The Tyranny of the Open Tab

I currently have, by a conservative estimate, forty browser tabs open, and each one is a small promise I made to a future version of myself who does not exist. He was going to read the long article. He was going to compare the three recipes. He was going to get to it. He never gets to it, because he is always busy opening new tabs.

The open tab is a peculiarly modern form of debt. It costs nothing to take on and accrues a quiet interest of guilt. We have built ourselves a machine for deferring our own attention indefinitely, and then we are surprised to feel, at the end of the day, that we were busy without having done anything.

Lately I have been practicing a small heresy: closing them unread. Not bookmarking — closing. The article will exist tomorrow, or it won’t, and either way the world will continue. It turns out the thing I was protecting was never the information. It was the version of me who was going to be improved by it.