It was as if I’d been assuming that what I needed was to collect sufficient resources to create momentum, when what I’d really needed was to clear enough space for momentum to arrive.
In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”
The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.
I don’t think this attitude of hoarding-as-a-substitute-for-engaging is limited to scrolling online, either. Project plans, to-do lists, bucket lists and suchlike can all end up serving a similar function. They become places to collect things you want to do later, but the collecting stands in for the doing. […]On the contrary: by hoarding such thoughts, stowing them safely on a nice big list, I’m almost certain I’d made it less likely I’d take the plunge and do them.
This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action… means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.
Here’s the image, sent a long time ago by a friend, that I use to represent my own surplus of FOMO read-later tabs:
Now… will I delete them?