love&truth — a diary somebody reads
sex, drugs & scroll
the world is sick now. this is the door out.
01 the noise
it has a name
social media syndrome: the checking, the refreshing, the evening that goes missing.
You caught it from a design, not from a germ. Nothing about you is broken. Something about the room is loud.
a reward at random
Sometimes pulling down to refresh gives you something. Usually it does not. Nothing keeps a habit alive like a reward you cannot predict. The psychologist B. F. Skinner proved this in 1957, with pigeons. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
randomised. Ferster & Skinner (1957). Schedules of Reinforcement.
the loop never closes
Dopamine is not the pleasure chemical. It is the wanting chemical — and wanting is supposed to switch off once you get the thing. A feed never lets you get the thing. You are not weak. You are in a loop built without an exit.
observed. Berridge (2006). The debate over dopamine’s role in reward. Psychopharmacology, 191(3).
everything you see has been ranked
A machine decides what reaches you, and it picks whatever gets the most reaction. So you never compare yourself to a real person — only to the best moment out of thousands, sorted best first. Nobody has ever won this. Not even the people at the top.
you know them already
- Reaching for the phone before you say good morning to the person beside you.
- The buzz you felt when nothing had arrived.
- Opening it for the weather, closing it twenty minutes later.
- Someone else’s holiday, before your alarm has even gone off.
- Daydreams, going extinct — they need boredom to live.
02 the homework
the reading came first
three studies that counted something real, and one that argues this whole page is wrong.
When fast internet reached Italian towns, teenagers there ended up in hospital more often — for depression, anxiety and self‑harm. People born ten years earlier, in the same towns: no change. When one social network opened at 775 American colleges, one campus at a time, severe depression rose 7% and anxiety 20%. Not the screen — the comparing. That is why there is no like button. When English schools banned phones, the weakest students gained twice the average. The best students gained nothing.
A strong story is not proof. The best paper against all of this is in the journal Nature: screen time explains at most 0.4% of a teenager’s wellbeing — about as much as eating potatoes. But it used hours that people guessed; the three studies above counted. Thirteen signs, sixteen papers, and how far each one can be trusted: the whole list is a page of its own.
03 the quiet
the thing in between
a journal nobody reads gets lonely. a feed everybody reads makes you perform.
one page a day
Write it in two minutes or take the whole evening. Tomorrow gets its own page. The limit is the kind part: you can read everyone you love before the kettle boils.
one black line
Raise the camera and it is already drawing — the world turned into one black line, moving as you move. You never see a photo of yourself. The line forgives you before you can think to ask. The engine underneath is dissector’s — a printing tool, off duty in a diary.
a circle with a bottom
Your circle is the pages of the few people you let in, newest first — and then the bottom, where the day is handed back to you. This is an app that wants you to leave. The loop on your phone never closes. This one does.
sealed, then forgotten
When a page moves you, there is nothing to press. You write back — one person, one letter, locked on your phone before it leaves. The server carries it, delivers it, deletes it. A postman, never an archive.
04 the contents
the label on the bottle
one page a day is the dose. this is the rest of the label.
contains no
- Likes, hearts or counts of any kind.
- Reshares or quotes — nothing can go viral.
- An algorithm deciding what you see next.
- Advertising, trackers or analytics.
- Read receipts, in either direction.
side effects
- The hobby you stopped, starting again.
- Sleep, arriving on time.
- An afternoon longer than you remembered afternoons being.
- The specific urge to write to one specific person.
- Rare: finishing something.
05 the way in
100 pairs
flight one. every seat is half of a pair. bring the one person you would actually write to.
It costs about twenty dollars a year, paid by the people who write in it. That is what keeps it free of investors, advertisers, and anyone who would mine a diary.