A week without recommendations

The rules were simple. For seven days: no recommended feed, no autoplay, no “because you watched”, no algorithmic timeline. Chronological where offered, subscriptions where possible, and where neither was available, the service was simply off. I kept a log because I did not trust myself to remember accurately, which turned out to be the correct instinct.

Days one and two: the twitch

The first thing to go is not entertainment. It is the gap-filler. I counted, on day one, thirty-one occasions where I opened something with no intention of doing anything in it — lift, kettle, the eleven seconds between joining a call and the call starting. Each time there was nothing new, because I had subscribed to eighty things and eighty things do not publish continuously.

Day two was worse and I want to be honest about why. It was not boredom. It was a specific, low irritation at the world for failing to hand me something, which is a strange thing to feel about a lift.

Days three and four: the substitution

By the middle of the week I had found workarounds, and the workarounds were revealing. I read my email more often. I refreshed a chronological timeline that I knew had not changed. I checked a weather app four times in an afternoon in a city where the weather does not change. The appetite did not go away; it went looking.

The feed was never the habit. The feed was where the habit was being served.

Day five

On Friday I finished a book I had been carrying for four months. Not because I had grandly reclaimed my attention — I want to be careful here, because the tidy version of this essay ends with a book and a sunset and I do not think the tidy version is true. I finished it because it was the nearest available thing during a forty-minute wait, and for the first time in months it did not have to compete.

That is the whole finding, and it is smaller than the genre usually allows. Recommendation systems do not defeat your intentions. They win the tiny, uncontested moments — the eleven seconds, the forty minutes — that your intentions were never watching. Remove them and those moments do not become meaningful. They become available.

I turned two of the feeds back on this morning. I have not turned the third one back on, and I notice I keep not doing it, which is probably the most honest result in the log.