Closing the Tabs

on burnout, digital detoxing, limiting distractions, creativity, and letting go

I’ve been writing some version of this letter for a long time, about social media, distraction, creation, and burnout. There is so much I want to write, but I am reminding myself that I don’t have to write everything at once. The fragments aren’t entirely cohesive, but they live in context with each other.

William Blake. Pity. ca. 1795. The Met.

Table of Contents:

1. I am in the process of healing

2. Social media, aesthetics, and consumption

3. Routine, scrolling, and burnout

4. Creativity without distraction

5. The consistency trap

6. The cycle

7. Reference section

8. Footnotes

---

I am in the process of healing

I am ready for the future to unfold. — journal entry, April 1, 2026

I have lived a season. Life often feels stagnant, but so much can change in just a few months. Even when the changes aren’t noticeable to others, even when the touch-points of your life remain the same, you can still wake up one day and perceive everything differently. The transformation doesn’t happen overnight, but the recognition of it happens in an instant.

I experienced a severe episode of burnout as winter turned to Spring. The effects of stress had been accumulating in my body for years, and they intensified last summer after I lost my dad. I avoided my grief, treated myself poorly, and put every last bit of my attention into work. I reached my breaking point, so I began itemizing and decluttering every part of my life. I threw out anything I could – physically, mentally, or otherwise – just to feel some relief.

I quit Instagram, deleted the Substack app from my phone, canceled my Spotify premium¹, and renewed my library card. I stopped counting calories and started eating three meals a day. I set strict work hours and scheduled lunch breaks. I read good books² and didn’t tell the internet about them (yet). I pulled tarot cards and let their energies guide me. I breathed, stretched, and rested. I quietly put my Open Tabs series to bed, feeling that it was just another excuse to consume instead of create³.

I don’t want stress, burnout, overwhelm, and indecision to dominate my life. I don’t want to continue living in survival mode. I don’t want to continue struggling through my days, telling myself: ‘just a little longer.’ I don’t want to keep delaying my life, my happiness, or my desires. I simply do not want to keep living this way. I don’t want the documentation of my life to show that I wasted my energy stuck in the same cycle. I want my life to open up. I want to experience abundance. Abundance is not material wealth. Abundance is rest, time, pleasure, and creativity. I cannot keep moving through this cycle. I am not infinite. I do not want to suppress my desires any longer. – journal entry, April 2026

With less distractions and more nourishment, I started daydreaming again. I envisioned the future. I began to think about what would fulfill me. I gave my inner desires space to sprout. My writing, my creativity, my well-being, and my burgeoning spirituality became my focus. I started changing small things and making big decisions. Through all of this, my intuition became distinguishable from my anxiety. I now recognize it as the calming presence within me⁴, and I don’t question it.

8 of Cups, The Empress, Death.

The other day, I listened to music for the first time in weeks. I made a playlist last year called “I am in the process of Healing”. I put it on and began packing up my apartment⁵, and I felt pure joy.

Social Media, Aesthetics, & Consumption

This year, I have been actively disavowing the aesthetic impulse, and the desire to be “seen” online. I want to think privately, though I see the value in thinking publicly. But the aesthetics get in the way. The impulse to photograph my desk as I write, or a book as I read, overtakes the impulse to write or read. I login to the app to post the image, which very quickly leads to my own aesthetic consumption. In this process of documentation, every desire becomes a still life –- ultimately static, lifeless.

In this era of “romanticizing your life,” people posit the value of art, beauty, and aesthetics as a rejection of the Capitalist Hellscape. But when utilizing corporate-owned digital platforms to distribute these images and videos, beauty and aesthetics do little more than drive consumerism. Visual appeal becomes shallow, another distraction. How to escape this hollowness except to stop engaging on the platforms that compel me to make everything look pretty?

So I deleted Instagram, my final tether to the aestheticization factory. Not necessarily as a forever thing, but as proof of concept. If I stopped seeing everything as a photograph, would I engage with the reality in front of me instead of curating it? I’m not anti-social-media or anti-technology, but I am not interested in playing into the attention economy at every turn and pretending I have no say in it.

I am interested in being present on the internet in the ways that fulfill me, while maintaining a distance that gives me the mental freedom to create. That is a balance I’m still working on.

“For me, this kind of freedom in process can ONLY truly happen outside of social media platforms — because to be plugged into the system is to sell your autonomy in exchange for “ease of connection” with an existing network. I won’t go into the problems and fallacies of it, here — except to say that you cannot truly embody a creative practice in an environment that exploits attention for profit, where you’re pushed to measure your “success” according to metrics of validation. This system encourages that the creative act, not be embodied and lived, but performed and pantomimed.” — The internet as a creative practice, Kening Zhu

Routine, Scrolling, & Burnout

Our culture glorifies commitment, routine, and productivity over all else. We are meant to just keep going, keep pushing through, keep doing exactly what we are doing, in exactly the same way, over and over again. But knowing when to let go, when to walk away, when to quit -– that’s an underrated skill.

Algorithms cultivate this obsession with unexamined routine, this compulsion to keep going. Everything becomes seamless, presented to you in a never-ending stream of sanitized discovery. No thinking is required. One never has to exit the Known in order to seek fulfillment. The Algorithm provides.

Convenience is an anti-transformational ethos; a consumerist ethos. And that’s what these algorithmic feeds are: convenient. They give you exactly what you want, when you want it, which leads to hours of daily scrolling.

Endlessly scrolling through social media has a burnout effect similar to endless days of repetitive work⁶. The only thing stopping you is your mind or body telling you it simply can’t do it any more.

12-stage model for the development of burnout

Creativity without Distraction

I am closing the tabs. I am letting go of the infinite possibility of more, the multitude of distractions. I could read this, watch that, learn this, research more, put off the work again and again. I could go for the easy win, do the thing that asks nothing of me. Just consume.

But true creation takes time, effort, and energy. I want to dedicate myself to creating what is most meaningful to me. I waste so much time on the surface, because I am afraid to crack open the core. But I know there is something in there, and I want to find it.

Art and intuition are inextricably-linked. I want to write, create, and live from this place of inner guidance. I do not want to fear what’s inside. I do not want to be afraid to sit, think, write, and fail. I do not want to put a timeline on my process, or create for an algorithm.

I don’t want to wait until some imaginary “next phase” of life arrives to prioritize my writing. I want to be in the process now, instead of waiting for something to end.

Me, Substack Notes

The Consistency Trap

I’ve been rethinking what it really looks like for me to be consistent, here and in other parts of my life. I think the concept of consistency has been hijacked by the algorithms of our online lives, where consistency equals visibility; consistency equals existence; consistency equals survival. Without consistency, you simply disappear into the void of the internet, never to be seen in someone’s Home Feed again. There are many ways that social media subtly and insidiously trains us, and this is one of them.

So in the world of social media and algorithms, Consistency means producing content on a tight schedule, forever. But what does Consistency look like for me, as a human being with varying energy levels and a life outside of algorithms? How do I show up for myself and my desires?

My perfectionism instills me with an all-or-nothing attitude, and the mirage of perfect consistency keeps me at its mercy.

But what I care about most is being engaged in the process of writing, creativity, and living in a way that feels fulfilling to me. Everything doesn’t have to be a to-do list. I don’t have to do something every day, at the same time, and announce my devotion to it online in order for it to be meaningful.

Alexandra Lais [Substack Notes]

The Cycle

Sometimes I manage to clear my mind of all distractions, and for a while, I feel a sense of contentment. Not clarity about the future or a path forward, but a sense of presence that allows me to forget about what’s next. But then the ideas come flooding back in, and I want to be open to every possibility. I do not want to choose or take life one step at a time.

I am beginning to think that life is a series of opening and closing the tabs, though we probably open more than we close. It leaves our brains hot to the touch, our bodies overheating, our memories overloaded. But we need that sense of possibility, of novelty, of aliveness.

Stagnancy strips life away from us. I can only remain in a peaceful state of contentment for so long before I feel myself wasting away. Creation is proof of life. You have to move to grow.

I am sitting here thinking about all that I’ve experienced this year, the internal changes. I recognize how differently I feel now compared to 3 months ago or 6 months ago. I acknowledge the progress I’ve made. I am eating enough and feeding myself well. I am letting go of control. I am giving myself space to rest without guilt. I am sticking to my work boundaries and not over-working. I am listening to myself and my needs. I am going after what I want. I am feeling optimistic. I am not trying to escape my life, destroy it, or self-sabotage. I am making decisions that make me feel good. — journal entry, June 2026

---

Reference Section

Things that have directly and indirectly influenced this letter.

• Signs of Burnout: What It Is, How It Feels and How To Recover [Cleveland Clinic]

• Art and Artifice by Donna Tartt [Harper’s Magazine]

“But artifice—or false art—orients us toward what is flashy and shallow—toward movement and, more specifically, in the predetermined path where it wants us to move.”

• I Don’t Want to Show You My Work by James Junk [@jamesjunk.co, Instagram]

• When Sharing Becomes the Creative Work by Carolyn Yoo [See You, Substack]

“It’s my hope that everyone who desires a deeper relationship with their creativity finds both quietly public and private places to make and share their work. Both of these places ask us artists to sit in the discomfort of creating without being immediately validated by others—of doing the difficult work of communing with one’s self through bodily acts of process.”

• Digital Ecosystems & World-building [Kening Zhu]

• Be Your Own Algorithm [pagemelt, Youtube]

• Stop chasing “consistency.” It’s a trap for consumers. [Reddit]

“We think consistency is this holy grail of success, but honestly? Most of the time, consistency is just the driving force behind your false illusions. You don't actually want consistency. You want consumption.”

• Your Dream Life Requires You to Move [Ren, Youtube]

• Overthinking About Workaholism [Magical Overthinkers]

1. These apps were all that I had left. I was not a user of TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. And yes — Spotify had to go! Consuming music on an endless loop was part of the process.

2. I read Pure Colour by Sheila Heti in one afternoon. The main thing I’ve heard people say about this book is that “it’s…weird” (negative connotation). Well, grief is weird.

3. My Open Tabs series has simply run its course. It provided a false sense of consistency, and gave false meaning to my media consumption. It did not leave space for thinking and creation of my own. Many of the references linked/shared in this letter would have been (or were) shared in my roundups…but it’s very likely I would not have shared my own thoughts on these topics if my focus was on producing another issue of links to send out. However, my little notebook version lives on.

4. “Something clicked yesterday and I am on a mission to make all necessary life changes. I can’t explain it. But I read somewhere that true clarity — making decisions from the core instead of from anxiety — feels like calm. Like knowing. And it’s rare that I’ve experienced it like that. But this was it. Suddenly I felt CALM and DECISIVE.” – journal entry, June 9, 2026

5. I am moving to a new apartment and I am so excited! This change of environment is much needed! I never felt right in my current place, and I see now how much it has affected me.

6. I feel guilty even talking about burnout in relation to my job, because I genuinely enjoy it and I am so grateful for the position I’m in. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that you can experience burnout even if you like your job (or whatever situation is causing it). Grief is a huge part of the stress I’ve experienced, and I used work to mask it, making the two hard to untangle.