The infinite scroll doesn’t just consume our hours; it fundamentally rewires our perception of past, present, and future into a disorienting, eternal now.
You’ve put words to precisely what I’ve been feeling and thinking about what’s happening to our cognition. The fact that you paired it with an appeal to subscribe both pisses me off and inspires me to pay you again. The tricky part for me about the payment part is that I live on such a small amount of money per month that I have to choose between paying you and paying the light bill on time. What a fucked up world this is because that’s a choice that shouldn’t have to be made.
I totally agree there is kind of a hypocritical thing happening here and I don't really understand the purpose if the content itself is about how there are endless stimuli but also if you actually want to know everything (because now that you've read it it got you hooked) pay for the subscription !:) like, what?
Thanks for making a comment about my comment @Eleonora. I have never received a human response from this Substack so I don’t know if it’s AI or what it is. And it just makes absolutely no sense to me to see that a couple of quotes that I have restocked in my own Substack have been re-shared by this site with no human comments whatsoever back to me. I paid to subscribe to this stack for a few months, but whatever is going on isn’t what I would call human connection. Have you ever received a response here?
I am a human, reaching out to you as a human and would like to tell you if it is about survival then pay your bills first! Look after your health, eat well, walk on grass
Feel this earth
More than any knowledge or opinion This is what we need
Thanks for your advice, @Akshat. For sure, the body needs all those basic things AND I also need a mind that can see and feel a safe context for the body to live in... I wish things were simpler, but I need BOTH.
Hey! Do not worry, I am a real person hahah, I actually haven't really interacted much on here in the comments or subscribed to anyone (by paying) and I remember one time someone liked my one comment but this is pretty much it. Best wishes xx
Well, good to hear you're real and to see that you reply in relatively real-time, @Eleonora. What a beautiful name. Never saw a name like yours before. Thanks for your reassurance that you're real.
I am truly curious about what's going on here -- especially in relationship to this post, this text. Because it's named the experience I've been having for years now and it freaks me out to receive that "signal" from nowhere. I'm in my own process of writing personal stories as a way to get free of the endless "now" in the scroll but I'm also teaching others a way I use to tell their short stories as a way to connect with the people they love. Not as a performance for some faceless audience in the endless scroll... To use their writing to rediscover themselves and to offer their stories to people that used to be close as a way to draw them back closer. It's about doing the exact opposite of just feeding the "feed."
The digital blender image is the one that landed. Not just information overload but temporal collapse… the body trying to process past, present, and future simultaneously with none of the natural buffers.
What I’d add from a somatic perspective is that this shows up physiologically. The nervous system needs time to have texture — beginning, middle, end — to complete its processing cycles. The infinite feed keeps interrupting the completion. We’re not just distracted. We’re chronically mid-cycle. That’s a different kind of exhaustion than tired.
Good points here. I feel in order to take back our time, we have to actively want to do it, to really act. Otherwise, we are just lost in the sauce in this age of wires.
You’ve put words to precisely what I’ve been feeling and thinking about what’s happening to our cognition. The fact that you paired it with an appeal to subscribe both pisses me off and inspires me to pay you again. The tricky part for me about the payment part is that I live on such a small amount of money per month that I have to choose between paying you and paying the light bill on time. What a fucked up world this is because that’s a choice that shouldn’t have to be made.
I totally agree there is kind of a hypocritical thing happening here and I don't really understand the purpose if the content itself is about how there are endless stimuli but also if you actually want to know everything (because now that you've read it it got you hooked) pay for the subscription !:) like, what?
Thanks for making a comment about my comment @Eleonora. I have never received a human response from this Substack so I don’t know if it’s AI or what it is. And it just makes absolutely no sense to me to see that a couple of quotes that I have restocked in my own Substack have been re-shared by this site with no human comments whatsoever back to me. I paid to subscribe to this stack for a few months, but whatever is going on isn’t what I would call human connection. Have you ever received a response here?
I am a human, reaching out to you as a human and would like to tell you if it is about survival then pay your bills first! Look after your health, eat well, walk on grass
Feel this earth
More than any knowledge or opinion This is what we need
Thanks for your advice, @Akshat. For sure, the body needs all those basic things AND I also need a mind that can see and feel a safe context for the body to live in... I wish things were simpler, but I need BOTH.
Hey! Do not worry, I am a real person hahah, I actually haven't really interacted much on here in the comments or subscribed to anyone (by paying) and I remember one time someone liked my one comment but this is pretty much it. Best wishes xx
Well, good to hear you're real and to see that you reply in relatively real-time, @Eleonora. What a beautiful name. Never saw a name like yours before. Thanks for your reassurance that you're real.
I am truly curious about what's going on here -- especially in relationship to this post, this text. Because it's named the experience I've been having for years now and it freaks me out to receive that "signal" from nowhere. I'm in my own process of writing personal stories as a way to get free of the endless "now" in the scroll but I'm also teaching others a way I use to tell their short stories as a way to connect with the people they love. Not as a performance for some faceless audience in the endless scroll... To use their writing to rediscover themselves and to offer their stories to people that used to be close as a way to draw them back closer. It's about doing the exact opposite of just feeding the "feed."
Do you write?
As someone said a long time ago
“Time is a flat Circle”
Interesting. I think it's not just about social media feeds, but also gaming, especially mobile gaming.
The digital blender image is the one that landed. Not just information overload but temporal collapse… the body trying to process past, present, and future simultaneously with none of the natural buffers.
What I’d add from a somatic perspective is that this shows up physiologically. The nervous system needs time to have texture — beginning, middle, end — to complete its processing cycles. The infinite feed keeps interrupting the completion. We’re not just distracted. We’re chronically mid-cycle. That’s a different kind of exhaustion than tired.
Yes
Good points here. I feel in order to take back our time, we have to actively want to do it, to really act. Otherwise, we are just lost in the sauce in this age of wires.