Here’s Another Article For You To Open Up In A New Tab And Then Forget To Read

Look, you tried your best.

You live in an age where the internet is your source for everything (and pretty much is Your Everything) and sometimes you just slip into those trances where you’ve right-clicked 46 different articles to “read later,” and then three days have passed and you still have a browser filled with unread tabs haunting you.

So, if you’re anything like me, the natural next step you take is spiraling into a weird panic where you KNOW you SHOULD read all those articles (you only get, like, 10 free New Yorker articles a month — why did you waste this one, you utter fool? IT’S ONLY MID-NOVEMBER.) but it’s been 30 years in internet time (one IRL day = 10 URL years) so is this all irrelevant to you now? Do you even bother reading them? Fuck, Medium is totally going to penalize you for this. For the love of god, why is everything approximately one thousand times harder than necessary these days?

Why are we emotionally attached to browser tabs? Why do we feel like we need to read the entire internet before forming an opinion on something or else we’re all idiots? Why does our heart sink into our stomach when a real human person asks us with their real human voice whether we’ve read an article on The Atlantic that we’re genuinely not sure we’ve actually read or just seen a tweet about? Have any of us been really reading anything?

But anyway, this article is a freebie. Take a deep breath and just open up another tab. Hell yeah. What an absolute waste of time that only results in you becoming progressively more and more anxious the longer you’ve waited to read this article. It’s not even that good! Nobody ever has to actually read this, I can say whatever I want: How I Met Your Mother isn’t funny, I stole my roommate’s dress in 2015, I’ll always be in love with [REDACTED].

Your only saving grace is the possibility that Chrome crashes and you don’t have to restore everything. Sweet freedom!!!!!