Ennui Lately

Over the last few days, I’ve been having long conversations again. Catching up with Paul and Em, I keep having similar conversations over and over again. Ennui seems to be everywhere. Obviously the world feels like it’s on fire, but also there’s the distraction machines in our pockets that don’t even seem to generate joy in the way that they used to. We are more online than we ever have been but the online spaces that used to drive joy fail to do that. There were tipping points for each end every one, moments when they ceased to be the things that we were once excited about. Substack feels like the most recent version; one day, it stopped feeling like a way of connecting with people in the same way that it used to.

I’ve cut out a lot of my digital consumption lately. No more Twitter and Instagram, no more YouTube shorts. I disabled YouTube history, so my recommendations are frozen in the moment that I changed that setting. A lot of the videos I get recommended are about this experience. Even in the search for clarity, even as I try to cut down consumption, I’m still defaulting to consumption as my way out. The problems I have with all online consumption abound here. Every video more or less repeats the same points that were probably all sourced from certain ideas suggested by algorithms: videos advocate for creation over consumption, every other person reminds me that algorithms have been developed to ruin our lives. I think I’ll slowly be able to wean myself off of it all, but it feels like a long journey, especially on days like these when I’m sleep deprived and stupid. Hopefully sleep will save me.