What Feed Can't Hold
We’re not doing too much. We’re doing too much that disappears behind us.
This is the first issue of Analog Lava Lamps, a newsletter on what survives the scroll.
Every issue gets a companion soundtrack. This one is free and includes: Passion Pit, Paul Simon, Odd Future, Sharon Van Etten, Led Zeppelin, and a little nacho cheese.
Stress doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds in the background. Like rhythm under your feet, subtle, until it wears down the soles of your shoes. It gathers like lint, hums like a fridge in another room. Most people talk about it like it’s a jacket they can’t take off. Hans Selye, who coined the term, said: “Everyone knows what stress is, but nobody really knows what it is.” And that’s the thing, it doesn’t scream. It just… accumulates.
The muscle memory of clicking.
The dull ache behind your eyes.
The hours you can’t remember.
But none of it sticks.
Stress isn’t just a feeling. It’s a biological cascade. Perception turns into cortisol turns into tight shoulders turns into shallow breath. The National Institutes of Health describe it as a full-body event, but culturally, we’ve made it vague. We say “burnt out” like a status update, not a signal. We scroll through solutions, swipe through advice. We reach for grounding but forget to touch what’s right here: the doorknob, the grass, our own handwriting.
Everything around us is designed to reduce friction and with it, our capacity to feel where we are.
Remote work rises with every new software rollout. Over a fifth of Americans no longer leave home to earn a paycheck. And as screens replace space that is too expensive for businesses to occupy, third places vanish not just from routines, but from our worlds.
The 24-hour diner that smelled like syrup, cigarettes, and burnt coffee. The neighborhood print shop with half-bent staples and flyers late to their own date. The bookstore with cracked linoleum floors and no working Wi-Fi. These places held time. They absorbed us. They weren’t optimized.
Now, they just can’t afford to stay. Now, everything moves through glass.
Even fast food has gone quiet. No more overheard birthdays or PlayPlace giggles. Just touchscreens, app lanes, and cubbies that buzz like vending machines. These aren’t restaurants. They’re convenience terminals wrapped in nostalgia fonts. Taco Bell’s “Go Mobile” model is designed for digital-first consumption. Wendy’s new stores feature dedicated mobile lanes and kiosks instead of a baked potato bar. These are no longer gathering places. They’re data points that serve meat and cheese.
The vibe is ambient stress under fluorescent lighting. And in spaces like this, you’re not hosted. You’re processed.
We’ve streamlined so much that we’ve erased chance: the accidental brush, the pause before speaking, the overheard story that lingers in your chest. And without friction, we stop bumping into each other.
We mistake ease for meaning.
Nothing lands.
Nothing lingers.
Maybe that weight we carry—that feeling of nothing quite landing—isn’t just stress. Maybe it’s Sisyphus. We refresh the feed. Roll the content uphill. Wake up and do it again. And we call it productivity.
But maybe the tragedy isn’t the boulder.
It’s not the labor that undoes us, it’s the meaninglessness. Effort without imprint. Motion with no residue. We’re not doing too much. We’re doing too much that disappears behind us.
But some things resist refresh. A signed record. The box of photos you carted around the country. A hand-passed note, shiny & still sticky with lip gloss. They don’t autoplay. They don’t ask to be seen. They just exist. And in that stillness, they hold us.
Walter Pater once wrote, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end.” Analog media slows you down. A cassette doesn’t play at 1.5x. A zine doesn’t scroll. You have to sit with it. Sometimes you even have to flip it over.
We used to make scrapbooks. Burn CDs. Write tracklists in Sharpie and hand them over like confessions. Now we share links. The gesture is the same. The touch is gone.
This isn’t anti-internet.
It’s anti-disappearance.
A reminder of what’s missing.
Something uneven, hand-torn.
Something that smells like pulp.
Arthur Schopenhauer said, “The world is my idea.” Desire filters everything. And the feed knows that, so it feeds the wanting.
Want intimacy? Swipe.
Want escape? Refresh.
Want affirmation? Post.
But what if the most meaningful things don’t come from more?
What if they come from contact… from friction… from enough?
Analog things are hard to fake. They take time. They leave traces. They hold your breath. There’s a difference between consuming content and being moved by it. One fills time. The other shifts it.
In 2020, I made a book. No audience. No algorithm. Just paper, thread, and a sense that if I didn’t make something with my hands, I would forget how. It didn’t solve anything. But it made the ache visible. And that was enough.
Joseph Campbell wrote that ritual gives shape to life “not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.” That book didn’t tell me what to feel. It just gave me a place to feel it. Sometimes, survival is the private object.
Lately, I’ve had Summer House on in the background. Season nine feels different. The women aren’t orbiting men anymore, they’re authoring the space beyond them. Wiping tears. Asking hard questions, actually sticking around for the answers. They disagree. They show up anyway. There’s no edit for catharsis, no performance for the feed. The boulder is still there, but they’re not rolling it for someone else anymore.
Slacker meanders the same way. The light of day is the arc. Assassination theories. A guy with a gun. A friend you used to trust. Each scene: a brick placed. Not a wall. “Repetition is a form of change.” You don’t remember the point. You remember the pulse. What lasts isn’t the spectacle. It’s the form they build together.
In Chinese myth, stories were carved into bamboo, painted on oracle bones, passed in scrolls from hand to hand. The pace wasn’t set by the reader. It was set by the voice in the room. The weight of the scroll. The hand that unrolled it.
Memory, in this way, was physical.
To remember was to carry.
You can’t rush a prayer rug. You can’t duplicate the grief in the family incense. You can’t flatten a ritual into a tweet. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s realism.
The scroll won’t stop. The inbox won’t empty. But maybe the point isn’t to keep up. Maybe it’s to feel something. To stop mid-scroll and ask: Where did this even land?
Before the feed, the form.
Before the boulder, the hand.
We don’t need every answer. But we do need contact.
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Enjoyed 😊
Keeping it simple - I Like it!