Save It, Read Later
on loss of authentic, unmediated human experience
So I woke up this morning, and before I was even, like, a conscious person, like you know, before I had decided to think that I need to exist, my arm had already picked up my phone, and my eyes were already reading a headline about something being on fire. I want to be very clear that I did not choose to do this. my arm just did it on its own. my arm has apparently been training for this moment for years and did not feel the need to consult the rest of me about it.
which is fine. it’s fine. everything is fine.
here’s a thing that happened to me. i watched a city flood on my phone. actual footage, rising water, the whole thing. and i felt bad about it for maybe four seconds. genuinely, sincerely bad. a real human emotion. then i scrolled and saw someone making pasta, and i got a little hungry (respect, that’s just biology), and then there was a dog getting reunited with its owner after three years, and i choked with sadness at 2 am. over a dog i didn’t know and would never receive updates about.
and i lay there thinking: i could not cry for the city. but the dog got me immediately. and the reason is so obvious and so embarrassing that i almost don’t want to say it, which is that the dog video had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it was thirty seconds, and everything resolved, and my brain gave me the little chemical reward for experiencing a complete narrative arc. the city just kept being flooded with no resolution. my brain didn’t know what to do with that. my brain is now a golden retriever that only responds to treats.
here’s the thing: i used to be a person who could just be confused. as a teenager i would sit with a question and not solve it. i’d lie there at night actually thinking about my life and what it was and what i was supposed to do with it, and yeah it was uncomfortable, but it was mine. the confusion had texture. it was a real thing i was living inside of.
now the question barely finishes forming and i’ve already opened my phone and someone has written a substack about it. with a title like “on the quiet violence of not knowing who you are (and why that’s actually okay).” twelve thousand people liked it. it has a hopeful ending. i read it and feel briefly seen and then i close it and nothing has changed and i still don’t know who i am, but now i’ve also outsourced the processing of that, so i’m behind.
we used to have to sit with our confusion long enough that something would grow from it. even if that something was just a scar. now you don’t even get the scar. you get a thought, and before you can do anything, a reel surfaces and hands you someone else’s processed version of it neat, summarised, resolved. you look at it, you nod, and you save it to a folder called insightful things, where it lives next to a sourdough recipe you will also never make.
speaking of that folder.
i have, on my phone right now, 847 bookmarks. i have never looked at any of them again. they exist as a kind of museum of the person i was intending to become the person who was going to read a long-form piece on the geopolitics of rare earth minerals, and that one thread about how to think more clearly, and a recipe for vegetarian shakshuka that genuinely looked great, and seventeen different articles titled some variation of how to focus in the age of distraction, which is such a perfect and horrible irony that i want to lie down every time i think about it.
turns out saving or bookmarking something feels exactly like doing it. thats a trick to make your brain release a pat on your back so when you hit the bookmark button your brain reacts, the same way it does when you add something to a to-do list instead of just doing it. the thing enters a queue. queue has infinite storage. nothing ever leaves the queue just like you might have a stacked TBR list somewhere. by the end of filling this queue you are a very productive person who has never done anything.
and the thing that’s wild to me is that the bookmarks are weirdly aspirational. like, they are a portrait of who you think you should be.
i look at mine and i see someone who is deeply interested in screenplay writings , and cognitive science, and fermenting things, and improving their posture, and the entire history of the ottoman empire i guess. and i’m like, that’s a great person. i would love to be that person. Funnily enough in reality i just also watched a forty-minute youtube video last night about why a guy thinks a particular 2009 comedy film is actually misunderstood, and before that i was on a page about some beef in a corner of the internet i don’t even participate in. so… take it as you will
Oh, also we have completely forgotten how to be bored. like, actual boredom. Think about it, you just have to sit there and exist and your brain, with nowhere to go, starts doing this weird freeform thing where it wanders into rooms you didn't know were in there. you'd stare at the floor tiles and then fifteen minutes later you'd have half an idea that felt genuinely new, that just doesn’t happen anymore (until and unless you are in washroom and you forgot your phone).
and i genuinely think we don’t understand what we’ve lost with that yet. boredom wasn’t just dead time. boredom was weird brain time. a lot of people did their best thinking while doing something else entirely, in the shower, on a walk, in traffic, because the conscious mind was occupied with something low-stakes enough that the other thing could surface. now the conscious mind is never that free. it’s consuming content. always content. Like i once had a good idea in the shower. one time. i don’t remember what it was because i didn’t write it down. i’m telling you this as though it’s a charming anecdote but it is actually a tragedy.
i have been meaning to write something for six months. i’m not going to tell you what it is, because i haven’t written it, so it doesn’t deserve to be described. it exists as a thing i have been meaning to do, which i think about every time i open instagram in the most useless possible way. i have spent roughly four hours watching videos about how to write more instead of actually writing it.
i think about Keats. which i realise is a specific person to bring up in what started as an essay about phones, but bear with me. Keats was twenty-five and dying, and he knew he was dying. he wrote the Ode to a Nightingale knowing the nightingale would outlive him by centuries, and wrote it anyway. when you have a year left you don’t spend evenings on nothing. you don’t save things to a folder. you don’t watch four hours of content about how other people write.
i am not Keats. i want to say that with complete clarity. i am someone who spent an entire evening researching whether Keats was happy in his final months (finding no satisfying answer) then watched three videos about completely unrelated things and went to sleep without writing a single word of the thing i have been meaning to write for six months.
Honestly, it’s not just that we’re distracted. it’s that we’ve traded away something specific: the felt knowledge of things. the difference between reading about grief and sitting inside it long enough that it changes the shape of something in you. between saving the article and actually thinking the thought. between knowing about Keats and writing something anyway.
i’m not going to tell you to delete your apps or go live in the woods. the woods have bugs, and you’d spend the whole time anxious about your phone, which is arguably worse than just being on it. the feeds will keep filling. something will always be on fire before your water has boiled. the grief will keep arriving faster than we can process it and keep turning into numbness, and we will keep calling the numbness fine.
but what we’ve lost (what i’ve lost) is the willingness to stay inside the incomplete thing.
From the first line I felt like its me.
Till the very end its me.
With the exception that now I add even YouTube videos to the watch later section.
Btw, this line is so beautiful:
Honestly, it’s not just that we’re distracted. it’s that we’ve traded away something specific: the felt knowledge of things. the difference between reading about grief and sitting inside it long enough that it changes the shape of something in you.