Writer's Diary
2/24/26
It can be hard to admit to oneself that you’re living in a way that’s kind of wasteful—spending too much money, drinking too much, waking up too late, spending too much time on your screen, too many cars. It can be hard to get off the hedonic treadmill and to sacrifice some degree of dopamine—the hit of dopamine that one gets, say, from opening social media in the morning—for the slower, richer pleasure of opening a book of poetry. It’s hard to see how anything good...
My life is happier than eight months ago, but then... consumption habits haven’t gotten better.
It’s almost like an insult to the happier life, love and friendship, and art that I find myself spending my time in an idle way.
Time is money, money is time, money is wasted, time is wasted, time is wasted, money is wasted. Time is money, money is wasted, time is wasted, time is wasted.
In an age when almost everything is artificial, no choices come naturally, no roots are present to help us resist erosion—of being blown or washed away. Simone Weil writes that the railroads destroyed thousand-year-old traditions in small-town New York, in France, overnight wherever they appeared in the 19th century.
We’ll say the same about mobile screens, and no one is above it. Everyone belongs to this great, vast syndicate of distraction. Doomscrolling is not an action, but an ontology.