News

I used to have a ritual that probably looks familiar. Wake up, grab my phone, and start tapping through the same handful of news sites. The New York Times. The Verge. Hacker News. A few tech blogs I’d bookmarked years ago. Each site demanded its own login dance, its own layout quirks, its own endless scroll of related articles designed to keep me clicking rather than reading. It felt productive at the time. I was staying informed, wasn’t I? But looking back, I spent more time navigating interfaces and resisting clickbait than actually consuming quality information. The whole experience left me scattered and oddly anxious, like I’d consumed a lot without absorbing much of anything. ...

I used to pride myself on keeping up with everything. Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, news apps, email, Slack. My day was a blur of short posts, quick headlines, and endless scrolling. I felt informed. I felt connected. I felt like I was on top of the world. Then I started noticing something odd. I could tell you what ten different people had for lunch or what minor controversy was trending at 2 PM. Ask me to explain a complex topic I’d been “following” for months, and I’d struggle to articulate anything beyond surface-level talking points. ...

A few months ago I counted my RSS feeds and felt a knot form in my stomach. Two hundred and seventeen sources. Two hundred and seventeen places where information was being pushed toward me every single day. I had started with good intentions. Each subscription represented something I genuinely wanted to read, some corner of the internet I wanted to stay informed about. Yet somewhere along the way, the act of subscribing became easier than the act of unsubscribing. ...

I used to spend a lot of time refreshing my social media feeds. Not because I particularly enjoyed the content, but because something in me felt compelled to check. There was always the possibility that something interesting had appeared in the few minutes since I last looked. This habit ate up hours of my day without me really noticing until I started paying attention to where my time was actually going. ...

I used to have a ritual. Every morning I would open the same five news sites in separate tabs and scan their front pages. The first one was a general news aggregator that covered politics, world events, and the occasional feel-good story. The second was a tech publication that I had been reading since college. The third was a niche blog about the web development ecosystem. The fourth was Hacker News. And the fifth was a rotating slot for whatever new site had caught my attention that week. ...

I used to feel guilty about my RSS feeds. Not because I was reading too much, but because I wasn’t reading enough. At some point I had accumulated well over a hundred subscriptions—tech blogs, niche newsletters, industry news sites, personal blogs from people whose writing I genuinely enjoy. The math was simple and depressing. If each feed published even one article a week, that’s over a hundred articles I’d need to process weekly. Nobody has that kind of time. ...