How to End Your Extremely Online Era

This piece by Tommy Dixon is a must-read for anyone who is grappling with the hollowness and brainrot that comes with being chronically online.

A small excerpt:

"We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention. The ideas that resist compression are forgotten, cast aside, as everything has to be in bullet points, stripped of all excess verbiage. The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread.

Screens are reached at, mostly, as an escape. An escape from boredom, from anxiety, from an abating loneliness. Maybe, an escape from ourselves. But instead of causing consolation, screens only make us feel more distant and disconnected and lonely, as an apathy sets in that is increasingly abstract, a kind of stomach-level sadness."