News

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. ...