how to survive being chronically online

To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

The collection of so much personalized data—around what time of day we turn to Sade or how many seconds of a NewJeans song we play—suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.

But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here.

Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have ... See more

True disconnection, like true wilderness, is an empty goal. Whether we have shunned social media or not, the internet does not cease to exist as a driving force in the world, any more than ecological systems cease to shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail and hop back in the car. The concepts of the “offline world” and the ... See more