The new voyeurism: Why videos of people cleaning, sleeping, or studying get millions of views

Gogglebox is a television program that has been widely watched on Channel 4 in Britain since 2013. Each episode features families, couples, or groups of friends sitting on their sofas watching their own television and commenting on what’s on it. The program was imported under the title ¡Aquí mando yo! (I’m in charge here!), and although Spanish broadcaster Antena 3 quickly withdrew it due to a lack of viewers, for many it was their first introduction to the phenomenon of reaction videos, a format that is now hugely popular on YouTube and TikTok.

Like millions of teenagers on Twitch, those who watch Gogglebox don’t see something directly, but rather observe the gestures and listen to the critiques of other viewers watching that content. This mirror game is one of the mechanisms most used by contemporary content creators. In fact, it’s what all those streamers do who — without competing or creating a review or guide — record themselves playing video games with routine or repetitive, almost boring mechanics. For example, recently, YouTuber IlloJuan uploaded a Euro Truck Simulator game lasting more than six hours that has already garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Euro Truck Simulator is a cheap game that runs on any computer and simulates truck driving on realistic routes in minute detail (you have to keep to schedules and obey speed limits). What’s the point of watching someone else calmly drive a virtual truck for hours instead of playing the game ourselves? Why do we watch videos of people cleaning homes instead of grabbing a cloth and peering into the corners of our own kitchen? What’s better: watching a soccer match live or watching the changes in a streamer’s distraught face?

A shark with Nike sneakers

You Are Being Followed (2025), the latest novel by Belén Gopegui, features a pair of investigators working for technology companies who pursue two other individuals whose attention spans are failing to fully sink into the depths of the internet. This seemingly ordinary man and woman have something exceptional about them: despite all the distractions, technology platforms have detected that they are still capable of patiently observing the world around them. That’s why they’re called “the recalcitrants” or “the unrepentant,” and finding a way to capture their interest (and that of the few who remain like them) could prove to be very profitable.

Although the mechanisms used by technology companies are very sophisticated, there are always those who are left out. Furthermore, when we expose ourselves to increasingly elaborate stories, narratives full of unexpected twists, or successive audiovisual “masterpieces,” we may end up exhausted by the oversupply. Perhaps that’s why it’s sometimes explicitly absurd content (like memes of Tralalero Tralalá, a shark wearing Nike sneakers) or the most predictable formats that end up hooking the unrepentant. Those who don’t receive a dopamine hit in the form of a red notification from their favorite app may get it by watching something seemingly boring.

Essayist Jorge Dioni develops this thesis in Pornocracia, an essay published by ARPA Editorial. Dioni argues that the entire content industry has replicated the business model of pornography, which, in addition to sexual arousal, offers recognizable formats and familiar endings. Those who consume pornography know what’s going to happen, and that, while instability grows in all areas, is also a relief: “Any platform has content to watch pornography for decades without stopping and is constantly refreshed with very similar videos. They all have the same masculine narrative structure and the same rhythm. They are full of automatisms. They are a format. The repetition of leisure time is reassuring compared to the uncertainty of other vital spaces, such as work,” he explains in his work.

“We could talk about narrative saturation,” the author confirms to EL PAÍS. “Since everything already uses narrative mechanisms (advertising, politics, etc.), we’re constantly seeing stories and narratives, and everything is presented to us in this form, which leads to a certain saturation and a desire to seek out repetitive actions that simulate a connection with reality. It’s like people who watch plays.”

So, is this the reason why we’re fascinated by such unexpectedly viral content as carpet cleaning or streamers who record themselves studying for hours? In these cases, a certain desire for order also emerges, as Dioni continues: “The predictability in realistic content connects with the desire for order and the desire for a sense of time. Begoña López Urzaiz and Noelia Ramírez dedicated a podcast to the posh women who organize our lives: this idea of having a routine that organizes life, like in monastic orders, which gives meaning to the days, without having to waste energy wondering what we have to do. It’s the idea of regaining control that has been in political discourse at least since the 2011 [financial] crisis.”

Sometimes, the desire for things to be a little more organized “out there” is the flip side of the need to disconnect from oneself and from an intimacy that for centuries seemed almost impermeable and is now flooded with notifications and duties. Much of the seemingly simplest content, or those where all responsibility is left to a mediator, can be consumed as mere pastimes, and it’s easy to lose track of time when what you’re watching lacks narrative structure. However, the process sometimes goes further: this content can also serve to initiate dissociative states.

For example, through watching (not playing) a video game. In her book Traumacore, Núria Gómez Gabriel describes a time when she “couldn’t stop watching YouTube videos of people playing the Silent Hills P.T. demo,” a video game “in which the source of terror consists of walking and/or zooming down an L-shaped corridor through which you can only access a bathroom and some stairs that connect back to the start of the circuit.” If dissociation has been defined as “sensing one’s own actions from a distance, like moving away from one’s body and coming back” and can become a disorder with serious consequences for mental health, there is content that can induce it or, at least, help sustain it.

In some contexts — Gómez Gabriel speaks of “dissociated feminism” and the voluntary or involuntary displacement “of emotions outside the body” — dissociation becomes, again according to the author, a state beyond despair, “a deranged response that is not organized on the street and that serves as a shield against the hypocritical morality of certain social networks and online communities.” The compulsive consumption and production of indecipherable, empty, or grotesque content is one of its symptoms, almost a stifled cry in the face of the order, rhythm, and esthetics of the products that usually triumph on the networks.

Domestic realism and productivity

In their essay After Work, philosophers Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek refer to the entire imaginary surrounding family life that governs how we live in intimate spaces as “domestic realism.”

“Domestic realism” is an idea, a social imperative constructed through household appliances, family traditions (closely related to the sexual division of labor), and representations, such as American cinema from the 1950s or, more specifically, all those YouTube videos of cleaning and tidying. In the same text, the philosophers warn that, despite the technological development of recent decades, the weekly hours dedicated to housework in Europe have not decreased, but are actually increasing year after year, and they attribute this paradox to rising standards of order and cleanliness.

So, when a young woman (again, the sexual division of caregiving) suggests you watch her clean, or Marie Kondo convinces you to be a little more organized, in some way they are preparing you to lead a life as normative as theirs. Writer and philosopher Javier Moreno, author of The Transparent Man, points out that, in these cases, “it’s also obvious how attractive it is for someone (and even more so if we feel a certain admiration for them) to reveal their intimacy to us, to let us into their home to see how they pack suitcases, unpack, or chew (via ASMR) raw rice for several hours. The viewer always seeks to soak up the streamer’s charisma or aura.”

Moreno, who is optimistic about the phenomenon, believes that “we mustn’t rule out the possibility that in some cases there is an underlying idea of the ready-made, that is, the attempt to subvert an everyday situation to try to find something extraordinary in it.” Thus, amid so much cleaning and video reaction, we could end up finding intentionally or inadvertently artistic and transgressive approaches, such as sleep streaming. In these videos, someone broadcasts how they are trying to sleep or pretending to do so while their followers continually wake them up with comments and chat noises. The result is disconcerting: it seems like a metaphor for the world of work.

Finally, the success of inane content, reactions, and broadcasts of everyday events could be explained by something much more prosaic, one that also has to do with productivity: even while we’re entertaining ourselves, we want to make the most of our time, and divided attention creates the illusion that not a second is being wasted. As long as it’s not dissociated, these products allow us to do other things at the same time or simulate (as is the case with reactions, with multiple screens within the main screen) that we’re moving on multiple simultaneous planes.

In a context of decreasing attention spans (there’s much debate about whether we’re capable of concentrating for longer than a fish) and optimization of any task (social acceleration consists of more and more actions being performed or fitting into decreasing time periods), the possibility of multitasking is irresistible: some people already work while watching others work on another monitor, or those who play video games while watching other people’s games.

So, while it sometimes seems (especially when watching Tralalero Tralalá and Bombardino Cocodrilo) that the structure of social media is so addictive that anything integrated into its distributive logic can work, driving all the production and circulation of unusual or absurd content, there’s usually something else going on. And often that fuel is a mix of emotions as ancient as loneliness, despair, and the need to belong to a community.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition