Mar 31, 2025 2 min read Self Improvement

March Unmadness

Spring-cleaning the brain buy consuming less content for a month and creating more instead? Hmmm.

My trip on a train provided an excellent opportunity to devolve myself of all internet reading / watching habits for a bit. For me that was mainly tech news, car news, local news, YouTube, and a few local and interest-related subreddits.

I would normally check some or all of these sites in the morning. Maybe again in the evening. You probably do the same with your own set of sites. In the case of YouTube, I'd often open it on my TV whenever I felt my energy drop a little and then I'd stay there watching until I was too annoyed by the diminishing quality of the recommendations to continue.

So for a week at the beginning of March, I went cold turkey on all of them. Easy enough when you're travelling without a solid internet connection and lots of things to do. Harder when you get back home and you've melted into the couch, and your phone / TV remote is right there.

But I decided to continue not watching or reading stuff for the month anyway.

I called it March Unmadness and it feels ... lonely and boring and kinda nice.

And so, over breakfast, I've been ... eating, mostly. And thinking. And writing stuff. And that's why you've seen more posts here this month and why you'll probably see more through April.

No public zombie mode

If I learned anything on the 4-day train, it's that time is better spent staring out the window looking at trees than reading a thousand internet comments made by people you don't know.

But the disturbing image that is stuck in my brain is actually from a different time on a different train. Cue the wobbly screen and irritating time travel music.

I can get motion sick if I look at my phone on a subway train. So while on a trip across town on the Metro in Montréal last year, I was just looking ahead, at nothing in particular, as you do when on such tunnel'ed transit modes without anything out the window to see but dark concrete walls. Around me everyone – and I do mean everyone – was doing the same thing: blank-faced looking at their phones, doing the upwards thumb flick to go to the next video on whatever short form content platform they preferred.

As far as I could tell, no one was texting. No one was writing notes. No one was web searching random facts. No one was right-left swiping through Tinder, even. All things you'd normally see folks doing. All somewhat productive things. Nope. It was just a subway train car full of people watching the next thing the algorithm told 'em to.

I don't fault the folks who were doing this any more than I fault smokers for smoking in the 1950s. I'd probably be doing it too if doing it didn't make me wanna puke. (The using a phone on a train, that is. The smoking too, probably.)

That image of the train people all doing the same thumb flick motion with blank zombie faces stuck with me. Like the dead smoker's lung I saw on display at a museum once. Like the old men sitting alone in the food court on any given weekday because they have nowhere else to go and no friends left alive.

Now I don't care if you smoke. Or mindlessly consume content. Or alienate everyone around you and end up alone in a food court. It's your damn life, do what you want.

And even though I'm not a short form content watcher, I spend plenty of my free time watching long form content and reading sites that don't make me happier or more knowledgeable about the things I wanna be knowledgeable about. But, at least for a month, I found some other things to do with my downtime ... like annoy you with these thoughts. You're welcome.