It was 8:30 PM on a Tuesday. I had finished my dinner, washed the dishes, and settled onto the sofa. I had roughly two hours of free time before I needed to go to sleep. It was the perfect window to engage with some high-quality, culturally significant cinema.

I picked up the remote, opened a streaming service, and prepared to expand my intellectual horizons. I hovered my cursor over a critically acclaimed, three-hour, black-and-white Eastern European drama about the harsh realities of rural farming. It had won fourteen awards at Cannes. It was important.

I looked at the runtime. Two hours and forty-eight minutes. A wave of profound exhaustion washed over me. I couldn't do it. I simply did not have the psychological stamina to care about a struggling Eastern European horse on a Tuesday.

So, I pressed the "down" button. I began to scroll.

For the next forty-five minutes, I engaged in the defining ritual of late-stage capitalism: the endless scroll. I watched twelve different auto-playing trailers. I added four harrowing historical documentaries to "My List," a digital graveyard where aspirational media go to die. I scrolled through hyper-specific categories like “Gritty Scandinavian Thrillers Featuring Cold Detectives” and “Cerebral Independent Movies That Will Make You Feel Worse.”

By 9:15 PM, I had consumed absolutely nothing, yet I felt completely overwhelmed. I was paralysed by the sheer volume of excellent television I was actively failing to watch.

To understand the sheer panic of the streaming menu, we have to look to the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is famous for exploring the concept of Angst (anxiety or dread). He famously wrote that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."

Kierkegaard argued that having infinite choices does not bring happiness to human beings; instead, it terrifies us. When you stand on the edge of a cliff, you aren't merely afraid of falling; you are horrified by the sudden realisation that you possess the freedom to throw yourself off. You are paralysed by the limitless possibilities of your own agency.

The Netflix homepage is the digital equivalent of Kierkegaard’s cliff.

When there were only three television channels, you didn't have freedom. You just watched whatever was playing. But now, when you open a streaming app, you are staring into the abyss of unlimited potential. Choosing a film requires a terrifying commitment. If I choose to watch a sci-fi movie, I am actively murdering the possibility of watching a rom-com. I am forced to define who I am in that exact moment. Am I a person who watches French New Wave cinema, or am I a person who watches competitive baking shows?

The endless-scrolling interface forces you to confront your complete freedom, which can be dizzying. We don't scroll because we can't find anything good; we scroll because we are too afraid to make a final choice and face the consequences of a bad movie.

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If I am a fragile existentialist drowning in the sea of infinite choices, the cat is a master of unmediated, terrifying focus. She does not suffer from the paradox of choice. She does not curate a "Watchlist" of birds she intends to look at when she is in the right emotional headspace.

Yesterday evening, as I was forty minutes into a scrolling paralysis, unable to decide between a true-crime docuseries and a nature programme, she found her entertainment for the night.

A single, highly confused moth had gotten trapped between the glass of the window and the blind.

And for the next two solid hours, she watched that moth with 100%, unblinking, predatory intensity. She did not wonder if there was a better, more critically acclaimed moth on the kitchen window. She did not pause the moth to go check her phone. She was completely and wholly committed to the reality unfolding before her.

She is the ultimate anti-Kierkegaardian subject. She has no freedom, only instinct. She watches the moth, and she is at absolute peace. She looked over at me, furiously pressing the "back" button on my remote for the fiftieth time with an expression of deep, evolutionary pity. "You have ten thousand stories in that plastic box," her unblinking stare seemed to say, "and yet, you are watching none of them. Pathetic."

At 9:35 PM, the dread finally overtook me. I had wasted my entire window of free time curating my choices rather than making one. The Eastern European horse would have to wait. The harrowing documentaries would remain in the digital graveyard.

I panicked, exited the film menu, navigated to my "Continue Watching" row, and aggressively clicked on an episode of a 2000s sitcom.

I have seen this specific episode at least seven times. I know all the jokes. I know the rhythm of the laugh track. It provides absolutely zero intellectual stimulation or narrative surprise.

But as the familiar theme song played, my Kierkegaardian Angst immediately evaporated.

I realised that watching a sitcom you have already memorised is not an act of entertainment; it is a psychological defence mechanism. It is an aesthetic safety blanket. It requires no commitment, no risk, and no freedom. It asks nothing of you, and in a world of infinite choices, that is the greatest luxury of all.

See you next time. Keep scrolling,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

I came across a book titled The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3, written/drawn by James Edward Deeds Jr.

I found the name interesting, and it turns out that quirky "ECT" spelling on the cover wasn't just a whimsical, childish typo, it was a remarkably dark inside joke about the brutal electroconvulsive therapy (!) he was subjected to.

I saw a beautifully written review of it by a GoodReads reader, and I am copying it here.

You can see the whole archive here:

I was recently searching for the perfect shade of green to paint my future imaginary house. It’s a fine balance, really. Pick the wrong hue, and you immediately risk making your living room look like a sanatorium. Go slightly too dark, and suddenly you’re living in a military camp. Green is hard work.

So, naturally, I turned to Pinterest. I typed “green room” into the search bar, hoping for some aesthetic inspiration, and came across these paintings. The rooms glowed with this green hue.

And then I learned what that colour actually was.

In 1775, a Swedish chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele was tinkering around in his lab and created a stunning, vivid green pigment. It was an instant hit. Before this, greens were murky, fading quickly into dull teals or muddy yellows. Scheele’s Green was vibrant, cheap to produce, and caught the light beautifully in gaslit Victorian parlours.

There was just one tiny, insignificant catch: the secret ingredient that gave it that brilliant pop of colour was copper arsenite. Yes, literal arsenic.

Victorians, who eagerly embraced hazardous materials without hesitation, went far beyond simply painting their walls. They incorporated Scheele's Green into various aspects of their environment:

People essentially turned their homes into glamorous gas chambers. The pigment wasn't sealed into the wallpaper, meaning that a gentle breeze or a brush against the wall would send microscopic arsenic flakes drifting into the air. Worse, if the wallpaper got damp (which, in Victorian England, was practically guaranteed), a specific type of mould would metabolise the arsenic and release deadly arsine gas.

Newspapers reported ladies in green dresses swooning at parties, children wasting away in bright green nurseries, and factory workers turning green themselves. Yet, the public's commitment to the bit was terrifying.

Famed designer William Morris, who used the pigment extensively, dismissed the health concerns as a massive hoax, claiming doctors had been "bitten by the witch fever." Because why let a little thing like mass poisoning ruin a perfectly good colour palette?

This whole deadly wall(paper) situation reminded me of something else, but honestly, I didn’t go too deep into the search because my degree gave me enough research trauma for one lifetime.

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman authored a short story titled The Yellow Wallpaper. The story centres on a woman confined to a room who gradually descends into madness due to the wallpaper’s chaotic pattern and "sickly" hue.

Was she metaphorically oppressed by the patriarchy, or was she just breathing in heavy metals from some bizarre Victorian dye? I don't really know 🙃 I'll leave that thesis to someone who still has the energy to check JSTOR. I'm just thinking of sticking to a nice, safe, un-poisoned beige for my imaginary walls.

That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is this pair of carbonated cats that look deeply concerned about their sudden rebranding.

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