care about this, why am I watching this?". Removing recommendations and comments has helped me (there are extensions, or the select tool in ublock). Building the skill and self control to walk away has been hard, but is what I would consider the goal. I've spent months not going on youtube, but will come back and spend hours

> I've been left feeling horrified and wondering how different would my life had been if i was occupied with different stuff during my teenager years

I think it is great to be self aware of things like this, but try not too get too caught up in the "what if" type train of thought. Its good and healthy to reflect and see how you can do better, but can also be a dangerous way to fall into a rut of self pity.

If you want to chat more over email/signal/matrix, I would be more than happy too. It looks like you are slightly younger then me. I just graduated college.