The last few days I’ve been off infinity wells. Occasionally I forget for a second and find myself typing in the url for Reddit, Threads, or LinkedIn. I’ll mindlessly begin to hover toward the login button or start to scroll down on Reddit. 

Then I remember. 

I’m taking a breather from all this. I’m doing it for myself. I’m seeking a calmmer existence, if only for a few weeks. Then I smile and pull back. 

Before, when I’ve done this, it’s felt like a restraint; like I’m holding myself down and forcing myself to take some disgusting medicine. Now it feels completely different. I’m choosing a calmer path, and I want it, I want more of it. Much like my lifelong habit of taking a break from work every Saturday, this reminds me I’m taking a month long break from the doomscrolling that makes life hard to enjoy. 

It started with a seven mile run last Wednesday. I felt numb, I felt the relentless pull of the news, politics, social media, and the neverending flow of it all threatened to boil me over. 

I’ve not stopped completely. I don’t know if I could do a complete disconnect. But the flood as slowed to a trickle, picked up through texts from friends or the slower forms of content coming in through the podcasts I enjoy listening to. This is better, this is calmer. A slight delay on what I hear, a less frenetic refreshing of information sites, a return to something more akin to my childhood. 

I’d like to say I can do this forever, but I know myself. I’ll give a limit to this, then allow the indulgence of opening the spickets again. In this time of quiet I’m finding myself more drawn to the problems I want to solve in work, more interested in the books I look forward to reading, and more present (maybe just a little) in the real world I inhabit. 

Apps are designed well, I know as someone who makes a living out of trying to understand the best way to create a great experience. Sometimes they’re designed so well that we can find little escape from the desire to engage, to catch the latest bit of information. 

Recently a friend recommended Reeder, I tried it out, added a few feeds, and generally found it beautiful but uninteresting. It lacked the pull from an app like Threads, it didn’t have the by-the-second updates I looked to on an app like Twitter years ago. It was, in a word, boring. 

Now that I’ve deleted social media apps from my phone I find myself going to the Reeder app, checking if one of the writers I enjoy has posted something new. It’s slow, only a few new posts a day show up. But then I devour them, and enjoy them, and reflect on the medium or longform writing in a way that I couldn’t before. 

For millenials and older we remember a time when it was calmer, and sometimes we feel nostalgic for that time. But the nostalgia isn’t strong enough to combat the infinity wells and casino-like-levers of today. 

I don’t know what the solution is, but I know that I am grateful for a break, for a reset, for a chance to catch my breath.