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WELCOME TO THE PLATFORM WHERE TIME DISAPPEARS AND YOUR BRAIN FORGETS WHAT IT CAME FOR

Welcome to the age of TMI: Too Much Internet. Being online doesn’t really feel like a choice anymore. It’s not something you start or stop; it just runs, quietly in the background, bleeding into every part of the day. You’re not logging on. You’re already there. Scrolling between moments, tapping through thoughts. The internet used to be a break from real life. Now it’s tangled up in it. We don’t go online anymore. We live there.

The internet has followed us out of the browser and into every corner of our lives; our pockets, our watches, our bedroom nightstands. And somewhere along the way, the places we used to visit started collapsing into each other. The websites, apps, platforms — they’ve all started blending together, trying to become everything, everywhere, all at once.

Apps used to have lanes: one for chatting, one for photos, one for work. Now? Everything’s a marketplace. Everything’s a group chat. Everything’s a content feed. Open any app today and you’re met with the same mix of videos, messages, updates, ads, and oddly specific recommendations for things you mentioned out loud once. It’s all blending together into a sort of endless digital soup.

There’s convenience in that, sure. You don’t have to jump between five different apps to share a thought, buy a product, or send a message. But there’s also something kind of exhausting about it. When every platform tries to do everything, nothing feels like it has a purpose anymore. Maybe that’s why you can scroll for an hour and come away feeling kind of … empty. Like your brain’s been busy but you haven’t actually done anything.

It’s getting harder to tell where real life ends and the internet begins. There’s no clear moment when you “log on,” it’s just always there, blended into your day. You check one thing, then another, and suddenly it’s been forty minutes and you’re not even sure what you were looking for. It slips into your quiet moments, while you’re brushing your teeth, waiting for a coffee, walking to class.

It’s constant, even when you’re not really paying attention. It rings and notifies and recommends, even when you didn’t ask. We live in a state of constant partial attention, always a little bit plugged in, always reachable, always scrolling through something. And that can be a lot. It is a lot.

Maybe that’s why more of us are starting to crave a bit of space, not to disappear completely, but just to feel like we have some control again. To make the internet feel less like white noise and more like something we choose to use. Something that means something. Not just another way to fill the gaps in our day.

That doesn’t mean we need to delete everything or swear off screens completely, but it might mean being a little more intentional. A little more curious about where we spend our digital time, and why. It might mean looking for the corners of the internet that still feel alive, the ones where people are creating, building, talking, not just reposting the same thing for the hundredth time. Because the truth is, the internet isn’t going anywhere. But how we use it, that’s still up to us.

So maybe the next time you reach for your phone out of habit, pause just for a second. Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. And if the answer is, “I don’t know,” maybe that’s a good place to start.

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