Making Peace with Infinity

The first step is to acknowledge that you can never finish watching every video, TV show, or movie you want in the world. You can never finish reading every book you want. You can never finish scrolling through every page on Reddit. There’s just too much and you have to accept that there are just some things in this world that you are going to miss out on.

And that’s okay.

The second step is to have priorities to what you consume. This is to be conscious of what you really want to consume, and not just because it’s there. It’s very tempting to let the YouTube recommended videos or autoplay decide for you what to watch next. But if what’s there is not the priority of what you want to consume, don’t do it.

• The pages of Instagram and Facebook are an endless scroll, they are always there, and there is always more.
• You have to set self-imposed content and time limits. Decide that you will watch just one episode, or will scroll for only 10 minutes.
• Even if you exceed these guidelines occasionally, it is good to have them.

We can’t expect ourselves to be able to resist triggers if we don’t train our nervous system to handle these triggers.

These triggers could just be as simple as the tempting infinite scroll, or the eye-catching thumbnail of a YouTube video. The ones that trigger your dopamine response to want to consume and satisfy the curiosity that has been planted in you.

Meditation at the start of your day can help inject some calm throughout your day and make you less jittery.

Like it or not, “content” is here to stay. As long as we progress technologically in this information age, where content is king, we have to live with it. Even this stash, it's content.

So our duty to ourselves is to find the content that energizes us, content that we choose to consume, so we don’t fall into the infinity of the internet. We have to make peace with how we will never experience all that is out there, and that’s okay.