You keep scrolling. The decision has been made, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, not to click any links - not yet, anyway. You bookmark a few, rationalizing that if you really are interested in them, you will still be interested in them after you have finished your infinite-scrolling ritual - the same way you pick up items and carry them around with you at the store when you’re not sure if you actually want to buy them or not - though at the same time you’re doubtful whether your own interest in an article ought to be the deciding factor here, because isn’t there something to be said for sitting down in an uncomfortable chair and reading something important even though it may not be fun? But then again, with no real reason to choose any one article over the others, no outstanding aura of significance to guide you, wouldn’t you be doing something difficult simply for the sake of difficulty, as if reading something uninteresting was an end in itself, in which case you might as well revert back to your childhood habit of reading the directions on shampoo bottles when you were in the bathroom? You remind yourself that each headline is an advertisement, really; that each article is optional; that this whole activity is optional; that you could very well have just sat around and consumed your coffee in silence and stillness, and you suddenly feel guilty for having grabbed your phone in the first place.
Prior knowledge is activated. Connections are formed and solidified. Things are sorted neatly into boxes, on some subterranean level, too fast and complex to ever keep up with, never mind record. You believe the highest achievement in art would be to capture this process. The number of associations that go through the mind upon encountering even a single word. A single word would be enough. One day, you will write it; for now, you are experiencing it, which is a necessary part of the writing process - a justification which is simultaneously one-hundred percent true and one-hundred percent bullshit, kind of like how Jesus Christ is supposed to be fully human and fully divine.
Figures are moved up and down in your evaluation of them. Some are pushed closer towards the threshold where you officially unfollow them - tap that icon that (you marvel at the ease and simplicity of it) removes them from your experience entirely - or at least mentally wash your hands of them with some decisive word or phrase. Others are moved up, but there’s no analogously semi-concrete way of marking that. You already follow them. You already tap the small heart under their Tweets on a regular basis. That is as far as these relationships can go.
You try to pin things down in your memory, repeat names to yourself like they’re some kind of mantra. Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia. You encounter acronyms that you do not recognize, and try to figure them out. You use, of all the quaint and incongruous things, context clues - a phrase ripped out of some third-grade test-prep lesson, well-intentioned but useless, since even though it is a very good description of what the Smart Kids (such as yourself) were both able and willing to do (because your basic animal needs were taken care of, as per Maslow, and because you were serendipitously just born with a propensity for the exact same sort of ultimately-pointless tasks that the bloated, self-sustaining schooling-and-testing-industrial system happened to value and assess in the nineties, and because you were also either born with or developed (depending on whether one wants to blame an institutional boogeyman like the Catholic Church, or a specific one like your Catholic-raised-but-lapsed mother) an intense sense of guilt, which led you to always actually Try Your Best on every task placed in front of you, no matter how pointless it seemed - the more pointless, the better, actually, in some ways) - even though, you know now, context clues were a big part of how you actually managed to ace all of those tests and get labelled as Proficient (by the testing companies) and Gifted (by your school) and a Smart Kid (by your peers), it turns out that simply talking about them is not actually a very good way to get people to use them, any more than explaining brainwave patterns will help an insomniac to fall asleep.
The real battle is fought inside the mind. Bilbo Baggins taught you that, and it is the only thing you actually remember from reading The Hobbit at least twice (because it’s a "classic," because you were afraid you weren’t old enough or attentive enough to fully appreciate it the first time around), but that does certainly put it ahead of a lot of books (some of which were a lot longer or required a lot more time commitment) that you can’t even point to a single thing you got from them - although you know that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t in there, because of course we don’t always remember the origin of every idea or image or feeling, although wouldn’t it be nice if we could, or at least could see them all spelled out for us in the afterlife, there for our endless perusal and exploration.
At some point, you stop reading. The scrolling becomes habitual, automatic. This is part of the addiction of the app, you know, but knowing that doesn’t lessen its power over you. You feel like you must scroll until you reach what you want to call a Natural Stopping Point, although, if pressed, you wouldn’t be able to give a better answer than that powerful government person from, like, fifty years ago whose name you can’t recall at the moment but will try to later, when he was asked about obscenity: you’ll know it when you see it. You do the same thing when you go for a walk that requires a turn-around (though, at least partially because it allows you avoid this dilemma, you really do prefer walks that go in a circle) - I'll turn around at that mailbox; no, that telephone pole; no, the bottom of that hill.
You’ve never been able to decide if a Natural Stopping Point has to do with your own mind or the aesthetics of the app - if it is determined by being able to point to a specific idea or insight as proof that the time was not entirely wasted, or by reaching the end of one Tweet without being able to see even a single pixel of the one following it in your timeline, which would allow you to tap the “Home” icon (a small house, with a blue dot next to it, to signify that since you have begun scrolling there have been new Tweets added, which you hope you will be able to resist the temptation to scroll through before you close the app entirely) without feeling as though you had left anything unfinished, any loose ends untied.
Or are you waiting for Twitter to do the work for you so that you can forsake your existential responsibility of decision-making (as per Sartre and Beauvoir): to either fail to load the next series of posts, or to offer you that fantastic Godsend of an “out,” the button that reads “Show More Tweets,” which you always take as a sign that you have done quite enough of this for one morning. That is when you will stop, you decide, as you continue to scroll, still passing your eyes over all the text in a pantomime of reading (which you have caught yourself doing while reading actual books, too, and used to do for entire chapters sometimes, because there must be something pleasurable about the physical act of moving one’s eyes across a line of text, quite separate from the pleasures of reading proper, which, of course, like the pleasures of mathematics, which you have also experienced, take place in the unseen, private, inaccessible mind) and the scrolling slowly becomes more frantic, more anxious: the muscles in your legs start to twitch, your heart starts to beat a little bit faster.
The real battle is fought inside the mind. Bilbo Baggins taught you that, and it is the only thing you actually remember from reading The Hobbit at least twice (because it’s a "classic," because you were afraid you weren’t old enough or attentive enough to fully appreciate it the first time around), but that does certainly put it ahead of a lot of books (some of which were a lot longer or required a lot more time commitment) that you can’t even point to a single thing you got from them - although you know that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t in there, because of course we don’t always remember the origin of every idea or image or feeling, although wouldn’t it be nice if we could, or at least could see them all spelled out for us in the afterlife, there for our endless perusal and exploration.
At some point, you stop reading. The scrolling becomes habitual, automatic. This is part of the addiction of the app, you know, but knowing that doesn’t lessen its power over you. You feel like you must scroll until you reach what you want to call a Natural Stopping Point, although, if pressed, you wouldn’t be able to give a better answer than that powerful government person from, like, fifty years ago whose name you can’t recall at the moment but will try to later, when he was asked about obscenity: you’ll know it when you see it. You do the same thing when you go for a walk that requires a turn-around (though, at least partially because it allows you avoid this dilemma, you really do prefer walks that go in a circle) - I'll turn around at that mailbox; no, that telephone pole; no, the bottom of that hill.
You’ve never been able to decide if a Natural Stopping Point has to do with your own mind or the aesthetics of the app - if it is determined by being able to point to a specific idea or insight as proof that the time was not entirely wasted, or by reaching the end of one Tweet without being able to see even a single pixel of the one following it in your timeline, which would allow you to tap the “Home” icon (a small house, with a blue dot next to it, to signify that since you have begun scrolling there have been new Tweets added, which you hope you will be able to resist the temptation to scroll through before you close the app entirely) without feeling as though you had left anything unfinished, any loose ends untied.
Or are you waiting for Twitter to do the work for you so that you can forsake your existential responsibility of decision-making (as per Sartre and Beauvoir): to either fail to load the next series of posts, or to offer you that fantastic Godsend of an “out,” the button that reads “Show More Tweets,” which you always take as a sign that you have done quite enough of this for one morning. That is when you will stop, you decide, as you continue to scroll, still passing your eyes over all the text in a pantomime of reading (which you have caught yourself doing while reading actual books, too, and used to do for entire chapters sometimes, because there must be something pleasurable about the physical act of moving one’s eyes across a line of text, quite separate from the pleasures of reading proper, which, of course, like the pleasures of mathematics, which you have also experienced, take place in the unseen, private, inaccessible mind) and the scrolling slowly becomes more frantic, more anxious: the muscles in your legs start to twitch, your heart starts to beat a little bit faster.
You remember that there are other people in this house with you, and any one of them could wake up any minute and catch you in the act, which now feels shameful, especially since you aren’t even reading anything anymore, just caught up in the throes of your relatively-harmless-but-still-embarrassing addiction, and you are seized with this intense, irrational need to get to the end before anyone else comes out, this panicked sense that if you are interrupted you may well die.
And finally, after an indeterminate amount of anxious time, it happens: you reach the NSP, you tap the Home icon, you purposely avert your eyes so that you do not even catch a glance of the most recent post on your timeline, you close the app, you place your phone face-down on the table, you breathe a sigh of relief. The game is over. You have won.
And finally, after an indeterminate amount of anxious time, it happens: you reach the NSP, you tap the Home icon, you purposely avert your eyes so that you do not even catch a glance of the most recent post on your timeline, you close the app, you place your phone face-down on the table, you breathe a sigh of relief. The game is over. You have won.
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