You can stay online. You can stay connected. You can stay hooked up to each other literally all the time if you want. (If you don’t that’s fine too.) You don’t have to read books or write poems. (If you want to, that’s cool.) You can still use phone, computer, and apps.

But there’s a whole category of apps that push junk to you that I’m asking you, pleading with you, to give up.

Good thing is you’ll be free from all the machine generated slop out there.

"The Cure for Slop" (idiomdrottning.org)

I wanted to build on Sandra's idea here a little bit and I have two load bearing metaphors for it, related to two of my favourite video games: No Man's Sky and Stardew Valley

No Man's Sky may be my favourite game of all time, and it's one I've gone from being able to play for hours on end, to basically being unable to open. The reason I like it doesn't have to do with its story (which really isn't all that interesting, although it's gotten better over the years) and isn't because it's a particularly engaging game (I liked it even at release when it was basically a glorified, buggy walking simulator). The reason I like it is because there's a weirdly honest admission about what they game is for, buried deep within it that you can only really get a sense of after you've beat all the mainline missions, or else gotten bored and abandoned them. It's that your objective as the player character in No Man's Sky is to explore the galaxy, and exploring the galaxy is incredibly boring.

No Man's Sky suits its narrative's existential themes because it's hard to play for long without running up against the fact that jetting between alien planets and scanning procedurally generated lifeforms is an incredibly pointless exercise. You don't really get anything out of it in-game except a small amount of money and the satisfaction of having spent several hours of your real-life time taking pictures of fake plants. You can't even really convince yourself it matters within the context of the game world because the game world doesn't try to convince you that your "work" matters; it just kind of is a thing you can do. Don't get me wrong; I'm a nerd who likes to play a video game about scanning plants, but it's hard to do for long. No Man's Sky is still probably my favourite game, though, because unlike anything in the game itself, that's real. There's a certain kind of honesty to a game like No Man's Sky, where the object is to explore a world you know doesn't matter.

Stardew Valley, on the other hand, is a really easy game to get into. Literally from the moment the game starts, there are obvious things for you to do every day. Every time your character wakes up, you have chores to do in order to grow your farm. But after about a year, your farm has grown to the point where you're spending around half of each in-game day stressing about watering your plants, collecting forageable goods and taking care of your animals—and at that point, you're starting to wonder why you aren't just doing chores in real life. There's a similar kind of honesty in a game like Stardew Valley, a game the object of which is to do chores to maintain a farm that doesn't really exist.

Both games have their distractions, but in the end, it's impossible to avoid the fact that none of it matters, that you may as well just go outside, or do the dishes.

Real life, as dictated by the parameters of our terminally online world, actually doesn't seem to follow this pattern anymore. Unlike in No Man's Sky, after you run out of narrative, you don't have to face the bare reality that you're living in a simulated universe where your goal is to scan procedurally generated plants. There actually is no end of the narrative; you could read Moltbook until the heat death of the universe and it wouldn't make any difference.

Probably my favourite experience of the internet ever was the two or three weeks where I'd just open Marginalia Search, hit the random button, and dig up cool stuff on the open web. Until I got bored, and then I stopped. I don't really do that anymore, but I still have fond memories of that week because even when it was boring there was a sense of discovery, like I was connecting somehow with these people whom I'd never met, who'd never meet me.

It's worth comparing that to my time on Instagram, but it's hard. I don't have any memories of my time scrolling through Instagram, except that it happened.

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