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16 February 2026

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If you ever feel like everything is always marching, marching, marching forward these days, your senses do not deceive you.

Last night I sat alone in our loft/media room, watching episode five, “In the Name of the Mother” of the new series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is yet another spinoff of the original Game of Thrones: Song of Ice and Fire.

So far, this series has me rapt, perhaps even more than the original HBO Game of Thrones, because its story is on a much smaller scale. Where the original Game of Thrones bounced between about 6-8 storylines spanning all of Westeros, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms focuses on just one storyline, one main character, in one location: The Hedge Knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, in a jousting tournament at the Reach. Because of this much narrower scope and focus, the story is more engaging to me as a sensitive person, where depth and breadth and detail of characters and events have a tremendous impact on my whole sensory system—not just sight and sound, but also intuition and emotion. As a consumer of books, tv series, movies, etc., I have always been more drawn to first-person narratives, as they lend themselves to profound layers and complexity of individual characters.

At the end of each of these A Knight of the Seven Kingdom episodes, the audience is left with what writers might call a “beat,” an insight or turn that is unanticipated and propels the story forward. This is, as you might imagine, expertly crafted in collaboration with George RR Martin.

The “beat” or “turn” at the end of last night’s episode five was startling in a demise of Gus Fring sort of way. That’s all the spoiler I’ll give here, but it was gory, gut-wrenching, and engaged the audience’s whole throbbing hearts. Then, the screen went black.

As I sat there, immobile, beginning to process the meaning and repercussions of such a plot twist, the show’s closing credits began to run, along with some moving instrumental music. I was wholly within that moment: the black screen, the white credits, the evocative instrumentals, my thoughts—

And then I was violently wrenched out of that moment.

The black screen and white credits were minimized to a tiny upper left corner of my TV screen, replaced by a giant black, white, and hot pink advertisement for Industry, a show starring our former Jon Snow, Kit Harrington. In the bottom left corner, a black button that read “Play Now” started to fill with white from left to right: a timer.

If I did not leap of the couch to find my remote within 15 seconds, HBO was going to force-feed me the pilot episode of Industry, a show I have zero interest in watching.

After a frenzy of locating my remote and redirecting HBO to allow episode five’s credits to continue to roll, all my musings about the show’s twist had evaporated. In fact, after that flurry of distraction, it was a sheer act of willpower to even remember how the episode had ended.

It took a moment or two, and then I got mad. HBO had robbed me of an opportunity to deeply process what I’d just witnessed.

I understand how very few people would get angry about this. Have you ever seen a grandmother appeasing a cranky toddler? Upset that other child is using the swing you want right now? Well, how about this other thing, a slide or climbing wall, maybe? Too hangry to wait for your dinner to arrive at the restaurant? Well how about this dancing napkin!

HBO doesn’t wait until we are cranky or bored: it force-feeds us more and still more entertainment so that we have no slice, no space, no moment to think.

Of course, this ties back to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I read and reviewed a few weeks back: entertainment, mollification, and consumerism. If we are prohibited from down time, we have no opportunity to process deeply, and we can never become dissatisfied. And if we are prohibited from down time, we can be perpetual consumers.

This is happening just about everywhere, in every industry. A week back, the dog sitting app I use, Rover, emailed me out of the blue: “Get Lexi back into familiar routines,” it said, encouraging me to consume more services. AirBnB sent a similar email: “Time for your next trip!”

But the most egregious is Facebook. I’m not a Tiktoker, ShapChatter, Xer, or YouTuber—my weakness is really Instagram. But Facebook is where most Gen X and Millennials I know hang out, so I check it about once a week. At intervals, I locate some willpower and delete Facebook from my phone. But then, if I am posting a piece of writing to my Substack, I’ll need the app back on my phone in order to share. So I’ll grumble under my breath and re-download Facebook.

Hear me out, readers: I do not enjoy Facebook reels. They’re horrible. 62% of them are AI slop. 99% of that slop has comments from later GenX and/or Boomers who believe what they saw was 100% real. I can’t. It makes me want to gouge my eyes out.

Still, those thumbnails of those reels are click-bait and utterly irresistible. Besides, sometimes they are related to topics I enjoy. For example, there are currently many, many social media book nerds posting reviews of Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights,” which—how could I pass that up??

So I’ll let a “Wuthering Heights” review play, and as I’m contemplating the content of the reel, a little ticker timer starts at the bottom left of my screen, moving right, and forces me to quit thinking about the content in order to hit “cancel” on the reel’s auto-advance feature. We won’t even talk about how difficult it is to hit that “cancel” button—it’s so small and my fingers so large.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Now, believe me. I know that I can turn the auto-advance feature off. But the setting will be lost the next time I delete the app from my phone (which is really the space in which I should be living—Facebook-free). So the next time I’ll delete it, then reinstall it, and would need to remember to re-set that feature, which of course, I’ll never remember to do.

Why must I re-set that feature each time? Why is the auto-advance setting standard?

In my Comp II class a few weeks back, we watched this YouTube video posted by Howtown: “What the Actual Science Says About Brain Rot.” In the video, our hosts provide research evidence to show that auto-advance features which lead to “doomscrolling” is specifically what impacts our short-term memory and becomes detrimental to attention-span.

In Mary Wolf’s book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Wolf presents scientific evidence that when force-fed short-form digital content, our brains receive that content out of context and then therefore do not deeply process it. We therefore never apply what we learn from reels to our greater lived experience.

We have every scientifically researched and proven reason to believe that auto-advancing our content is bad for our cognition and critical thinking, and yet mega media like Netflix, HBO, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and others demand our attention and usurp our processing time by force-feeding us more and still more content.

I’m tired.

I’m tired of the way my brain feels foggy and bogged down and slow—potentially in part attributable to perimenopause, but also the result of my own doomscrolling habits.

I’m tired of the prevalence of these mega media outlets in my life, commandeering my time, my attention, and my money.

I’ve noticed, and perhaps some of you have too, that the things in my life which bring me the most contentment and wholesome satisfaction are free of charge: library books, outdoor walks, writing, sleeping. Sleeping.

And I’m tired of people trying to convince me that I need to consume more, or that the time it takes my (now, admittedly, much slower) mind to process content is somehow not worthwhile.

I want to go back to when the credits after a movie would roll, and you’d sit there in your chair and watch them go…and contemplate the story you were just told. I want to go back to a time when I’d finish consuming something and had an opportunity to digest before more was set on my plate.

Guess I’ll be deleting Facebook again after this Substack post…